GEORGE BUSH has opened up a startling 8 point lead over Al Gore, according to the latest Los Angeles Times poll, and the conventional view is that he’s built this post-primary advantage by moving to the center. But that’s not quite right. Over the past month Bush has moved to the center and the right simultaneously. He could turn out to be the first conservative in the world to find a way to counter the mushy Third Way style of politics created by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
That Third Way style of politics vows to move beyond the “false choices” of left and right. But what the Third Wayers mostly do is propose a hodgepodge of modest programs some of which seem vaguely conservative and some of which seem vaguely liberal. They seem to offer the best of both worlds — free market prosperity with dirigiste compassion. Nobody can argue with this model’s political success. Third Way types lead virtually every nation from here to Vladivostok.
The Bush campaign has learned the essential lesson of the Third Way — that we are no longer in an age when the central debate is between those who love government and those who hate it. These days unreconstructed liberals and unreconstructed conservatives do not win presidencies. Instead, the real debate is over how to mix limited government activism with fiscal conservatism. How do you concoct the stew?
Over the past few weeks, the Bush campaign has not been shy about proposing an activist agenda. Bush has proposed a $ 3.6 billion program for new health care clinics, a $ 2 billion program to clean up brownfield sites, a $ 35 billion plan to help families purchase health insurance, a $ 5 billion plan to address illiteracy, a $ 1.7 billion plan to encourage developers to rehab housing, a $ 500 million grant plan to improve Latino health, and so on and so on. Some of the programs include federal grants. The total cost so far approaches $ 60 billion over five years.
That croaking sound you hear is the death of the flat tax. Based on the idea that government should get out of the way so people can make their own decisions about earning and spending, the flat tax is off the Republican radar screen. Bush’s approach has caused some free marketeers to blanch. But most conservatives are going along giddily. “I think Bush is talking the way Republicans should have been talking for the last 40 years,” leading conservative activist Grover Norquist told the Times-Picayune last month.
There are two reasons for conservative enthusiasm. First, it is working politically. Not only is Bush opening up a lead in the national polls, but his standing on specific issues like education and health care is way above that of other, less activist Republicans.
But more important, Bush’s activism on these other domestic issues builds credibility for him when it comes to taking on a big-ticket item like Social Security. Nobody can accuse Bush of being dogmatically hostile to government, so he will not scare voters when he moves to reform a beloved entitlement like Social Security.
Bush has been slowly unveiling the outlines of what could be a historic reform of the Social Security system. He’s not going to provide nitty-gritty details, but it’ll be the standard reform model that conservatives, and many centrist Democrats, have been advocating for the past several years.
Democrats have always been able to demagogue this sort of reform package to death. And even today, it is extraordinarily hard to tell how this issue will play out in the fall. The polls are utterly confusing. If you ask people in theory whether individuals should be allowed to invest part of their retirement in private accounts, they overwhelmingly agree (by about 58 percent to 33 percent in a recent Princeton Survey Research poll, for example). But if you ask them about specific plans put forward by specific politicians, suddenly they — or at least the people who have the loudest voices on this issue — squawk. Both Bush and McCain backed off their reform goals during the primary season and fell back on the standard rhetoric: their desire to “preserve and protect” the system.
Republicans are perpetually hopeful that the electorate is moving in their direction. After all, the New Deal generation, which doesn’t want Social Security changed, is dying off, while the investor class, which should be comfortable with individual accounts, is growing by leaps and bounds. And if there has ever been a time to be hopeful, it is now. That’s because Bush has more credibility on this issue, in large part because of his activism on other issues.
As usual, Gore is all set to wave the bloody shirt. He’s already charged that Bush has a “secret plan” to privatize the system. But what is striking is the way this issue is drawing Gore away from the center. He started as a Democratic Leadership Council Democrat. The DLC strongly favors Social Security reform. In fact, if you take the Bush domestic agenda, with the large exception of the tax cuts, it resembles the DLC blueprint — tax credits, targeted spending programs, entitlement reform. This resemblance has not been lost on DLC leaders.
But Gore has abandoned that model. If Bush stays aggressive on Social Security and other issues, Gore will attack, inevitably moving himself further and further away from the Third Way/DLC approach that has been winning elections for Democrats. That could produce another President Bush and a historic reform of Social Security. That in turn could have a cascade effect, further boosting future Republican fortunes. For as James Glassman and Kevin Hassett point out in their book, Dow 36,000, investors are more likely to vote Republican than non-investors. Even in the same income bracket, people with money in the financial markets are far more likely to vote Republican than people without.
That’s why, for all the concern about education and health care and judges and China, the most important issue in this election is Social Security.
David Brooks, a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (Simon & Schuster).
