Thinking in Moderation
Jr, John J. DiIulio
ON POLITICAL BOOKS Thinking in Moderation Progressive, conservative, liberal. Clinton's favorite think tank borrows from everyone by John J. Dilulio Jr. Mandate for Change Will Marshall and...
...Liberals often demonize conservatives, conservatives often demonize liberals, but progressives reflexively trivialize both...
...For example, Kilgore's crime chapter lambasts the Reagan and Bush administrations for reducing the federal role in "making streets safer...
...Understood as a fervent progressive policy prayerbook, Mandate for Change makes inspiring reading...
...In the preface, PPI's founder and president Will Marshall and nationally syndicated columnist Martin Schram summarize the "five core themes that define the new progressive politics: opportunity, responsibility, community, democracy, and entrepreneurial government...
...Rather, it is a book that deserves to be taken seriously even though its editors and contributors often substitute rhetorical flights for policy analysis, caricaturing liberal or conservative ideas on one page only to adopt them (albeit with brave new labels) on another...
...Where evidence for his management bromides is transparently thin, he resorts to tautologies and a superabundance of slogans (e.g., "emphasize missions and outcomes," "earning rather than spending," "steering rather than rowing...
...But Mandate for Change certainly does not deliver what contributors William A. Galston and Elaine Ciulla Kamarck herald as "an agenda for action that transcends the stale options of the Left and Right...
...Unfortunately, the Osborne chapter is little more than a well-packaged list of administrative proverbs...
...Unfortunately, Ross sidetracks himself with a wacky proposal for a "new Employment Insurance System" based on "a Career Opportunity Card—a voucher or wallet card" that "would entitle a person to purchase up to $1,200 in education or training" during any five-year period in which he falls on hard times...
...And don't worry about the inefficiencies of this new bureaucratic entity because, remember, progressives know how to "reinvent" government even while they're expanding it in every conceivable direction...
...To be sure, there are parts of Mandate for Change that would warm the coldest conservative heart...
...Try buying what the GI Bill bought with $1,200 in 1993 dollars and you'll see what I mean...
...But even the most well-intentioned squinter cannot find in them the sort of decisive mandate for change that Lipset and Schram find lurking in the numbers on the election of our latest plurality president...
...By any measure, Mandate for Change is an impressive, illuminating, and wide-ranging book and has many important and novel things to say about the nation's most pressing domestic and international policy chalJohn J. Dilulio Jr...
...Welfare," they write, "undercuts the incentive to work," "underwrites single parenthood," and "empowers bureaucrats rather than the poor...
...But Marshall and Schram go too far...
...Mandate for Change Will Marshall and Martin Schram, editors...
...Still, the voters did demand that the economy be improved—and that everything else that's wrong with America be fixed in the bargain, with as little human and financial pain as possible...
...To be kind, they doth protest too loudly...
...The data and returns from the 1992 elections, which my Princeton colleague Donald E. Stokes and I have recently analyzed for a forthcoming Congressional Quarterly publication, admit of many reasonable interpretations...
...Ross likens this proposal to the GI Bill, but that's quite a stretch...
...The book is required reading for Kempish Republicans who want a good point of intellectual departure for their own DLC-like comeback efforts...
...But be careful, because HIPCs "only market standardized benefit packages offered by accountable health plans...
...But liberals believe the responses are likely to prove humane and effective...
...And Ross does a superlative job of summarizing ongoing changes in the ways goods and services are produced in the advanced economies...
...They suggest that both liberals and conservatives are at odds with the belief that "America's strength ultimately resides in our families and communities...
...Finally, in the book's foreword, "Interpreting the 1992 Election," Schram and the distinguished sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset attempt to find both a personal and a policy mandate for Clinton in the polling data and election returns...
...Responsibility...
...They do an able job, for example, of retreading ideas first articulated by Charles L. Schultze, a Brookings economist and Carter-era Council of Economics Advisers chief...
...As a corollary, I added that, in thinking about how to solve complex public problems, liberals put governments first, conservatives put markets first, and progressives put themselves first...
...Having gotten off to a rocky start with Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood, gays in the military, and attacks on Social Security benefits, Clinton can still re-read chapter 14 on how to effect a foolproof transition and hit the ground running...
...Short change Perhaps the most egregious example of this Goldilocks progressivism is so-called entrepreneurial government...
...Astudent of mine once asked me to distinguish liberals and conservatives from progressives...
...But Ross's proposal points up a broader truth about the book—its ultimate kinship to liberal policy ideas...
...But the only thing he "reinvents" are ideas that have been discussed in dozens of reports on civil service reform dating back to the sixties—contracting out, public-private partnerships, and participative management, to name just a few...
...At a time when many volumes on public policy play fast-and-loose with the facts, it is no faint praise to say that Mandate for Change is relatively free of factual errors or gross distortions of data...
...Berkeley Books, $11.95...
...Clinton's own big-type quote on the front cover (complete with a presidential seal embossed behind it) promises that the book "charts a bold new course for reviving progressive government in America" and "really looks beyond the old Left-Right debates of the past and tries to move us toward a better future...
...Despite the bulge in the nation's prison population, the number of persons imprisoned per 1,000 serious crimes actually decreased between 1981 and 1989...
...For example, as a pre-schooler, years before you pick up your $1,200 "Career Opportunity Card," you earn your folks an $800-per-child tax credit and get them time off work for good parental behavior via the Family Leave Bill (see chapter 7...
...crime and imprisonment trends and by ignorance of recent empirical findings on gun control...
...Democracy...
...Perhaps the progressives are banking on Osborne's new "Federalism Czar" and the passage of his "American Perestroika Act" (I'm not making this up) to resolve such contradictions...
...And progressives believe that everything would be just fine were it not for the existence of liberals and conservatives...
