Dear Obama: Don’t go right; get it right

Many are urging President-elect Barack Obama to govern from the center, claiming that “middle-of-the-road” policies better suit a nation that remains “center-right.” This advice carries particular weight coming from moderate Southern Democrats, whose states remained mostly red on Tuesday. But this is exactly the wrong advice because it mistakenly presumes that American politics is driven by labels. Americans are fed up with government by slogans. They hunger for workable solutions to their pressing problems.

Democrats have listened to this kind of conventional wisdom in the past, and failed. The centrist Georgia Democratic Party had exhausted its middle ground approach by 2000 and lacked new ideas tailored to the rapidly changing times. Moderate Democrats tried to stave off surging Republican realignment by running on Reaganesque rhetoric and governing with “Republican-lite” policies, but the voters preferred Republican government administered by genuine Republicans.

Former Gov. Roy Barnes joked that his educational reform was 90 percent Republican, but the joke was on him when Georgia’s teachers, the core of any viable Democratic coalition in the state, led the tidal wave of rejection that sank state Democrats in 2002. And Bill Clinton, no matter how refreshing a breather during the Reagan-Bush era, was merely an interlude before the rightward lurch of the second President Bush.

We don’t need a one-and-a-half party system, with the Democrats playing second fiddle to a hegemonic Republican Party. Instead, Democrats should look to North Carolina, where Obama and Senate victories showed what Democrats can accomplish when they strongly contest elections. In light of the surprising muscle flexed by Georgia Democrats on Tuesday, imagine the result if significant resources had been invested early and consistently in a forthright campaign to turn the state blue.

Americans are ideological “conservatives” —- in the abstract, they believe in less government. But in practice, they are “liberals” —- they want active government programs to help solve their problems, and they respond enthusiastically to proposals such as Obama’s plans to restore middle-class tax cuts, extend health care, explore alternative energy sources, and reconfigure the war on terror. In other words, Americans don’t want big government, but they do want effective government.

Ronald Reagan was actually only moderately successful in repealing government programs. George W. Bush took office determined to push the Reagan revolution to its logical extreme and finally translate taglines such as laissez faire, market solutions and individual responsibility into policies of deregulation and inaction (expansive foreign policy and military overcommitment aside). The result, we now see, was an economic, fiscal, environmental, energy, social and international train wreck.

Americans have real problems that aren’t caused by their personal irresponsibility. It’s not individual failure when your company ships your job to Taiwan, your employer doesn’t provide health insurance or your policy doesn’t cover what’s actually making you sick, or your kids receive a third-rate education because your taxes are being squandered on neoconservative pipe dreams of dominating oil-rich regions abroad. Millions of hardworking Americans have played by the rules but, despite their diligence and responsibility, find themselves holding jobs that don’t pay a living wage, discover that their pensions are worthless and awaken to the tanking values of their homes and savings, manipulated by unscrupulous and unregulated big investors. Laissez-faire government can’t solve these problems; it simply enables the large transnational corporations and the small class of super-rich who, coddled and cajoled by the Republicans, have been breaking, or rewriting, the rules.

The way to effective 21st-century governance and a political realignment lies not through empty sloganeering about being centrist and in the middle of the road, but through developing an innovative public philosophy and matching policies that will build a stronger America. Obama, like Franklin Roosevelt, has impressive rhetorical skills, and clearly people need inspiration in times like the Depression (or now). But FDR didn’t just give cozy fireside chats and soaring inaugural speeches; he brought the New Deal to a country desperate for a new departure.

Americans are tired of politicians of both parties trying to talk their way into power using hollow slogans and labeling their opponents with worn-out catch phrases. They are ready for leaders who will propose workable solutions to the problems they actually face. The party that successfully gets beyond public relations and provides effective governance will be rewarded with a bright electoral future.

> Gus Cochran teaches political science at Agnes Scott College.