http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/democrats-double-down_821211.htmlThe Democrats Double Down
Will Republicans seize the opportunity?
Stephen Moore
December 22, 2014, Vol. 20, No. 15
Right after Democrats got routed in the midterm election, the left-wing group MoveOn.org blasted their activists with a message not to panic. Party leaders should, in fact, “double down on progressive policies.”
This is the kind of advice you would expect from a gang of young ideological activists, but what is amazing is that Barack Obama and the Democrats have followed it. On immigration, energy, climate change, regulatory overreach—Obama issued 3,000 new rules before Thanksgiving—the Democrats have pretended that the election didn’t happen.
Obama’s immediate response to middle- and working-class economic anxiety was a new global warming deal with China and a call to close down coal-burning power plants, both of which will destroy even more jobs. The White House followed up with a new program centered on “gender equity” in the workforce.
Democratic approval ratings have gotten even worse in the month since the blowout election. Some Democrats, like New York’s Chuck Schumer and retiring senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, have rung the alarm that the party is out of sync with working-class voters. But they’re lonely voices. The party’s New Democrat Clinton wing—Bill Clinton, that is—is extinct.
The left is flummoxed that their progressive economic message has fallen so flat. After the election, the seven-figure-and-up donors gathered with Democratic leaders to assess what went wrong. “Many Democratic patrons and party strategists concluded that the White House did not offer a compelling argument about how much has improved on President Obama’s watch and how people’s lives would benefit if congression-al Democrats held their seats, the Washington Post reported. “There’s a strong sense that we weren’t full-throated enough about jobs and economy—both in talking about accomplishments and what we need to do,” one attendee said. “We needed a broader narrative.”
It’s not at all clear what this broader narrative might be. Some liberals have argued that the president and congressional Democrats should be taking more credit for this recovery, which is clearly picking up and creating more jobs. Paul Krugman wrote in Rolling Stone (and we’ve discovered how accurate that magazine is) that Barack Obama should be heralded as an economic savior. Yet even with the recent improvement, the dramatic underperformance of the economy of the last five and a half years is just too pronounced for all but the most ardent of “hope and change” true believers. Even Democrats are undermining the recovery narrative: Heir apparent Hillary Clinton has been telling people around the country the middle class is getting squeezed and the poor are getting poorer—under Obama.
Meanwhile, liberals have been grousing that Republicans won by stealing from the left’s populist playbook and emphasizing issues like reducing poverty, rewarding work, making health care affordable, and increasing working wages. How can this be? Can voters be so “stupid”—to borrow a Gruberism—that they don’t understand Republicans only care about rich people?
But on issue after issue, that isn’t how working-class voters see things. Take, for example, the Democrats’ continuing and lunatic opposition to the Keystone pipeline. Why would a party that allegedly cares about blue-collar unions kill a project that would create 10,000 jobs for their members? Keystone symbolizes why blue-collar Reagan Democrats have started abandoning the party. The working class wants jobs and high incomes—how many times do they have to say this to pollsters? Billionaire Democratic funder Tom Steyer wants a green agenda that would block any and all energy projects and the $60-, $80-, and $100K-a-year jobs that go with them.
Another example: In the weeks before the election, Barack Obama ran around the country and the world declaring that climate change is the biggest problem facing the nation and the planet. According to almost every recent poll, only about 3 percent of voters agree. Most voters say they are concerned about climate change, but it ranks at the very, very bottom of their concerns.
The slightly deranged climate change obsession on the left is a weighty albatross around the neck of Democrats when the number-one story of economic revival is massive increases in fossil fuel production, falling gas prices at the pump, and major oil and gas job gains all over the country. Without this technology-driven drilling explosion, there are almost no net job gains over the last six years. Democrats want to grind it to a halt and still pretend they are the party of the working class. The idea that we’re somehow going to power an $18 trillion industrial economy with windmills is absurd to all but climate change professionals and seven-figure Sierra Club donors whose lives won’t be disrupted by higher home heating costs. The new coal plant emission standards will raise working- and middle-class utility bills by 35 percent or more.
If the Democrats weren’t so tethered to the radical green left, they would have taken credit for the shale oil and gas boom rather than denouncing fracking and other smart drilling technologies that have made it all possible. After all, this energy revolution has happened on Obama’s watch. And instead of bemoaning lower gas prices as a disaster for the environment, as many green commentators have been doing recently, Democrats could be celebrating the benefits to the middle class. Privately, Democrats that I talk to whisper the obvious point that the party has found itself on the wrong side of the energy issue. But they’re trapped by activists and donors who sound like members of Earth First.
Or take the Democrats’ standard retort to the problem of falling real wages: Raise the minimum wage. It’s true that raising the minimum wage is popular with voters and most ballot measures to hike the wage passed. But few in the middle class see raising the minimum wage as helpful to them personally. They are right to be skeptical, because 95 percent of workers are earning above minimum wage already. (Republicans should get smart and negate some of the harm with a $6 or $7 teen minimum wage, which voters would like.)
President Obama boasted on the eve of the election that almost every economic statistic shows improvement under his presidency. That spin fell flat with voters because of the statistic they care most about: real take-home pay. Median incomes during the recovery have fallen by about $1,600 a year, according to Census Bureau data.
There’s a stark contrast between the Reagan and Obama recoveries. Under Reagan, the economy grew at just under 4 percent over the first five and a half years of recovery. Under Obama, the recovery has been right at 2 percent. This means we would have $2 trillion more in annual output and incomes if the economy had grown as fast from 2009 to 2014 as it did in the Reagan boom years. We would have 3 million more jobs if employment had grown at the Reagan pace. This growth deficit is what frustrates voters and makes a mockery of Krugman’s claim that Obama is an economic wonderboy.
So what does the left now propose to jumpstart growth? “The moral to me is that we need a bigger, more ambitious economic plan than just raising the minimum wage,” David desJardins, a left-wing San Francisco-based investor and major Democratic donor, said after the election.
Wait—more ambitious? Under Obama’s leadership, Democrats have raised the minimum wage, bailed out the auto companies, spent $830 billion on a Keynesian stimulus plan, wildly cheered while the Fed printed $3.5 trillion of debt, borrowed $7 trillion in six years, passed the big lies of Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, and raised tax rates by $1 trillion over
10 years on the rich. In the wake of all that, the working class lost ground.
That is why working-class voters in November crossed the aisle to join Republicans and shouted a simple message to Democrats: “Stop.” The Democrats don’t need a more ambitious agenda; they need an entirely new one that puts working-class families—headed by welders, teamsters, electricians, pipefitters, construction workers, machinists—ahead of billionaire funders like Tom Steyer. If they won’t do that, Republicans should welcome these voters—often union members—into the GOP with open arms.
