The presidential race one year out: America’s missing middle | The Economist

The presidential race one year out

America’s missing middle

The coming presidential election badly needs a shot of centrist pragmatism

Nov 5th 2011 | from the print edition

IT IS a year until Americans go to the polls, on November 6th 2012, to decide whether Barack Obama deserves another term. In January the Republicans start voting in their primaries, with the favourite, Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, facing fading competition from Herman Cain, a pizza tycoon, and Rick Perry, the governor of Texas. Already American politics has succumbed to election paralysis, with neither party interested in bipartisan solutions.

This would be a problem at the best of times; and these times are very far from that. Strikingly, by about three to one, Americans feel their country is on the wrong track. America’s sovereign debt has been downgraded. Unemployment remains stubbornly above 9%, with the long-term unemployed making up the largest proportion of the jobless since records began in 1948. As the superpower’s clout seems to ebb towards Asia, the world’s most consistently inventive and optimistic country has lost its mojo.

Some of this distress was inevitable. Whatever the country’s leaders did in Washington, the credit crunch was always going to cause a lot of suffering. Rising inequality, unfunded pensions and bad schools are not new problems. But politics, far from offering a remedy, is now adding to the national angst. Eight out of ten Americans mistrust their government. There is a sense that their political system, like their economy, has been skewed to favour the few, not the many.

The European Union may seem the epitome of political dysfunction, but America has been running it close. All this year the deadlock between the Republicans in Congress and Mr Obama has meant that precious little serious legislation has been passed. The president’s jobs bill is stuck; the House of Representatives’ budget plans have been scuppered by the Democrat-controlled Senate. At the end of this year temporary tax cuts and other measures, worth around 2% of GDP, are set to expire—which could push America back into recession.

Surrender to extremists

On the face of it, neither side has gained from this stand-off. Only 45% of Americans approve of Mr Obama’s performance. The approval rating for Congress dropped to 9% in one recent poll. A plurality of Americans call themselves independents, and on the most divisive economic argument—how to solve the budget mess—two in three of them back a combination of spending cuts and tax rises. But politics is being driven by extremists who reject any such compromise (see article).

The right is mostly to blame. Ronald Reagan, a divorcee who did little for the pro-life lobby and raised taxes when he had to, would never be nominated today. Mr Romney, like all the Republican presidential candidates, recently pledged to reject tax rises, even as part of a deal where spending cuts would be ten times bigger. Mr Cain surged briefly to the front of the pack because of a plan that would cut personal taxes to 9% (seeLexington); Mr Perry lost support for wanting to educate the children of illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, in Congress, the few remaining pragmatic Republican centrists, like Senator Richard Lugar, are being hunted down by tea-party activists.

Mr Obama has tried harder to compromise. But he foolishly failed to embrace a long-term budget solution put forward by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission, which he himself appointed. Ever since the furore over the debt ceiling this summer, he has “pivoted” to the left, dabbling in class war, promising his supporters that the budget can be solved by taxing “millionaires and billionaires”. He is also trying to issue more executive orders, to bypass Congress (see article).

The divisiveness is hardly new, but it is increasingly structural. As the battle for billions of campaign dollars heats up, neither side dares grant the other any modicum of success, or risk the ire of its donors by appearing to compromise. Gerrymandered districts mean that most congressmen fear their partisans in the primaries more than their opponents in the general election. Ever more divisive media feed the activists’ prejudices. So, at worst, a bitter contest could merely reinforce the gridlock, with a re-elected, more leftish Comrade Obama pitted against a still more intransigent Republican Congress.

Wishing on a star

In other countries such a huge gap in the middle would see the creation of a third party to represent the alienated majority. Imagine a presidential candidate next year who spelled out the need for deep future cuts in spending on entitlements and defence, as well as the need to raise some revenue (largely by getting rid of deductions); who explained that the pain would be applied only after the recovery was solidly in place; who avoided class or culture wars; who discussed school reform without fear of the Democrats’ paymasters in the teachers’ unions. Better still, imagine a new centrist block in Congress, which might give that candidate (or for that matter a President Obama or Romney) something to work with in 2013.

And so the fantasy continues, for that is sadly what it is. Even if the money were forthcoming, there are all sorts of institutional barriers, especially to starting new parties, and the record of even very well-heeled third-party presidential candidates is bleak. Instead, the middle will have to be recreated from what is already there.

The immediate, rather slim, chance is of a grand bargain on the budget emerging out of a congressional “supercommittee” set up after the debt-ceiling fiasco. If it were to embrace a centrist option, politics over the next year would be considerably more civilised. But it too appears deadlocked, with the Republicans once again ruling out tax increases of any kind.

So, back to the campaign. It is not entirely without hope. You can win the White House only by winning that disenfranchised middle. For Mr Romney and his party the danger is clear: the Republicans’ intolerant obstructionism could drive independents away. But Mr Obama also has a lot to prove. Why re-elect a man who has failed to unite Americans? Now should surely be the time for the president to seize the centre ground. Otherwise, in a year’s time he may well see his own name added to the rolls of those who have lost their job.

The presidential race one year out: America’s missing middle | The Economist