The Inconvenient Truths of 2008
STUNTZ, WILLIAM J.
The Inconvenient Truths of 2008 Four things the party loyalists won’t want to hear. BY WILLIAM J. STUNTZ Each party’s base has two inconvenient truths it doesn’t want to hear. For Republicans,...
...Political talk matters: It shapes voters’ expectations and defines the political context in which decisions are made...
...We might start by asking who tells us the truth— even, or especially, when it hurts...
...The Reagan years were followed by the defi cit-hawkish 1990s, when voters rewarded budgetbalancing more than either tax-cutting or profl igate spending...
...Given those circumstances, amnesty is less a policy choice than a statement to political reality: the rough equivalent of bankruptcy for a debtor who, without it, will never pay another creditor another dime...
...Since that decision, abortion has been a constitutional right—yet, since 1980, the abortion rate has fallen by more than one third...
...The right lost —a pro-life initiative failed in South Dakota in 2006: If it can’t win there, it can’t win anywhere...
...But they will lose the chance to have the kind of public debate that shapes government policy— meaning, the kind that is based on truth, convenient and otherwise...
...Not only will the illegals themselves remain, so will generations of their offspring: a large voting bloc that will be forever barred to the party that wanted to ship their parents and grandparents back to their Central American homes...
...Political insiders have long understood what many pro-life voters are loath to admit: In any national election in which abortion rights were squarely at issue, the pro-choice side would win, and win big...
...If Republicans fail to understand their unpleasant truths, they will lose in November, and lose badly...
...John McCain may be better positioned than anyone in either party to secure the southern border without alienating America’s Latino population...
...Neither sounds much like a defi cit hawk...
...On Iraq, McCain is prominently identified with Petraeus and the surge...
...Wishing doesn’t make it so...
...we usually get the leaders we want...
...A more destructive message can scarcely be imagined...
...On the issue that matters most to conservative Christians— abortion—the political phase of the culture war is over...
...Well, maybe Utah...
...The second is a practical impossibility and a political disaster...
...Republicans may be slow to accept defeat, but Democrats seem to have trouble accepting victory...
...The two Democrats seem less impressive on this score...
...A McCainled Republican party could become the party of defi cit hawks—just when defi cits are about to become the political liability they were in the 1990s...
...Yet Obama and Clinton compete to see who condemned the war soonest and who can promise to withdraw American soldiers the fastest...
...A sizable share of both parties’ most passionate supporters seem not to understand that basic truth...
...It is no longer possible to say with a straight face that the war in Iraq is as good as lost, or that the “surge” is a fl op...
...Democrats might win even if their heads remain in the sand: It’s a Democratic year, as a comparison between the two parties’ fundraising, turnout, and vote totals in the primaries to date suggests...
...Politicians have a limited array of governance tools available to them, and they operate in a world of constrained choices...
...It may be just as well: Even if culture warriors’ political agenda were achievable, that agenda might prove counterproductive...
...Politically, he stands in much the same position today as Dwight Eisenhower in 1952: tough-minded and hard-nosed without being reckless— and, like Eisenhower with Korea, he bears none of the blame for the war’s mishandling...
...For Republicans, those truths concern immigration and the culture war...
...No presidential candidate can change those facts...
...For Democrats, the relevant subjects are Iraq and federal spending...
...Elections are not always won by truth-tellers...
...Today’s candidates should take note...
...And on the war—the real one—both have made statements that could make wise governance impossible if either reaches power...
...Politicians have a limited array of governance tools available to them, and they operate in a world of constrained choices...
...On spending, McCain may be the country’s leading proponent of fi scal discipline: Ross Perot without the lunacy...
...Nor can pro-lifers’ commitment, by itself, eliminate abortion...
...The lesson is one conservatives should fi nd easy to understand: Like modern economies, modern cultures resist centralized control...
...those you fi ght will soon leave the fi eld...
...Voters no doubt wish that the consequences of past policy errors—the Iraq invasion for Democrats, the failure to police the nation’s borders for Republicans— could be wiped away...
...Consider the four issues in turn...
...William J. Stuntz is the Henry J. Friendly professor at Harvard Law School...
...Because these are Democraticleaning times, Republicans have the most to gain from embracing this year’s inconvenient truths—and may have a nearly ideal candidate to do the embracing...
...As kids leave the table before the beans and carrots are gone, one suspects a Democratic administration might quit on border security before the borders are secured...
...The audience may not realize it, but the spirit of those words is uncomfortably close to the spirit that led the current administration to fi ght a hard war with too few weapons and too few soldiers...
...Ridgway retook Seoul, pushed Chinese and North Korean forces back to the 38th parallel, and salvaged a partial victory from what had looked like certain defeat...
...Sometimes, leaders need to say: No, you can’t...
...Another part believes that the hundreds of thousands of abortions each year in the United States amount to a holocaust...
