We Can All Do Better (20 page)

Slowly, the politician has become another species to the average person. This disillusionment with those we elect is ominous, because, in our representative democracy, they're supposed to speak for us. The lack of collegiality is serious because the engine of our democracy from the beginning has been skilled compromise. Today that seems a lost art. We sorely need to create a government that reflects the moderate middle, which is willing to compromise, rather than the ideological extremes. One way to do that is to change the way we draw congressional district lines. Right now, in almost every state, they are drawn every ten years, mostly by partisan legislatures. The result is that out of 435 House seats, only 50 are competitive and only 21 of those are very competitive.
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The rest are comfortably Democratic or Republican in registration and voting pattern. If I'm running for Congress as a Democrat in a 60–40 Democratic district, I don't have to listen to Republican voters in my district. All I have to worry about is a primary. I do everything I can to avoid being challenged in a primary, which means I pay undue attention to the fringe of my party. Democrats move to the left. Republicans move to the right (witness the influence of the Tea Party). We can take the redistricting decision out of the hands of partisan legislatures and give them to citizen commissions (as has been done in California) or to a panel of federal judges, with the instruction to create districts as compact and competitive as possible. Candidates who have to reach across the aisle in order to get elected will have established a habit that will serve them well when they arrive on Capitol Hill. When politics no longer rewards extremism, extremism will decline. The state of our two major parties is such that a growing number of people are registering as independents. According to Beyond Red vs. Blue: Political Typology, a Pew Research Center Report in May 2011, more people (37 percent) considered
themselves independent than identified themselves as Democrats (32 percent) or Republicans (25 percent).

In 1986, in my second Senate term, two huge bills, tax reform and immigration reform, became law. Both won bipartisan support. I was deeply involved in tax reform, which had the support of a Republican president, a Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and a Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and passed by wide majorities. On the immigration bill, I remember going to see Alan Simpson, a Republican senator and its main author. I had a list of twenty-two questions about the bill. He and I sat alone, with no staff present, and he answered all of my questions. At the end of our hour, I told him he had my support. I didn't even know the “Democratic position,” if there was one. The bipartisanship that existed in 1986, and in the Social Security compromise three years earlier, seems impossible today.

The rigidity of our politics makes everyone a mouthpiece instead of an independent thinker. Polling says that 82 percent of the American people are worried about jobs. What do Republicans propose to do about this? Their only response is, “Don't tax the rich.” Why? Because, according to them, the rich are the primary “job creators.” Notice the choice of words: Republicans appear to hope that the phrase will persuade the electorate that Republicans care about providing jobs. A closer analysis of their policy reveals that they don't want the federal government to do anything substantial to relieve unemployment. Most of the “job creators” are not rich but middle-class small-business owners, and most hiring decisions are based on a judgment about their sales, not the marginal tax rate. But the spinners and the pollsters are betting that people won't look at the fine print and the media won't point out the obvious facts

Although the views of conservative Republicans are contrary to the interests of the majority of Americans, many of those Americans vote Republican. Why? I believe one major reason for this paradox
is that Republicans use a moral language, whereas Democrats use policy language. In a contest between the heart and the mind—that is, between deep conviction and facts—conviction wins every time. Berkeley linguistics professor Lakoff has observed that swing voters are people who can be conservative on fiscal policy and liberal on social policy (or conservative on foreign policy and liberal on domestic policy), but no matter which side they fall on, they tend to respond to conviction.
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When one party speaks from moral principles on an issue that swing voters care about—say, conservative fiscal policy—and the other party speaks with the facts about, say, liberal social policy, the moral-language position prevails.

Over the years, Republicans have made a sustained effort to build a national organization resembling a pyramid, with money (lots of it, from very rich people) forming the base, followed by a level for think tanks that generate radical ideas, such as privatizing Social Security. On the next level are pollsters and pundits, who express those ideas in language that achieves the maximum political advantage (i.e., don't tax “job creators”; don't support the “death tax”). At the top of the pyramid is the presidential candidate, who, by the time he has run the gauntlet of the primaries, is locked in the prison of party orthodoxy. Often that orthodoxy fails to reflect the views of a sizable number of Republicans, who feel disinherited by the reactionary fringe controlling their party.

Democrats have a different problem. They have long tended to look for the charismatic leader who, by the force of his or her personality, can single-handedly transform the country. The exemplar is JFK. Democratic candidates in subsequent presidential elections have donned the mantle of youthful, energetic leader. Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama all fit the mold. The problem with such an approach is that in searching for Prince Charming, Democrats have neglected to build their party with ideas from the grass roots up. There is no Democratic pyramid; there are only fan clubs.

Our politics today has boiled down to two competing ethics: the ethic of caring, which implies collective action and is usually associated with Democrats, and the ethic of personal responsibility, which implies individual action and is associated with Republicans. Every campaign debate begins from these poles. But given our present national circumstances, both ethics are necessary. Take pensions: Collective caring would require protecting Social Security, especially since it's the only retirement income for 35 percent of America's elderly. Individual responsibility would require each of us to save if we want more than a subsistence retirement. Yet most Americans don't save enough. The Survey of Consumer Finances has reported that if you're sixty-five, you should have saved $300,000 if you want a comfortable retirement. The current average is $60,000. Forty-six percent of all working Americans have less than $10,000 saved.
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Take health care: Collective caring would mean that everyone in America should have access to health care; individual responsibility would prompt us to take care of our own health by paying attention to what we eat and drink and how often we exercise. One third of Americans are obese and another third are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The healthier we are, the less we cost the system and the more money is available for insuring all Americans. Take education: The state can provide good schools, but families have to provide a context for maximum achievement and the students have to do the homework. Or, take democracy: Laws can ensure the franchise for all Americans, but individual citizens must exercise their right to vote. Caring and responsibility go only so far separately; together, they build the foundation for America's future. And when they're combined with research, public investment in infrastructure, and a new tax system to make us more competitive in the twenty-first century, you have the recipe for rising living standards and fulfilled dreams.

