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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Take the Bush tax cuts. The public has never been particularly enthusiastic about them, seeing them as only modestly helpful, if at all, to the average person and the economy as a whole. They are well aware most of the benefits flow to the well-off and outright rich. Evidence is strong that they would prefer seeing the money that now subsidizes the affluent used for public purposes in specific areas instead.
One area that immediately presents itself, especially given its clear connection to an opportunity society, is education. The Republicans' program in this area is simple: mandating high standards through the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, while presiding over a stagnant federal education budget and dramatic education cutbacks in fiscally crunched states. That formula means states don't have the money to help the many NCLB-designated failing schools, much less improve and modernize their school systems for the 21st century.
The public is well aware of this problem. Provided Kerry maintains the NCLB's basic commitment to high standards and stringent accountability ("mend it, don't end it"), he will find a receptive audience for proposals to give schools the resources they need to both meet current shortfalls and modernize for the future. Modernization could include universal access to preschool, keeping school buildings open all day and year-round for educational enrichment, and ensuring that all students can continue their education beyond high school. This, in turn, would mean substantial changes in the ways schools operate, recruit teachers and provide services. A modernization program on this scale will go far toward branding Kerry's campaign as a campaign for the future.
The same focus on the future should inform his programs in other areas. In healthcare, while he will have a fat target in the recently passed Medicare prescription-drugs bill, he should resist the temptation to focus on the notorious skimpiness of the drug benefit. The worst crime of the bill is it does nothing to rein in runaway drug costs, whose escalation terrifies the senior citizens who need prescription drugs. (Indeed, that's the main reason the bill manages to spend a fair amount of money -- originally estimated at $400 billion over 10 years, and already that figure is being revised upward -- yet achieve so little.) Similarly, the goal of extending coverage is a worthy one, but the typical voter already has health insurance and is most worried about the degrading quality and increasing costs (both premiums and out-of-pocket) of the policy they have. Modernizing the healthcare system in this country means, first and foremost, finding ways to keep healthcare costs under control. That, in turn, would help lay the basis for a model of fiscally and politically sustainable universal coverage, instead of simply adding another expensive entitlement to the current system.
Or take Social Security. The Republican plan to partially privatize the system by "carving out" a portion of the FICA tax to be put into individual investment accounts is a bad one, and support for it is quite soft, once the inevitable reduction in guaranteed benefits is brought to voters' attention. But a defense of the Social Security system, while reasonable in and of itself, does nothing to modernize a pension system that leaves some workers without retirement accounts at all and others with multiple and underfunded accounts.
The most straightforward way to do this is to set up a universal pension system that would provide every worker with a fully portable retirement account. Under such a system, all the various IRA and related accounts would be rolled into one tax-favored account and workers could direct cash from any and all of their 401(k) accounts into this universal account, which would remain with them as they moved from job to job. As former Clinton economic advisor Gene Sperling advocates, these accounts could be further supported by providing up to $1,000 a year in matching contributions for savings deducted from paychecks -- a one-to-one match for middle-income workers and a two-to-one match for lower-income workers.
Another issue Kerry should focus on is the environment and the need to safeguard it for future generations. This is an issue with strong appeal to key Democratic-leaning groups like professionals and the young. But it's also an issue that gets a lot of moderate suburban swing voters hot under the collar. Polling consistently shows that voters think Bush has been doing a terrible job on the environment, trust the Democrats on the issue by wide margins, and vote heavily Democratic if it's an important voting issue to them. The Gore campaign de-emphasized the issue in 2000, on the grounds that it wasn't salient to enough voters. Kerry shouldn't make the same mistake. The more he talks about it, the more salient the issue will become; the more salient it becomes, the better off his campaign will be.
Across all these issues, Kerry should highlight how his program for America's future connects to a vision of an opportunity society where all Americans are provided with the tools they need to succeed, from adequate education to a reasonable level of health security to an effective way to save for their retirement.
How difficult would it be for Kerry to move in this direction? Not very. Many of his current programmatic proposals would fit right into the frame of an opportunity society -- better, in fact, than they do into a simple populist frame, where they can more easily be typecast as just throwing more money at the middle class under the guise of "fairness." For example, Kerry has some interesting ideas on education (including versions of universal preschool and access to college, and ways of fixing the NCLB) that tend not to receive much attention, but could be more energizing with an opportunity society approach. His proposals in other areas -- with the exception of retirement, where he appears to lack any version of a universal pension system -- are also consistent with the approach recommended here and would benefit from being reframed as providing more opportunity, rather than more fairness.
I can't promise this approach will beat George Bush. But it's got more potential to do so than "the people vs. the powerful." Or (shudder) "the real deal."
