THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123621098187034487.html
OPINION: WONDER LAND
MARCH 5, 2009
Has Obama Buried Reagan?
The GOP is faltering in its defense of Republican ideals.
By DANIEL HENNINGER
The Democratic idea bank of Robert & Robert says it’s safe to unload on
Ronald Reagan.
Robert Reich: “It is the boldest budget we have seen since the Reagan
administration, and drives a nail in the coffin of Reaganomics. We can
basically say goodbye to the philosophy espoused by Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher.”
Robert Shrum: “Obama is not only unwinding Reagan’s policies, he is offering
a Rooseveltian paradigm that justifies government pragmatically.”
Hmmm. Let us consider an alternative universe.
The stock market has been in a free-fall (with a bounce off a ledge
yesterday), dismantling the saved wealth of millions of individual Americans
who must feel they are living through the exploding rubble of some Hollywood
disaster movie.
In reaction, Republicans, true to form, set sail for a deserted island to
ponder a dispute between Rush Limbaugh and Republican National Committee
Chairman Michael Steele. At issue: Who’s captain of the GOP Titanic.
Someone said, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Why are the
Republicans wasting it?
If the Democrats are willing to bet the entire U.S. economy on a 1931 theory
known as the Keynesian multiplier, surely Republicans can excavate and
relearn the core idea handed down to them by Ronald Reagan. That idea was
known as economic growth.
Freed to choose between these two competing ideas, I’m guessing many voters
would go for growth. All that’s needed is just one Republican who can
explain this idea halfway as well as Ronald Reagan.
Arguably at no time in their lives have more Americans been this sharply
focused on the economy. They think and talk about nothing else. The
Republicans have been handed on a tarnished silver platter the chance to
offer the American people an alternative vision of how their economy works
– and grows.
They should take political ownership of the 75% of the U.S. economy that the
Democrats have abandoned — the private economy.
Over the past four decades and the decline of private-sector industrial
unions, professional Democrats — politicians, intellectuals like Robert &
Robert, campaign professionals, unions and satellite groups — have severed
their emotional and intellectual connection with private production.
Today, frontline Democrats see the private sector as doing two things: It
produces tax revenue for $3.9 trillion federal budgets, and it shafts
workers. The private sector in the Democratic worldview is necessary but
nasty. Their leadership gives the impression of not having the simplest
understanding of how an employer’s life unfolds day to day.
This week’s NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds President Obama with a
60% approval. That’s high alright, as in high anxiety: 44% say the nation is
“off on the wrong track,” 41% see it headed in the right direction, and 15%
of respondents are in a gray fog.
I have a poll question: Has anyone in America had a single upbeat
conversation about anything the past three weeks?
Beyond the stock market, there is a reason why, despite much goodwill toward
his presidency, the Obama response to the faltering economy has left many
feeling undone. There isn’t much in his plan to stir the national soul. It’s
about “sacrifice” now so that we can live for a future of small electric
cars and windmills. This may move the Democratic Party’s faith communities,
but it cannot revive a great nation. If the Democrats want to embrace market
failure as a basis for their ideology, let them have it. As politics, it’s a
downer.
What Ronald Reagan knew and they don’t is that what moves a nation is the
vital, teeming life of the private economy — work, ideas, innovation, the
excitement of production, getting bigger. Growth. In the past this world was
depicted as blast furnaces and factory chimneys. Today the economy’s sinews
are harder to see, but they exist in tens of thousands of small-cap, mid-cap
and fat-cap companies.
The Republicans — Romney, Huckabee, Jindal, Pawlenty, Sanford, Newt, Sarah
and several hundred 2010 congressional candidates — must rediscover a way
to talk about the living world of the real economy. Their vocabulary now
consists mainly of policy-wonk spinach — “fiscal responsibility,” “reduce
the debt,” and even “tax cuts.” True but insufficient.
What Rush Limbaugh was trying to tell that conservative audience in so many
words was, Don’t be embarrassed. Don’t be embarrassed about embracing the
world of free markets, competition, entrepreneurship and profit. If you
don’t know how to talk about it, reread the apostles and evangelists of
private economic growth — Ronald Reagan’s “A Life in Letters,” Milton
Friedman’s “Free to Choose,” Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson.”
Politics, it has been recently demonstrated, is about ideas and language.
The conservative movement is not at a loss for proven ideas, and in the U.S.
the most powerful of these — running in an upward line since the Industrial
Revolution — is the idea of private economic growth. The Democrats don’t
want the private economy anymore and conservatives have forgotten how to
talk about it. Democrats are betting their opponents will forget even where
Ronald Reagan is buried. They should be so lucky.
- Write to henninger@wsj.com