We can all do better.

For whatever historical or ideological or media-driven reasons, the system just isn't working for the majority of Americans. We need a return to the idea that the answer to the problems of democracy is more democracy. That means finding a way for people's voices to be heard so that politicians will listen and politics will once again be a vehicle to make America better for more of our citizens.

Every two years, we elect a House of Representatives and one third of the Senate. Every four years, we select a president. The candidates we choose from have nearly always been nominated by our two major parties. These parties form a duopoly, blocking the emergence of a third party through campaign finance laws and other election regulations. The Federal Election Commission, which rules on a candidate's adherence to the campaign finance laws, is composed only of Republicans and Democrats. No independents. Should a third party begin to get traction because of its message, one or both of the parties will steal its agenda, arguing that only they can make something happen in the Congress because virtually all members of Congress are in one or the other of the parties. It's a circular argument that has worked for a hundred and fifty years.

The last successful third party was the Republican Party, founded in 1854, which fielded Abraham Lincoln for president only six years later. After 1860, the high point of third parties came in 1912, but the circumstances were unique. A popular president, Teddy Roosevelt had decided not to run in 1908, selecting as his successor William Howard Taft; he even left the country so as to give Taft the chance to establish himself free of Teddy's shadow. The portly gentleman from Ohio won the election and subsequently proved to be a great friend of big business. When Roosevelt returned from a two-year around-the-world tour, he was appalled by President Taft's
program. After trying unsuccessfully to get Taft to adopt the progressive positions of the previous Republican administration, Roosevelt decided to form his own party, the Bull Moose Party, and ran for president against Taft in 1912. The Democrats' nominee in 1912 was New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson. A fourth candidate of substance was the Socialist Eugene V. Debs, a founder of the Industrial Workers of the World. The race was one of the best contests in American history, full of larger-than-life characters, playing on a world stage and debating their differences honestly and eloquently. Wilson took 42 percent of the vote, Roosevelt was second with 27 percent, and Taft got only 23 percent. Debs got 6 percent, a high-water mark for an American Socialist.

After 1912, the only third-party candidates to receive electoral votes were Bob LaFollette in 1924, Strom Thurmond in 1948 and George Wallace in 1968. LaFollette won only his home state of Wisconsin. Running as a Dixiecrat, Thurmond won four states in the South, primarily on a racist appeal; and Wallace, as the candidate of the American Independent Party, won five Southern states. All other prominent third-party candidates—John Anderson in 1980, Ross Perot in 1992, Ralph Nader in 2000—failed to get even one electoral vote. They played big in the media, but they had no chance of winning—which is not to say that they had no effect on our country's trajectory. Bill Clinton won in 1992 because Perot took votes from George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush won in 2000 because Ralph Nader took votes from Al Gore.

Very rarely, a major party can do something surprising. In 2008, Barack Obama upended the Clinton establishment and stormed to victory. Smart and eloquent, he was also an innovator, using the Internet to organize and fund-raise. He touched a deep chord in America's consciousness, and people responded. Of the $746 million he raised for his campaign, more than half came from donations of
less than $1,000 and more than 30 percent came from contributions of $200 or less, often made on several separate occasions. The strategic insight of the Obama team was to realize that if he won all the caucus states by quietly out-organizing Hillary Clinton, he would have to win fewer of the primary states to claim the nomination and would force Clinton to spend much more money as the campaign season wore on.

His communication success came from his having the same story throughout the campaign: “Elect me and together we can change Washington and then do great things again.” Clinton had three stories about her identity: experienced professional, inevitable nominee, and Mama Bear defending the middle class. John McCain seemed to have had a new story every week. Obama's victory was unique, related as much to his compelling persona and message of hope as to the country's desire to get beyond its history of racism and the collapse of its international reputation during the Bush administration.

Nevertheless, despite Obama's insurgency, the two parties maintained their traditional control of electoral politics. They fought each other tooth and nail on policy, but when it came to resisting a third choice, they stood shoulder to shoulder. A group called Unity08 (the predecessor of Americans Elect) proposed to nominate a candidate for president in 2008 via an Internet nominating convention. The group itself would not be supporting a particular candidate or a specific set of issues, but would offer voters an alternative by getting whoever won the online convention onto the presidential ballot in all fifty states. The Federal Election Commission, a creature of both parties, ruled in 2007 that Unity08 was subject to the campaign contribution limitations that allowed donors to give no more than five thousand dollars each. Unity08 then filed a lawsuit claiming that it was not a party but a nominating process. In July 2008, a federal judge ruled in favor of the FEC. Unity08 appealed the ruling,
and on March 2, 2010, the appeals court reversed it, declaring that Unity08 was indeed a process and not a party and therefore could be financed by one person or many, contributing as much as they wanted, in order to give the electorate an alternative candidate to the Democrat and the Republican. When the FEC declined to appeal to the Supreme Court, that ruling became the law of the land, and Unity08 changed its name to Americans Elect.