...Liberals favor government handouts, conservatives favor unfettered markets, but progressives know the value of "voluntary associations and institutions of community— America's 'third sector.'" (Excuse me while I extinguish my thousand points of light...
...For the most part, however, the book errs strongly in favor of liberal approaches...
...If you grow up to do your community service bit for the "Citizens Corps," you earn $10,000 in vouchers "for college, job training, or housing" (see chapter 6...
...They are buzzword-hammocks suspended between liberal and conservative strawmen...
...Chapter 12, "Reinventing Government," by PPI Fellow David Osborne, is an attempt to justify this rhetoric...
...Still, Mandate for Change borrows creatively 52 The Washington Monthly/March 1993 from the Left, the Right, and the informed Center...
...Adjusted to account for relevant demographic and other differences, the United States does not have "by far the highest incarceration rate in the world...
...In the meantime, however, this citizen of the Republic would sleep a bit easier if the PPI reprinted and distributed to its progressive true believers copies of James Madison's Federalist, numbers 10, 39, and 51...
...I know that many FOBs, big-name journalists, and the National Governors' Association have embraced Osborne's "reinventing government" schtick...
...And as policy blueprints for new administrations go, PPI is every inch a match for the Heritage Foundation, producer of the now ancient Reagan administration document, Mandate for Leadership...
...I believe that Lipset was among those who in 1981 argued that the country had not decisively moved rightward with Reagan...
...By the same token, Mandate for Change is remarkably free of the self-contradictions that are common in the what-to-do-next policy genre...
...There are, however, some exceptions...
...And as much as I support a ban on assault weapons, the best available studies do not make the case that additional gun control measures would cut crime...
...Osborne is pathologically fond of making sweeping generalizations based on success stories drawn from the experiences of a few public agencies and jurisdictions...
...In a preface to a volume such as this, one expects to find some stirring words and should not be surprised or disappointed if a few of them are overstirred...
...Let me give it a whirl...
...But in a second Osborne chapter, "A New Federal Compact," criminal justice is listed along with volunteer services and rural development as an area in which "no federal action is justified...
...The publication of the Progressive Policy Institute's (PPI) Mandate for Change marks a watershed in the evolution of the ABLC (Anything But Liberal or Conservative) tradition of policy progressivism...
...And so on...
...They argue strongly in favor of massive increases in public spending (whoops, make that massive increases in public "investment") for education, research and development, transportation, and other levers of "wealth-producing activities," and propose that for 12 months "firms should be eligible to receive a tax credit for a significant portion of the first $10,000 in wages paid to new employees...
...Madison had a few time-tested thoughts about inter-governmental relations that Osborne and company seem not to know...
...For example, an otherwise decent discussion of crime by Georgia Director of Intergovernmental Relations Ed Kilgore is marred by a misrepresentation of the statistics on U.S...
...The PPI is to be applauded for daring to help William Jefferson Clinton achieve this mission impossible...
...That is the new president's real mandate...
...Unlike liberals and conservatives, write Marshall and Schram, progressives "seek innovative, non-bureaucratic ways of governing," including "choice, competition, and market incentives in the public sector...
...Unfortunately, anyone in search of detailed, practical, or strategic advice about precisely what the U.S...
...Ideology...
...Still, there are a few problems...
...lenges...
...For example, in a chapter on environmental policy, Harvard University's Robert Stavins and former Food and Drug Administration official Thomas Grumbly discuss tradable permit systems and other incentive-based approaches to cutting pollution and costs...
...Contributors Robert J. Shapiro and Doug Ross offer a plan for spurring job creation, business investment, state and local capital investment, and U.S...
...The new blurber-in-chief is not all wrong...
...is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution...
...The preface to Mandate for Change proudly notes that Clinton "encouraged PPI's efforts to develop new policies that challenge both liberal and conservative orthodoxies...
...In contrast, the book's chapters on the economy are generally well-argued, obviously well-researched, and they come close to justifying the heady claim that progressives have transcended liberal and conservative ideas...
...should do in the world's trouble spots, from Somalia to Bosnia, will not find it in Marshall's chapter, the only one in the book, I might add, that deals explicitly with international relations, diplomacy, and military force...
...Liberals are hopeless idealists, conservatives are obsessed with power, but progressives are "realistic" and "tough-minded...
...She was in a big hurry, so I answered half-jokingly as follows: Most thinking people of good will believe that human reason can fashion responses to social maladies such as poverty, crime, and racism...
...Conservatives believe they are bound to be perverse and futile...
...For example, a chapter by Marshall and Ka-marck, "Replacing Welfare with Work," depicts welfare programs as abject failures...
...Call it cradle-to-grave progressivism...
...But accountable, you ask, to whom...
...He also argues the need for a comprehensive sunset procedure for all government programs plus a line-item veto for the president...
...Whenever you need a doctor or a hospital stay, just call your local Health Insurance Purchasing Cooperative (HIPC...
...If you find yourself hooked on drugs, you just report to your local federally-sponsored drug clinic, where you're legally entitled to immediate treatment (see chapter 8...
...These are not "core themes" of a "new progressive politics...
...export growth...
...Accountable, of course, to the all-new federal health bureaucracy modeled on "the Securities and Exchange Commission" (see chapter 5...
...The PPI was founded in 1989 as the policy think-tank of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which Bill Clinton chaired from 1990-1991...
...Shapiro recommends dividing the budget into three separate parts (Past, Present, and Future Budgets), "reflecting the different economic impacts of different kinds of spending...
...Liberals favor a "politics of entitlement," conservatives favor a "politics of social neglect," but progresMarch 1993/The Washington Monthly 51 sives favor "reciprocal obligation...
Vol. 25 • March 1993 • No. 3