...Problems aren’t solved because voters, or the politicians they support, imagine the solutions...
...The message on spending is simpler: Whatever programs the Democratic primary electorate may want, the money to pay for them will be there...
...Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama talk about border control the way children talk about eating their vegetables...
...Petraeus has done as much, in more diffi cult circumstances...
...If the crusade to enforce our current immigration laws against our current immigrant population was lost several million border crossings ago, the crusade to end abortion and reform the culture by means of electoral politics was lost several election cycles ago...
...That much law enforcement is beyond government’s capacity—a fact for which conservatives, of all people, should be thankful...
...The Republican base wants the country to reacquire control over its southern border, and wants to see the millions of illegal immigrants already here expelled or punished— because anything less rewards them for their violations...
...It isn’t—unless one of them wins the election and pulls the plug, a scenario that Iran’s proxies no doubt await eagerly...
...In 1989, William Rehnquist’s Supreme Court issued its decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, hinting that Roe v. Wade’s reversal was just around the corner...
...Sad to say, the candidate who most often tells unhappy truths may not turn out to be the candidate who wins the most votes...
...One part of the electorate believes that providing the best health care to all Americans is a moral imperative...
...A common thread runs through these four issues...
...They can’t...
...They’re missing the point...
...The fi rst goal is both good policy and good politics...
...choices must be made from where one stands today, not some imaginary place of the speaker’s choosing...
...And the promise of speedy withdrawal tells those who fi ght American soldiers: Hold on a little longer...
...If pro-life evangelicals—of whom I’m one — wish to persuade our fellow citizens to protect unborn life, we must persuade them, not prosecute the ones who disagree...
...If the penalties for illegally crossing the border are more than a pittance, immigrants will simply refuse to pay them and remain underground, and no future government will spend the money needed to catch and prosecute them...
...David Petraeus has proved to be a 21st-century Matthew Ridgway: the general who took over American forces in Korea after the Chinese had taken Seoul and swept down the peninsula...
...so goes the shout that punctuates most Obama rallies...
...Yes, we can...
...For the foreseeable future, domestic policymaking will have more to do with arranging incentives than with dispensing largesse: Think welfare reform, not Aid to Families with Dependent Children...
...deception sometimes carries the day...
...Shooting wars and culture wars, immigration and the federal budget—all are examples of the Mick Jagger principle of governance: You can’t always get what you want...
...As Donald Rumsfeld might put it, you do immigration reform with the immigrants you have...
...No American government can afford to track down and expel, fi ne, or otherwise penalize 12 million of its residents: 17 times the number of convicted felons who enter prison each year (and today’s imprisonment rate has shattered historical records...
...Standing tough in Iraq may be impossible after voters have heard, again and again, that their new president is fi rmly committed to bailing out, as quickly as possible...
...In terms of fi scal policy, the last eight years have been a replay of the 1980s, when defi cits soared but the Reagan administration paid no political price for them...
...Senators Clinton and Obama may understand the fi scal constraints under which the next administration will operate— but if their debates about health care and education are any indication, they aren’t telling Democratic voters...
...Most of today’s illegal immigrant population is here to stay (along with their descendants) and will pay no significant price for getting here outside the legal channels...
...Cultures are powerful and mysterious things...
...the idea that laws and politicians can direct their paths is, to say the least, lacking in empirical support...
...The war can and should be won even if it shouldn’t have been fought in the fi rst place—because we’re not in the first place...
...That fall, Virginians chose the nation’s fi rst elected black governor— not in spite of the fact that he was pro-choice, but because of it...
...No matter how passionately held, the fi rst belief cannot make top-fl ight, universal, affordable health care a reality...
...If something similar happens this year, if the next president wins by promising limitless spending with limited taxes or a costless retreat in Iraq, voters should not blame the winning candidate...
...In politics as in markets, customers rule...
...In the years immediately before Roe, abortion was a crime, and the number of abortions soared...
...Discussions of the Iraq war in Democratic primaries have a bizarre quality: Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speak as though the war is a lost cause...
...As for spending, the federal budget (and federal tax revenues) will leave no room for large, expensive, New Dealstyle health and education programs...
...The trick is to want the right leaders...
...He has a strong pro-life voting record, but has never been in the thick of the culture wars...
...John F. Kennedy, whose presidency is often invoked these days, won a close national election by describing an imaginary gap between the Soviet Union’s arsenal of missiles and our own...
...Thanks to the Bush administration’s budgetary surge— and, even more, thanks to the stillunsolved entitlements problem—the next president will have less budgetary room for maneuver than the current one had when he entered offi ce...
...Shooting wars and culture wars, immigration and the federal budget—all are examples of the Mick Jagger principle of governance: You can’t always get what you want...
...To put the point differently, the size of America’s Latino population means that the nation’s border control problem must be solved with that population’s consent...
...It isn’t so...
Vol. 13 • February 2008 • No. 22
