What About the White House?
Matt skillfully presses the point that off-center politics require control of both Congress and the White House. We don't completely agree.
Control of the executive is incredibly valuable. When Clinton held the White House, the GOP had to contend with his veto, with his own capacity to take the initiative and help set the agenda, and with his use of the "bully pulpit" to cast a brighter light on the most radical efforts of the GOP Congress.
We wouldn't deny the importance of any of this, and there is no question that the move off center really revs up after 2000. Still, we do question the idea that divided partisan control necessarily stalemates conservatism. Congress can do some things on its own (like impeach a President despite the preferences of a wide majority of the public that it do no such thing). It also has real bargaining power because it decides what lands on the President's desk. A major example: the 1997 Budget agreement to reduce the deficit was way to the right of what Democrats produced in 1993 AND what a Democratic Congress and Republican President produced in 1990 (the 1990 and 1993 bills are actually weirdly similar). The 1990 and 1993 bills reduced the deficit by cutting spending and raising taxes. The 1997 bill cut spending and CUT taxes. Moreover, the tax cuts (although modest by more recent standards) were skewed toward the wealthy and employed many of the phase-in gimicks later used to such devastating effect in 2001 and 2003. The President can only sign or veto a budget; he doesn't get to decide what is in the budget that reaches his desk. Despite victory in the public struggle over government shutdown, Clinton moved way to the right in the end.
A conservative Congress can also move policy to the right by doing nothing (in the book we call this technique "don't just do something, stand there"). In a lot of cases, like the minimum wage (but also even bigger issues like health care), conservatives are happy to just do nothing while social change and market pressures erode government policies. These policies need to be updated as the world changes, and a conservative Congress can thwart moderate opinion in many instances by doing nothing.
Finally, a conservative Congress that is unified and has centralized control of political access can nurture relations with powerful interests even when it doesn't control the White House. The "K Street Project", for instance, was well-entrenched before Bush came into office. In our view, it could be sustained even without control of the White House, but would be very difficult to hold together without control of Congress. In short, there are a lot of strategies for pursuing off-center policies. Some of them, but not all, require control of the White House.
We're finding this book club incredibly stimulating. There is much more to be said on this and other issues that have been raised in both the posts and comments. We are trying to respond to as much as we can without being too long-winded or putting up too many posts. Within the next day, we want to address the "starve the beast" debate and talk about opposition strategy, so stay tuned.
Control of the executive is incredibly valuable. When Clinton held the White House, the GOP had to contend with his veto, with his own capacity to take the initiative and help set the agenda, and with his use of the "bully pulpit" to cast a brighter light on the most radical efforts of the GOP Congress.
This is a very good point. Newt Gingrich still ruminates about how the Clinton years were the "golden age" of furthering and geting the the GOP's agenda implemented...
December 8, 2005 1:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for responding to the argument about the need to control both the White House and Congress in order to sustain what you tellingly call off center "politics." And, indeed, the GOP Congress in the mid/late 90s did push the Clinton White House to the right, in some instances, and I'll even throw in a large issue which you left out: Welfare reform, which Clinton vetoed twice, but which a determined Republican Congress brought to his desk a third time, resulting in the president signing it into law.
But leaving aside the abberation of impeachment, all this falls under the category of effective politics, perhaps even politics that prepares the way for subsequent dominance, but, it is a difference in kind, not merely degree from what came after Bush's election in 2001. The GOP congressional push during the Clinton presidency was certainly not a transformative politics, a politics which shifts the coordinates of American political culture, which is the argument you powerfully make in Off Center, and which is, obviously, the argument that has attracted the book so much justifiable attention.
Just one example from OFF CENTER's litany of reasons for the GOP's great success might serve to contrast the vast difference in the breadth of the "off center" agenda, the coordination of that agenda, and the success of that agenda beginning in 2001 from what came before: Karl Rove is referenced as a top power broker, along with NGO meister Grover Norquist, and congressional pasha Tom Delay. But, of course, Rove's specialty is inter and intra coordination of the executive branch--which he does brilliantly. Might this be a rather critical added ingredient to what transpired since Bush's inauguration--indeed, Rove's inclusion to this list is a proxy for the ballast of Bush's election tout court. Or, more prosaically--just one more example--is it possible to imagine Hastert and Delay keeping roll call votes open for hours until they leveraged the winning votes on key bills, without the certainty that a Republican president supported both these bills and the underlying tactics necessary to produce the victories?
Or, finally, to put it another way: If the elderly voters of South Florida had read their ballots properly and voted for whom they intended, Al Gore, rather than Pat Buchanan, would the summary of moves in the "What about the White House" post above, regarding the 1990s GOP Congress, and the presummed subsequent hardball efforts vs. a President Gore have engendered a provocative, lucid book--even a book proposal-- by H/P called--and note the world-historical subtitle-- Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy?
I think not.
December 8, 2005 2:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
An excellent comment. I think we agree far more than we disagree, and I take the import of your final question. Still, two big reasons for emphasizing Congress. The first is that Jacob and I think the "don't just do something, stand there" aspect of conservatism gets short shrift. If one of your goals is to diminish the role of government in certain (not all) aspects of domestic life, you can do a lot with just Congress.
The second point is that loss of the White House might put elements of conservatism into a kind of hibernation, but if they controlled Congress much of the apparatus essential for off-center politics could be sustained, even nurtured (as it was between 1994 and 2000).
Yes, Rove is an administration figure, but the "broker" role we stress reflects his ability to connect political authority within the White House to networks outside.
December 8, 2005 3:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
The current administration adopted the term 'transformative'-one connotation being- 'to transcend'. Of course it is naturally suited to any regime which wants to appeal to a broad base of supporters. It sounds good.
December 8, 2005 4:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
A bit of a quibble but Congress did raise the minimum wage during the Clinton era. I can't quite recall all the details but I think it was done in recation to the unpopularity of some of the GOP's agenda at the time, and perhaps also to get Clinton on board for welfare reform.
December 8, 2005 4:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
You've made two critical points in this short comment. First, control of congress is a critical structural and ideological incubator for the much larger "off center" ultra-right politics that can only be fully implemented with simultaneous control of the presidency. Second, Republicans in recent years have brilliantly and perniciously severed the seemingly organic link between the public's political problems, e.g. health care, income inequality, environmental degradation, and public policy via government action as the remedy for--or the potential exacerbation of-- those problems, c.f. the Bartels article that Mark Schmidt cited the other day, in which survey data shows that people see no relationship between tax cuts skewed to the rich and widening income inequality.
Thus, the "do nothing" credo reduces government to forms of passive spectacle along a continuum from highly significant, e.g. war, starring the jut jawed commander in chief--to symbolically resonant, but politically vacuous, e.g. the Schiavo case. Legislation and administrative action designed to address public need is delinked from that need--else it be demonstrated to voters that such action might actually solve issues of public import, and that Republicans deliberately choose to "don't just do something" but, instead "stand there."
I would end by noting that a Rove adds value to the entire enterprise, not only in his coordination outreach, but in his intra-coordination of the executive branch, i.e. his tranformation of the West Wing into a non-stop political operation, where policy is systematically subsumed to the imperatives of, until very recently, a tightly integrated congressional/presidential far right political hegemon. Thus, in this reading, executive branch control, in the "right" set of talented hands, achieves a parallel, yet synchronic cohesion to that achieved by Delay and his cronies in Congress--and the lazy American fascination with individual success or failure makes the humming machine operating behind the singular, human face of the president that much more insidious and effective.
December 8, 2005 7:31 PM | Reply | Permalink