An article from the Economist
Feb 18th 2010
American politics seems unusually bogged down at present. Blame Barack
Obama more than the system
THIS week Evan Bayh, a senator from Indiana who nearly became Barack
Obama’s vice-president, said he was retiring from the Senate, blaming
the inability of Congress to get things done. Cynics think Mr Bayh was
also worried about being beaten in November (though he was ahead in the
polls). Yet the idea that America’s democracy is broken, unable to fix
the country’s problems and condemned to impotent partisan warfare, has
gained a lot of support lately (see article[1]).
Certainly the system looks dysfunctional. Although a Democratic
president is in the White House and Democrats control both House and
Senate, Mr Obama has been unable to enact health-care reform, a
Democratic goal for many decades. His cap-and-trade bill to reduce
carbon emissions has passed the House but languishes in the Senate. Now
a bill to boost job-creation is stuck there as well. Nor is it just a
question of a governing party failing to get its way. Washington seems
incapable of fixing America’s deeper problems. Democrats and
Republicans may disagree about climate change and health, but nobody
thinks that America can ignore the federal deficit, already 10% of GDP
and with a generation of baby-boomers just about to retire. Yet an
attempt to set up a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission has
recently collapsed–again.
This, argue the critics, is what happens when a mere 41 senators (in a
100-strong chamber) can filibuster a bill to death; when states like
Wyoming (population: 500,000) have the same clout in the Senate as
California (37m), so that senators representing less than 11% of the
population can block bills; when, thanks to gerrymandering, many
congressional seats are immune from competitive elections; when hateful
bloggers and talk-radio hosts shoot down any hint of compromise; when a
tide of lobbying cash corrupts everything. And this dysfunctionality
matters far beyond America’s shores. A few years ago only Chinese
bureaucrats dared suggest that Beijing’s autocratic system of
government was superior. Nowadays there is no shortage of leaders from
emerging countries, or even prominent American businesspeople, who
privately sing the praises of a system that can make decisions swiftly.
IT’S ALRIGHT, ABE
We disagree. Washington has its faults, some of which could easily be
fixed. But much of the current fuss forgets the purpose of American
government; and it lets current politicians (Mr Obama in particular)
off the hook.
To begin with, the critics exaggerate their case. It is simply not true
to say that nothing can get through Congress. Look at the current
financial crisis. The huge TARP bill, which set up a fund to save
America’s banks, passed, even though it came at the end of George
Bush’s presidency. The stimulus bill, a $787 billion two-year package,
made it through within a month of Mr Obama taking office. The Democrats
have also passed a long list of lesser bills, from investments in green
technology to making it easier for women to sue for sex discrimination.
A criticism with more weight is that American government is good at
solving acute problems (like averting a Depression) but less good at
confronting chronic ones (like the burden of entitlements). Yet even
this can be overstated. Mr Bush failed to reform pensions, but he did
push through No Child Left Behind, the biggest change to schools for a
generation. Bill Clinton reformed welfare. The system, in other words,
can work, even if it does not always do so. (That is hardly unusual
anywhere: for all its speed in authorising power stations, China has
hardly made a success of health care lately.) On the biggest worry of
all, the budget, it may well take a crisis to force action, but
Americans have wrestled down huge deficits before.
America’s political structure was designed to make legislation at the
federal level difficult, not easy. Its founders believed that a country
the size of America is best governed locally, not nationally. True to
this picture, several states have pushed forward with health-care
reform. The Senate, much ridiculed for antique practices like the
filibuster and the cloture vote, was expressly designed as a “cooling”
chamber, where bills might indeed die unless they commanded broad
support.
Broad support from the voters is something that both the health bill
and the cap-and-trade bill clearly lack. Democrats could have a health
bill tomorrow if the House passed the Senate version. Mr Obama could
pass a lot of green regulation by executive order. It is not so much
that America is ungovernable, as that Mr Obama has done a lousy job of
winning over Republicans and independents to the causes he favours. If,
instead of handing over health care to his party’s left wing, he had
lived up to his promise to be a bipartisan president and courted
conservatives by offering, say, reform of the tort system, he might
have got health care through; by giving ground on nuclear power, he may
now stand a chance of getting a climate bill. Once Mr Clinton learned
the advantages of co-operating with the Republicans, the country was
governed better.
REDISTRICTING THE REDISTRICTERS
So the basic system works; but that is no excuse for ignoring areas
where it could be reformed. In the House the main outrage is
gerrymandering. Tortuously shaped “safe” Republican and Democratic
seats mean that the real battles are fought among party activists for
their party’s nomination. This leads candidates to pander to extremes,
and lessens the chances of bipartisan co-operation. An independent
commission, already in existence in some states, would take out much of
the sting. In the Senate the filibuster is used too often, in part
because it is too easy. Senators who want to talk out a bill ought to
be obliged to do just that, not rely on a simple procedural vote:
voters could then see exactly who was obstructing what.
These defects and others should be corrected. But even if they are
not, they do not add up to a system that is as broken as people now
claim. American democracy has its peaks and troughs; attempts to reform
it dramatically, such as California’s initiative craze, have a mixed
history, to put it mildly. Rather than regretting how the Republicans
in Congress have behaved, Mr Obama should look harder at his own use of
his presidential power.
