By Clive Crook
Published: October 3 2010 19:46
Opinion polls continue to say that Democrats will do badly in next month’s midterm elections. Most analysts expect the Republicans to gain control of the House of Representatives. Many give them a chance of winning control of the Senate, too – which ought to be impossible in a year when the seats up for grabs put the Grand Old Party at a disadvantage.
If the Republicans do well they will call it a repudiation of President Barack Obama and a historic victory for their side. They will be right on the first point but wrong on the second. More than a rejection of Mr Obama’s agenda, this election will be a rejection of Washington and all its works. Angry and even despairing, the US is about to vote for paralysis. Its system of government has rarely looked so broken.
It is true that centrist voters have turned against the Democrats’ ambitious agenda to transform the country. The policy outcomes to date are not in fact that radical (which is why the Democratic left also feels let down), but the professed aims of Mr Obama and his allies in Congress make few concessions to the country’s conservative instincts. Anxiety over this mixes with disappointment over the slow recovery, for which the Democrats are increasingly (though mostly unfairly) blamed. In any event, disenchantment with the Democrats is real.
Yet voters are not choosing the Republican alternative. On this, the polls could hardly be clearer. Mr Obama, despite his slide in popularity of the past two years, is better liked than either party in Congress. According to Gallup, the president’s job approval rating in September was 44 per cent; the scores for Democrats and Republicans in Congress were 33 per cent and 32 per cent.
Asked whether Congress as a whole is doing a good job, just 18 per cent said yes. Asked, “Do most members of Congress deserve re-election?” two-thirds of voters said no, the highest since the polling firm began asking the question nearly 20 years ago. The proportion of voters saying they have a “great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in Congress stands at 36 per cent, the lowest for nearly 40 years – lower than Gallup has ever recorded for any of the three branches of government.
Next month the country can rebuke Mr Obama and his party, and check their ambitions for the rest of the president’s first term. Do not mistake this for an expression of confidence in Republicans. The electorate knows that the president and his veto pen will still be in the White House. The Republicans will have much stronger blocking powers, but will not be in charge. That would seem to suit the country just fine.
This is why the midterms say so little about 2012, and Mr Obama’s hopes for a second term. In two years, voters will be able to vote for undivided Republican rule. Whether they will, notwithstanding the victory the GOP expects next month, is very much in doubt.
One could argue that voting when the opportunity arises to divide and disempower the government is in the best traditions of American democracy. The checks and balances of the constitution were written with that purpose in mind. On a long view, the system’s resistance to political innovation might be the secret of the country’s success, preventing lurches from one ideological extreme to the other, creating a high degree of institutional conservatism. Compare domestic and foreign policy, where the executive’s powers are less checked and abrupt changes of direction, not always to the good, have been more common.
In normal times, perhaps, there is much to be said for the default mode of US domestic policy: don’t just do something, stand there. But these are not normal times. The US may be about to vote for paralysis in Washington just as circumstances really do demand forthright and urgent action.
Enormously consequential choices on infrastructure are pending: industry needs clarity on energy policy, so that long-lived investments can go forward without capital going to waste. The immigration system is squeezing the supply of skilled workers, choking the economy’s most promising and dynamic sectors. The US education system is failing and needs to be fixed. These are portents of decline. Action cannot wait. Business as usual will not do.
Most pressing of all, the US needs to repair its fiscal policy. The long-term budget projections are awful. To contain the risk of a public debt crisis, Congress must plan for a combination of gradual tax increases and spending cuts. Mr Obama has appointed a fiscal commission to come up with proposals. Parts of what it will say are easy to predict: a higher retirement age to stem entitlement spending, and a broadening of the tax base, so more revenue can be collected without raising marginal income-tax rates.
Simple enough, yet it is hard to imagine Democrats and Republicans coming to terms on this or anything else. The fiscal outlook is so bad that it might be better to let Democrats confront it their way (higher taxes on business and the better off) or Republicans their way (whatever this might be: they still have not said). The worst outcome – and, unfortunately, the likeliest – is bitter division, a paralysed government, and no action until another economic crisis intervenes.
You think disapproval of Congress is high right now? Just wait.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.
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