Campaign coverage is often criticized for focusing too much on personality and silly controversies, and not enough on policy. Though I am sympathetic to this view point, I also believe that policy reporters need to adjust to political reality by spending less time dissecting the nuances of campaign policy proposals that have no chance of becoming law and instead spend more time on potential executive actions.
In my latest column, I argue that none of the leading Democratic candidates have offered a realistic explanation of how any of their policies can get through a closely divided Senate, even as they propose sweeping plans to transform the United States.
Campaign season can of course be great fun for policy reporters as they watch candidates and their advisers come up with various ideas to address issues they’re writing out every day. And teasing out how radical or incremental candidates want to go in their policies also provides some insight into their underlying political philosophy and the approach they may consider as president.
But after a certain point, do the nuances of small policy differences matter if everybody intellectually honest knows that the next president will not be able to pass major legislation that comes close to say, “Medicare for all?”
More realistically, the next president’s ambitions are going to be significantly curtailed by the realities of getting anything through Congress when the opposition party has every motive to obstruct. And as a result, much of the policy is going to be pursued through executive action.
So, while it is of course quite necessary to dig through candidate policy proposals, it seems that campaign and policy reporters could be spending a lot more time asking candidates what they believe they would be willing and able to do through executive actions, and speaking to lawyers about how likely it is that such actions would survive court challenges.
For much of the past two administrations (since 2011) we’ve seen policy on immigration, healthcare, environmental issues, and all sorts of other areas being conducted primarily by executive actions and through the regulatory process. Very little has come on the legislative front. Political reporters note this regularly, but campaign coverage has not recalibrated in the face of this reality.
In 2016, reporters spent a lot of time pointing out what everybody widely knew, that Mexico was never going to pay for President Trump’s border wall. There was much less focus on the possible ways he could have tried to get a wall built without Mexican or congressional funding, which may have led to a debate during the election about the potential for him to use an emergency declaration.
So, by placing more emphasis on potential executive actions, those covering the campaign can provide readers and viewers with a more realistic picture of what a given candidate’s presidency would actually be like than when they focus almost exclusively on that candidate’s wish list of policy proposals.
