Alan McIntyre
As the lights dimmed on the last presidential debate in Boca Raton, the marathon officially became a sprint. As Romney and Obama headed out on gruelling tours of key battleground states, the reality of November 6th started to loom large for each of them.
For Obama, the risk is that he is this generation’s Jimmy Carter – a one-term Democratic failure; well-meaning and likeable, but judged by history as ineffective and weak. For Romney, November 6th will either be a glorious capstone to a successful career in business and politics, or his exit from public life.
Since Romney secured the Republican nomination in the early summer, the presidential campaign has been a protracted battle of demographics versus economics, with Obama buttressing a still fragile economic recovery by appealing to the young, the Hispanics, women and the gay community. In contrast, Romney has focused on winning the white, male, blue-collar vote, by focusing on his business credentials, job creation record, and his pledge to roll back ‘un-American’ legislation like Obama’s healthcare reforms.
As Romney has hammered Obama on his economic record, he has predictably tacked away from the divisive social issues that defined the Republican primary season like contraception and gay marriage and even had the hutzpah to position himself as the foreign policy ‘peace’ candidate in the last debate. Despite the Obama campaign’s relentless efforts to label Romney as a flip-flopper and their coining of a new type of memory loss called ‘Romnesia’, the electorate tends to focus on what is right in front of them – which at this stage is a moderate sounding Republican who claims to have a plan to create 12 million jobs. The result is that the polls are a statistical dead heat and the next two weeks are shaping up to be the Olympics of political punditry, with both camps ramping up the rhetoric around this being a ‘defining election’.
But for all the hoopla and media circus surrounding it, the presidency may not be the most important US election decided on November 6th. If you look at the past four years and more deeply at the last 30, it may be the US congressional elections that truly define what happens come January. As late as six months ago, the momentum was clearly with the Republicans, and the idea of a clean sweep of the House, Senate and the presidency was gaining credence. But now, like the race for the White House, the polls have tightened in key Senate seats and the outcome is uncertain (it is possible, but highly unlikely, that the Republicans will lose control of the House).
The conventional wisdom is increasingly that the Democrats will retain control of the Senate while the Republicans will continue to run the House; a result that – regardless of who wins the presidency – will I fear be a bad outcome for America.
Why should a split Congress be such a disaster? Well, when Churchill quipped that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the others that had been tried, his frame of reference was the British parliamentary system of a unified executive and legislature. Aided by the first-past-the-post electoral system, the UK has a history of strong governments who can push through a legislative agenda and then await the judgement of the electorate four to five years down the road. So, in historical terms, the current minority coalition is an aberration.
In contrast, the US constitution clearly separates the executive from the legislature and gives Congress the power to make the laws while the president only gets to sign them or veto them. With a split Congress during the last two years, the US has seen legislative gridlock at its worst. Rather than legislation being passed by Congress and getting a straight (and very public) yes or no from Obama as the Founding Fathers intended, the Democrats controlling the Senate have successfully smothered almost all legislation of any consequence that has emerged from the House before it has got anywhere near the president’s desk.
The result has been that, rather than reforms being debated in the public square between the Capitol and the White House, the battle ground of choice has been the proverbial smoke-filled rooms of Congress. Through arcane rules and parliamentary procedures, both sides have successfully stymied everything except the most inoffensive and mundane legislation. For example, the House has passed 39 ‘job creation’ bills in the last two years, 20 of which have never even been considered by the Senate never mind actually voted on.
This standoff has encouraged grandstanding and cheap political point scoring on both sides of the aisle. Paul Ryan, the rising star of the Republicans and now vice-presidential nominee, made his name in the House by proposing budgets that stood no chance of ever coming near a presidential pen. With swingeing cuts to entitlement programmes across the board, tax cuts and genuflection to the Republican idol of military spending, Ryan and his acolytes have played to the right-wing gallery without any fear that reality would ever actually intrude.
The biggest economic tragedy of this standoff has been that instead of taking a measured approach to lowering the budget deficit, the end of 2012 will see the US facing the ‘Fiscal Cliff’ or ‘Taxmageddon’ as the right refers to it. This budgetary Sword of Damocles will see the automatic expiry of the Bush era tax cuts plus ‘sequestration’ cuts that will lower government spending by $1tr over the next 10 years: oh and by the way this combination would almost certainly tip the US economy back into recession in 2013. This threat was meant to be Congress’s way of ensuring a deficit deal got done, but instead both parties are standing around watching the rope holding the sword fray by the day in the belief that it will all get fixed between November 6th and the end of the year. In the meantime the bond markets are beginning to get very nervous.
This refusal to deal with reality isn’t just a Republican problem. Obama asked the Presidential Commission on Deficit Reduction to come up with a budget proposal that would have seen gradual and meaningful reduction in the deficit, and the resulting plan was widely praised by non-partisan economists. But instead of embracing it, Obama backed away from it like political kryptonite for fear of upsetting his own base.
If you really want to understand how little has been achieved by the current divided Congress, two statistics provide a damning indictment. The first is that this congressional term has seen a 20-year low in terms of passed legislation. The second is that, despite facing a very partisan Republican House, Obama has only had to veto two bills since he came to office in 2008. But it doesn’t take a clean sweep of both branches of government to have a different and more positive outcome.
From late 1994 to 2000, Bill Clinton faced a united Republican Congress and in that time he vetoed 35 pieces of legislation. However, it was a very productive legislative period mostly because Clinton threatened to veto well over a hundred more pieces of legislation and as a result forced a series of effective compromises with the Republicans. The impact was that despite being impeached over the Lewinsky affair, Clinton’s second term produced landmark welfare reform, a balanced budget and many other pieces of important legislation that dwarf what has been achieved over the last two years.
So when in the early hours of November 7th the commentariat in the UK is fixated on the presidential results from the mid west, spare a thought for the Senate races in Connecticut, Virginia, Massachusetts and Missouri, where Democratic incumbents are trying to hold off Republican challengers. While my heart votes Democrat (and based purely on social policy I will indeed vote for Obama) my head says that Republican control of both houses of Congress may actually be what America needs if it is going to break the current legislative deadlock.
While I view many Republican policies as retrograde and ill-conceived, the best way to moderate them and actually get something done may ironically be to actually let them pass the legislation and then have the constitution work the way it was intended. Mr President, hopefully your pen will be getting a lot more work in 2013.
Alan McIntyre is a Scottish-born partner in a New York-based management consulting firm. He is Patron of ICS
