A Moment to Be Seized
EDITORIAL A Moment to Be Seized Has September 11 fundamentally changed the nation's political landscape? The common view among political consultants seems to be that it hasn't. Democratic...
...It will be interesting to see whether in his State of the Union address George W. Bush steps up and seizes these big issues...
...Hence, the pros see domestic stability underneath the foreign policy drama...
...The Kennedy assassination meant that the 1960s would be unlike the 1950s...
...For the past forty years, faith in government has eroded...
...A senseless act of violence, it loosed passions and energies that played out in unexpected ways...
...Will he use this moment to try to create a new political alignment...
...Some of the spending programs would be quite massive...
...But he did not go on to call for their repeal...
...Daschle concluded by calling his massive package of tax cuts and spending programs a return to fiscal discipline...
...The arguments Daschle proceeded to sketch out on domestic policy were a subtle but thoroughgoing insult to the intelligence of the American voter...
...September 11, the public reaction to September 11, and the progress of our arms in Afghanistan may well have made the country more daring...
...The rules of normal politics are suspended...
...Can America remain comfortable within its borders while the entire Arab world languishes under tyranny...
...Those numbers will fall a bit, but what they indicate is real...
...Is there more to life than maximizing health and minimizing pain, no matter the moral boundaries that are crossed on the way...
...A person with self-confidence is different from a person without self-confidence...
...In other words, this is a moment to be seized...
...But the decadence of Daschle's speech is testimony to the way the whole debate on fiscal policy has deteriorated as it has become less consequential...
...This really is an affront to the memory of voodoo economics...
...The Iran hostage crisis guaranteed that the 1980s would be unlike the 1970s...
...It assumes that if it launches an initiative it will be able to complete it, so it is more prone to launch new initiatives...
...Through it all, Americans continued to care about the fundamental things: education, health care, jobs...
...A self-confident nation believes it can control its own destiny...
...It's not hard to think of some bigger concerns...
...Basically, the Democrats are saying the United States should devote 1 percent more of its GDP to domestic programs, while the Republicans want to return the same 1 percent to the voters via tax cuts...
...The issues that dominated the past few years—the economy, health care, education, and so on—will likely end up dominating 2002, and, for that matter, 2003 and 2004...
...Similarly significant majorities tell pollsters that the country is on the right track—despite the recession...
...The party that seizes it can break the 49-49 deadlock that has gripped American politics of late...
...Americans used to regard power and politics as marginal...
...The Oklahoma City bombing sucked the air out of the Gingrich revolution, giving Bill Clinton the upper hand...
...If you ask voters what issues are important to them, they list things like health care, education, and jobs—pretty much the same concerns they had before September 11...
...Americans wanted a more assertive set of policies, abroad and at home...
...It has enlarged the scope of its aspirations...
...The nation suffers a horrible trauma...
...Fear of terrorism, which topped the list for a while, is fading—and isn't obviously partisan in its implications...
...Now faith in government has skyrocketed, with over half of all Americans expressing confidence in government...
...Is this really the debate that will launch the 21st century...
...It won't necessarily have changed its priorities...
...This echoes the sentiments expressed three weeks earlier by Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, at an American Enterprise Institute gathering...
...By the mid-1990s, only one in five said that...
...Is there anybody in America who actually thinks a stimulus package proposed at this late date will do anything to stimulate us out of recession...
...These and other institutions have seen their ratings soar...
...Instead he listed a long string of further tax cuts and spending programs he wants to pile on top of the Bush cuts...
...In 1960, three-quarters of Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing...
...The president's approval ratings shoot up to 90 percent and hover near there for at least four months...
...If he follows the polls, he won't...
...And in the midst of all this, we are supposed to believe that national politics will come to rest at approximately the same place it was before...
...For example, he envisions a subsidy to compensate workers who are hurt by free trade agreements, or who think they are hurt, or whose congressmen think they are hurt...
...There is so much posturing on these matters because there is so little at stake...
...Do most national traumas leave the nation unchanged...
...The American people now have confidence in their fundamental institutions: in the military, in the presidency, even in Congress...
...But if there is one thing the president has demonstrated in this crisis, it's that he is by instinct a leader, not a man, like his predecessor, who follows the polls...
...Now the voters are like a man suddenly aware of his muscles, looking around for something to use them on, some cause to contribute to...
...Certainly the congressional Democrats are showing no signs of fresh thought...
...The war on terrorism may well have a similarly large effect on American politics...
...So is a nation...
...Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, appearing at a Hudson Institute event on January 3, argued that though change is more exciting than continuity, continuity has been more common in the past and is more likely in the near future...
...Witness Tom Daschle's January 4 economic policy speech...
...He'll just return to a compassionate conservatism designed for the political landscape that existed before September 11— and already fading back then...
...The war probably won't have a partisan impact in either direction, he said...
...Can this really be true...
...But there is history here that contradicts the continuity thesis...
...In keeping with the wisdom of the political pros, Daschle spoke as if there were a hermetically sealed membrane separating foreign policy from domestic policy —and Bush were a saint when it comes to the former but a demon when it comes to the latter...
...If you are going to pose as an advocate of balanced budgets you shouldn't shamelessly promote a plan that will increase deficits...
...He spent the first half of his speech attacking Bush's tax cuts as fiscally irresponsible...
...It's puny compared with the country's aspirations...
...That restlessness would be pernicious, if channeled in the wrong direction—into a Great Society pipe dream, say...
...But if the energy were challenged intelligently, then it could lead to the sort of constructive activism we saw during the Civil War, during the first Roosevelt administration, and during the Reagan administration...
...When it starts down a road, it does not allow itself to be paralyzed by the commentators who warn that the path ahead leads to a quagmire...
...David Brooks, for the Editors...
...But politics was dramatically different, nonetheless...
...That's the question the cloning debate raises...
...Here's hoping...
...Wouldn't it be wise to try to bring democracy to that region...
...The debate in Congress is stale and unserious...
...And there are data that support this view...
...The professionals reach this conclusion because they study a certain set of data...
...It dreams on a different scale...
...They indicate self-confidence...
...How in an age of high-tech affluence do we inculcate character in the young...
...But it has changed along another dimension...
...A war of a new kind is launched...
...It may not have moved right or left...
...It thawed issues that had been frozen...
...On a larger scale, World War I brought the Progressive era to an end and heralded the quite different politics of the 1920s, just as World War II quenched the activism of the New Deal...
Vol. 7 • January 2002 • No. 17
