How Presidential rhetoric matters
by David Atkins
In the endless debate over whether Presidential rhetoric matters, E.J. Dionne gets it:
Government is the solution.
Why don’t Democrats just say it? They really believe in active government and think it does good and valuable things. One of those valuable things is that government creates jobs — yes, really — and also the conditions under which more jobs can be created.
You probably read that and thought: But don’t Democrats and liberals say this all the time? Actually, the answer is no. It’s Republicans and conservatives who usually say that Democrats and liberals believe in government. Progressive politicians often respond by apologizing for their view of government, or qualifying it, or shifting as fast as the speed of light from mumbled support for government to robust affirmations of their faith in the private sector.
This is beginning to change, but not fast enough. And the events of recent weeks suggest that if progressives do not speak out plainly on behalf of government, they will be disadvantaged throughout the election-year debate. Gov. Scott Walker’s victory in the Wisconsin recall election owed to many factors, including his overwhelming financial edge. But he was also helped by the continuing power of the conservative anti-government idea in our discourse. An energetic argument on one side will be defeated only by an energetic argument on the other.
The case for government’s role in our country’s growth and financial success goes back to the very beginning. One of the reasons I wrote my book “Our Divided Political Heart” was to show that, from Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay forward, farsighted American leaders understood that action by the federal government was essential to ensuring the country’s prosperity, developing our economy, promoting the arts and sciences and building large projects: the roads and canals, and later, under Abraham Lincoln, the institutions of higher learning, that bound a growing nation together.
It’s quite likely true that Presidential rhetoric is a blip on the radar of the factors that dictate his or her Party’s chances at reelection. It’s quite likely true that rhetoric browbeating Congress into passing a certain bill doesn’t do much good at all.
But it’s in the grand argument that these things matter. Ever since Reagan the Democratic Party at a national level has mostly ceded the notion that government is the problem. Entire books can and have been written on why and how this happened exactly. The most reasonable explanations lie in the fact that “government” became associated with giving handouts to “those” people in a country whose government has been crippled by issues of race and slavery since its inception, and the fact that starting in the 1980s Democrats faced a choice of taking lots of corporate money or getting slaughtered at the polls by being outspent by 10-1 margins.
Scott Walker’s win in Wisconsin would not likely have been changed by the President making lots of speeches about the issue over the last few months. But the Party’s general failure to address the issue of the positive effect of government spending in our lives has crippled the country (to say nothing of progressive politics) for decades now. Sometimes it almost seems if that charge were being led entirely by op-ed columnists like Krugman and Dionne, together with a chorus bloggers and a few largely ignored members of the Progressive Caucus in Congress.
It wouldn’t turn the tide immediately nor would it be measurable in any peer-reviewed political science study, but a little Presidential rhetoric on the subject would certainly help over the long haul.
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