Most of the campaign for the presidency seems like a
schoolyard brawl with lots of name calling and taunting and dares. Nobody seems to have an idea any better than
to accuse his opponent of idiocy or criminal activity or intent to destroy America . And Congress joins the battle with gusto, pushing and shoving and whining like sixth
graders. And the media cheer and
encourage, always looking for some sensational accusation to publish or
announce. And, in the meantime,
significant portions of the populace think President Obama is not a citizen,
cannot say who the Vice President is, or have never heard of Mitt Romney. And all this amid campaigns to get everybody to vote. We don’t need anybody to destroy America . We are doing it ourselves.
The political game has always been rough, but there have
been rules and there have been positive messages and plans and proposals and
ideas. Here are some data that may
explain the widening gap between left and right, disappearance of the political
middle, and the increasingly toxic political environment. Click on the chart for a higher resolution view. (Note: A friend just pointed out an error in the original chart. Republicans controlled the Senate 1981-1987 during the Reagan administration. I had the numbers transposed. Corrected graph below.)
From 1960 until 1995 Democrats were in control of both
houses of congress (Correction: except for the Senate during six years of the Reagan administration), holding about 60% of the seats vs. 40% for the
Republicans. In that environment,
partisanship was muted because it was not necessary for the Democrats to all
stick together in order to pass legislation and there was no need for
Republicans to stick together. There
were conservative Democrats interested in fiscal responsibility and liberal
Republicans focused on social issues.
But that all changed in the 1994 mid-term elections after which, for 12
years, Republicans had a slight edge, and party solidarity became the prime
concern. Reaching across the aisle was
immediately classified as politically incorrect.
For the first six of those years, Democrat President Clinton
and the Republican Congress cooperated with the growing tax revenues resulting
from the false prosperity of the dot com boom to generate budget surpluses and
begin reducing a national debt that, compared to the economic mess we now have,
seems trivial. During the last six of
those years, Republican President Bush and the Republican Congress began
rebuilding the deficit with tax cuts, unfunded wars, and an expensive Medicare
prescription drug plan. Their folly was
muted by the growing tax revenues resulting from the real estate bubble, but
that came to an end along with President Bush’s second term.
The 2008 elections, in the midst of the financial crisis,
swept in President Obama with comfortable Democrat majorities in both houses
and allowed the trio of Obama-Reid-Pelosi to ram through an undefined and open
ended Affordable Care Act with zero support from Republicans. And the animosity index soared. The expected reaction, a major swing back in
the Republican direction, occurred in the 2010 mid-term elections with
Republicans regaining their majority in the House but falling slightly short in
the Senate. And, as we approach the
November 2012 elections, ego protection and defense trump the national interest
in every case.
If you come up with a solution to this mess, let me know. But in the meantime, let’s try to
resist blaming all our problems on the recent strength of the Republican
Party. The seeds of all our economic
difficulties, establishment and expansion of unfunded liabilities in the form of social entitlements, were sown in the fifty years 1935 to 1985, usually with bipartisan
support and with both Democrat and Republican presidents. And now we are reaping what has been sown.
So, just the fact that Congress was better behaved in earlier decades doesn't mean it was doing a better job.
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