Politics
The question has the standard answer -- the next political party willing to compete for his vote. The Tea Party movement is an attempt to get both of the main political parties to favor a small government agenda. It will likely get some explicit converts among the Republican Party or stand up its own candidates and make it more difficult for Republicans to get elected. In today's Washington Post, Philip Rucker reports from Raleigh on an analogous movement gaining traction in North Carolina:
A political rebellion is brewing inside an old funeral home near the state Capitol here. Frustrated liberals and labor organizers are taking aim at the Democratic Party, rushing to gather enough signatures to start a third party that they believe could help oust three Democratic congressmen.
Eleven months ago, I wrote a post with the same name as this one reflecting on why the Political Right's fortunes were sagging in the wake of Tedisco's win in the NY special election and Specter's defection. With health care reform now passed, I thought it worthwhile to revisit the idea I raised in the post:
[T]he Political Right has a problem in addressing policy issues in which people are fundamentally connected to each other. Leaving aside the recent challenges of the financial crisis, the big issues in domestic public policy are health care, education, and the environment. In each one, the choices that one group of people make affect the opportunities available to other people in a fundamental way -- beyond simply changing relative prices as people interact in free markets. The connections come in different ways for each of the issues, but they are always related to basic notions of fairness.
In health care, the connection comes through the formation of the insurance pool. In our current setup, the pooling occurs largely around employment, which advantages some and not others and can in extreme cases leave out the sickest entirely.
Earlier this month, Nancy Rosenblum, the Senator Joseph S. Clark Professor of Ethics in Government and Chair of the Department of Government at Harvard, visited the Rockefeller Center and delivered a public lecture on the moral distinctiveness of political party identity. She is both contrarian and clever in the way she takes apart self-styled "independents," who let their self-styled independence of thought remove any consequence they might have in electoral politics if they remain independent from their fellow voters. She makes the affirmative case for ambitious political parties as sources of morality in politics.
The video is definitely worth your time. For more, see her full explanation in On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship
A friend pointed me to this column by Peggy Noonan in last week's WSJ, "We're Governed by Callous Children." I think she is right in her main point about a disheartened leadership class in business and a mindless leadership class in government.
But she makes the same mistake that other Republican commentators make when they criticize our current leadership. Specifically, she does not come out forthrightly to identify the one characteristic that separates adults from children: children don't have to balance their budgets, but adults do. As much as she may admire Reagan, it was his administration that began our 30-year fascination with outsized deficits. (The deficit mentality nearly went away with Clinton but came back with a vengeance with his successor.)
