Chastened, perhaps, by the slowness of the economy to respond to his first-term prescriptions, the president declined to offer any new ones for his second term. In a sense, this was prudent. Were he to propose a change of direction now, it would be an admission of failure: if these are such good ideas, his critics would ask, why didn’t you propose them before?
Still, there are worse things to be accused of than having learned from your mistakes. As it was, the president looked inert, pleading for more time for his policies to work while holding out little hope that they would. “I won’t pretend the path I’m offering is quick or easy,” he said at one point. “I never have.”
But in fact he did. In early 2009, when Obama’s $780-billion fiscal stimulus bill was before Congress, the White House issued projections showing unemployment peaking later that year at just under 8%, then declining steadily; by now it was supposed to be a little over 5%. That’s if the bill was enacted. If nothing was done, Obama’s economists warned, unemployment would soar all the way to 9%, falling to 6% today.
And the reality? Unemployment peaked at 10%, then began a long, slow decline to … 8.1% in August, according to figures released the morning after Obama’s speech. And that’s only with the help of a catastrophic decrease in the numbers of those looking for work: the participation rate (the proportion of the population either in work or seeking it) is now at its lowest level in more than 30 years. Had the participation rate remained where it was when he took office, according to the American Enterprise Institute, unemployment today would be 11.2%.
Well, fine. Perhaps, as I’m inclined to believe, there was nothing anyone could have done that would have worked much better. Perhaps, as the president’s defenders argue, things would have been even worse without the stimulus. But if that’s the case, why is not a further dose of stimulus — more spending, bigger deficits — in order, as so many Keynesians still maintain? “More of the same” may not be terribly exciting, but at least it’s a policy.
Instead, the president promised, in effect, less of the same. On the economy, in particular, the speech made no specific policy proposals of any kind. Asked to identify one the day after, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, pointed to the promise to create one million more manufacturing jobs. But a million jobs isn’t a policy. It’s a number: a target, a projection, a fond hope, but not a plan for achieving it.
Of course, the people you need to persuade of your ability to change things for the better are the people you have not yet persuaded: you make those big policy pitches when you need to win new converts to your cause. But when, as Obama’s campaign clearly calculates, there are few undecided voters, the election becomes about turnout: cementing the loyalty of your supporters, firing them up, in the hope that they will show up to vote in greater numbers than your opponent’s supporters.
Hence the emphasis on the broad differences in philosophy between the Democrats and the Republicans, often painted in the starkest terms (sometimes comically so: Republicans believe, the president claimed at one point, that government should do “almost nothing”). Gone was the image of Obama the bipartisan from Bill Clinton’s speech of the night before. Now all was lines in the sand. He would “never” agree to cut the top rate of tax; he “refused” to eliminate the mortgage interest deduction and other middle class tax breaks; he would “never” go along with the Republicans’ proposed reform of Medicare.
This was, then, very much a speech aimed at the base, designed not to sway the uncommitted but to confirm existing Democratic voters in the rightness of their views. The choice, it was implied, was not which party would do a better job handling the economy, but who better reflected your values.
That’s fair enough. There are fundamental differences between the two parties, as broad and as deep as at any time in the last 50 years. Often, parties try to blur the distinctions between them, in a contest for the middle. Not this time. On taxes, on spending, on health care, on abortion and gay marriage and a half a dozen other issues, voters will be presented radically different visions of government and society.
But the kinds of voters who identify with one or the other of those visions will mostly have made up their minds already: it will not be news to anyone that the Democrats are pro-choice, or want to raise taxes on the rich. Hence the gamble in the president’s speech. If the race remains as tight as it is now, if his people are right that each party’s support is more or less baked in, then it really will come down to whose voters are more motivated.
If, on the other hand, there remain enough undecided voters, less interested in party or ideology than in who can “fix the economy,” well, at least Mitt Romney can say he has a plan.
Original Article
Source: national post
Author: Andrew Coyne
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