I feel a rising tide of ennui. America is in the last, numbing days of an excruciating slog to Election Day and some of my tribe — the jaded scribes, the blogging sages and caffeinated cable chatterers — have run out of patience, poor babies. Searching for the source of their malaise, beyond the dubious science of the polls and the mean spirits of the campaigns and the emptiness of the slogans and our own limited attention spans, those of my ilk have come up with this high-minded diagnosis: the candidates have No Agenda.
They say: "It's a good time to follow the candidates if you like elections about nothing." And: "Obama's greatest weakness is that his proposals for the future are nonexistent." And: "The president did not lay out a second-term agenda ... And that is where he is the weakest." And: "People say, I want to vote for him, but he hasn't told me what he's going to do." And, by the way: "You don't get that from Mitt Romney, either." I've heard it countless times and, truth be told, probably said it myself once or twice. No Agenda!
When President Obama's campaign last week issued a 20-page booklet of its intentions, it was dismissed in my own newspaper for containing "no new proposals," and in The Wall Street Journal as a "glossy" pitch to critics who say "Mr. Obama hasn't fully explained what he hopes to accomplish if re-elected." Romney has made the ostensible lack of an Obama agenda the heart of his closing argument. That's shrewd politics. The No Agenda meme works nicely for Romney. If Obama has no agenda then he is, by default, the candidate of the status quo, and the status quo is a painfully slow recovery, a hovering debt crisis and a worrisome world. Obama's retort is that Romney is trying to hide his agenda — dressing a pack of wolves in sheep's clothing.
But Romney, with or without an agenda, is the candidate who has not presided over a time of national anxiety, and therefore he is the de facto candidate of change. Or as the new slogan has it, "Big Change."
Let us breathe deeply and clear our minds.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons voters (and the media) should be disenchanted by the candidates and the campaign, but the idea that we'll be voting in the dark is not one of them. Yes, the candidates have been reluctant to publish some unpleasant details of their policies. [See footnote 1] Most presidential candidates in modern times don't, for the understandable reason that details can be cherry-picked for attack ads. Yes, identifying Romney's plan requires some guesswork, because he has been at various times all things to all voters. And yes, Obama has been short on grand man-to-the-moon promises and on the pulse-quickening oratory our weary commentariat requires. He sometimes seems to have misread Mario Cuomo's famous guidance: he governs in prose and campaigns in prose.
And yet, can we really say we don't know what to expect from these two men?
With Obama, we can anticipate that the unfinished business of universal health care and the re-regulation of the Wall Street casino will be finished. We can expect investments in education, infrastructure and innovation, followed by a gradual, balanced attack on deficits that includes higher taxes on the wealthiest. (And this time he will have a hefty stick to apply to a recalcitrant Congress: the fiscal cliff, which forces Congress to compromise or share the blame for the ensuing havoc.) We can expect the Pentagon, after winding down two wars, to bank a peace dividend. If Obama is re-elected, especially if he is elected with substantial Latino support, we can expect that he will try to deliver on his postponed promise of comprehensive immigration reform. The fact that these objectives represent a continuation of his first term does not mean he is aiming low. These are ambitious goals.
If Romney is elected, there will be tension between his inner pragmatist and the stubborn extremists in his own party, but we can fairly expect a rollback of universal health care in favor of the rough marketplace, and at least a partial dismantling of regulations on banks, extractive industries and whatever other industries squeal about job-killing red tape. We can expect a lowering of the safety net, especially a retrenchment of Medicaid and a marketization of Medicare. His deficit plan will rely on draconian spending cuts and on the supply-side superstition that tax cuts automatically produce growth. Romney will be somewhat more enthusiastic about oil and coal, and will put less faith in renewables. The military will not want. You can expect another Scalia or two on the Supreme Court, the defunding of Planned Parenthood and a social agenda aimed at appeasing the evangelical base, mainly by letting the states decide. On foreign policy Romney has gravitated toward Obama's caution, and I tend to believe him, if only because whoever is president will have his hands too full at home to embark on a war in Iran or Syria as long as it is avoidable. [See footnote 2]
There's more, but you get the idea. Two agendas; compare and contrast.
The second thing to say is that an "agenda" is at best a rough guide to what a president will do, given the constraints imposed by Congress, curveballs pitched by fate, and what presidents learn on the job. Presidents surprise you, and surprise themselves. Obama really meant to close Guantánamo; he lost that one. I think he intended to reform immigration until other priorities took his energy. Libya was certainly not high on his 2008 agenda.
And that is why — third point — we don't elect agendas, we don't elect platforms, we don't even elect parties to the presidency. This is not a referendum or a ballot initiative. Indeed, we are skeptical of agendas. If either candidate had announced in his final weeks some grandiose initiative of the kind the pundits prescribe, we'd have mocked it as October-surprise gimmickry, a sign of desperation. We elect the human being we trust to have our best interests in mind. We choose a direction, a disposition, a set of instincts and convictions and competencies.
When voters tell pundits, and pundits tell us, that they are frustrated that the candidates lack an agenda, they are just saying they wish we could foretell the future. If we could do that, a lot of pundits would be out of business.
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Footnote 1: The most familiar example of withholding details, of course, is Romney's refusal to identify which tax breaks he would eliminate to offset the revenues lost by reducing income tax rates. He knows perfectly well that tax deductions for things like home mortgages and charitable donations are popular and well defended by lobbyists. But lost in that whole discussion was one of the more interesting ideas of the campaign season.
Romney said that rather than abolish popular tax breaks, he would cap deductions at a fixed amount; at various times he tossed out $17,000, $25,000 and $50,000 as possible limits.
The inescapable problem with Romney's plan, as the impartial Tax Policy Center calculated, is that the math doesn't work. Even if you eliminate all personal deductions, you recoup less than half of the $4 trillion to $5 trillion cost of his plan to lower income tax rates by 20 percent. Capping deductions recoups even less.
But that doesn't mean capping deductions is a bad idea. It is a lot easier than taking on the constituencies and lobbyists defending each specific tax break. It's simple, politically doable and highly progressive. In short, as the Tax Policy Center's Roberton Williams and Howard Gleckman have explained on the center's blog, while it doesn't raise the amount Romney needs to make his math work, it's an excellent way to raise revenues. Obama should think about grabbing it.
Footnote 2: If I had to bet which candidate was more likely to launch airstrikes against Iran or to up the military ante in Syria, I'd be inclined to give a slight edge to Obama. He has already crossed the daunting psychological threshold of dispensing death: surge troops, drone strikes, the Bin Laden raid. Romney talks tough, but has never had to make the hard decision to use force, which is easier said than done.
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