Soccer Dad

The good news and what it means

Ron Christie writing in The Hill seems to have come to much the same conclusion that Michael Barone did a few days ago. President Bush is succeeding. In Bush surging, not fading as tenure's end nears Christie (who has ties to the Bush administration) writes:

On the domestic front, the tax cuts the president pushed through the Congress have led to remarkable economic growth, low unemployment and record-high tax receipts that members of Congress can hardly wait to spend. New data released last week showed that America added 94,000 jobs in November 2007 — capping a remarkable 51 straight months in which jobs have been created in our economy. Despite partisan claims that the economy is soft, more than 8.3 million jobs have been created since August 2003 and unemployment remains low (4.7 percent). America remains open for business.

More Americans have more money in their savings accounts and in their wallets as a result of the Bush tax cuts. Despite talk on Capitol Hill of rolling back the president’s tax cuts that “benefit only the wealthy” Democrats have been loath to pass legislation and return to their districts to explain why raising taxes and eliminating the popular $500 per child tax credit is good public policy. Not going to happen anytime soon.

Barone had focused on foreign policy success. Christie's piece complements Barone by providing details of some domestic successes too. The economy has been going well despite the sharp rise in oil prices over the past two years. Christie also looks at the recent stem cell news much the same way that Charles Krauthammer did.

But there's even more good news. Peter Wehner and Yuval Levy looked at social trends over the past 15 years and report on Crime, Drugs, Welfare—and Other Good News:

The 1996 welfare-reform bill was the most dramatic and successful social innovation in decades, reversing 60 years of federal policy that had long since grown not just useless but positively counterproductive. In effect, the new law ended the legal entitlement to federally funded welfare benefits, imposing a five-year time limit on the receipt of such benefits and requiring a large percentage of current recipients to seek and obtain work.

When the bill was passed, there were dire predictions, mostly emanating from liberals, of an explosion of poverty and hunger. They were just as quickly refuted. State welfare rolls plummeted—and poverty, instead of rising, decreased. Welfare reform sent a message in bright neon lights: higher expectations will yield better results. Rather than giving up on the poor, the new policy assumed that the able-bodied were capable of working, expected them to work, and was rooted in a confident belief that, materially and otherwise, they would be better off for it. In each of these particulars, the policy makers proved correct. If, as the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in the 1990’s, our old social policy had “succeeded in ‘demoralizing’ . . . society itself,” the new policy proved to be profoundly re-moralizing.

Crime rates, too, benefited from something of a policy revolution over the course of the 90’s. Applying methods and concepts developed by James Q. Wilson, George L. Kelling, and others, innovators like then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in New York City and his police chief William Bratton pursued a zero-tolerance approach to crime that quickly became a model for other cities and states. Incarceration rates rose, policing improved, crime data were processed faster, criminal patterns were identified more effectively—all of which furthered the twin goals of intervention and prevention. Similar gains were posted by programs like Philadelphia’s Youth Violence Reduction Partnership, in which an array of urban agencies, working together, drove down homicide rates in the most violent parts of the city by focusing on youths most at risk of killing or being killed.

The progress we have made against drug use appears in large part to be another product of a reformed government policy. By the late 1980’s, in the heyday of the crack epidemic, drugs had come to be regarded as our most serious domestic challenge, and formed the subject of President George H.W. Bush’s first prime-time address to the nation. Discarding the piecemeal approach of the past, which concentrated now on one, now on another point of the drug-use continuum, Bush forged an integrated approach, applying pressure on all fronts: law enforcement, prevention, treatment, interdiction, and education. A critical element in the campaign was a public-awareness effort centered on the explicitly moral argument that drug use degrades human character.

The consequences were swift in arriving. If, in the 1970’s, drug use had been widely seen as liberating and glamorous, by the late 1980’s it was coming to be perceived as both dangerous and dumb. During the Clinton presidency, the drug issue was allowed to fade from attention, but since then national policy has returned to its former levels of efficacy, and the statistics reflect the encouraging results.

In education, the emphasis placed by government at every level on testing, accountability, and transparency has unquestionably made a difference. Every state now applies statewide academic standards, which, though in many cases still not high enough, at least measure performance against identifiable benchmarks. While the details of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind program have been controversial, its general approach has come to be broadly accepted—and has produced results. In the meantime, the rise in charter schools and publicly funded school-choice programs, along with the advent of “virtual” education, has created many more options for American families.

Obviously if Wehner and Levy are celebrating trends over a 15 year period, due credit must be given to President Clinton who presided over more than half that period. It doesn't diminish that clearly some of the progress occurred President Bush's watch too.

But if strategically, economically and socially President Bush is bequeathing a better country and world to his successor, how will that affect the race for 2008. I don't expect that it will change perceptions of President Bush too much, his partisans will still say that he's "misunderstimated" and his critics will still rank him as one of the worst presidents of all time. Only a decade or two of perspective will allow a consensus to emerge.

My (unscientific) guess is that good news most likely helps Romney and Obama. Giuliani is a crisis choice. And Hillary Clinton is too. Her husband won in 1992 because he was viewed as someone who could consolidate the gains of winning the Cold War - he'd invest the "peace dividend" wisely.

If the trends outlined above all hold and there's a feeling of security among the electorate, they will turn to the candidates who are viewed as "consolidators." Among the candidates with the most money, Gov. Romney and Sen. Obama look to the candidates who would best fill that role.

2008 election, president bush, barack obama, hillary clinton, rudy giuliani, mitt romney.