The Way We Were

In his Washington Post column Robert Samuelson expresses a reaction to the Democratic presidential debates similar to mine:

Three issues bother me.

The first is this: The campaign’s attention is focused heavily — almost exclusively — on domestic problems and programs, but the most pressing issues that await the next president will probably involve foreign policy.

How are we to judge the competence and judgments of the rival candidates on matters with which they have little experience? Assuming for the moment that President Trump does not win reelection, how is his successor going to deal with China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and our estranged allies, as well as our trade and economic relations with them?

With the conspicuous exception of former vice president Joe Biden, none of the candidates has much international experience. To be fair, this is often the case, but the consequences today loom larger, precisely because the post-World War II framework has broken down. Its replacement needs to deal with the reality of a populist backlash — both in the United States and in other advanced societies — as well as the need to remain engaged globally. In a world shrunken by technology and trade, we do not have the luxury of neo-isolationism and neo-protectionism, even if Trump thinks we do.

An enomrous amount has changed over the last 25 years. Decades worth of globalization, military intervention, and nuclear proliferation mean that we no longer have the luxury of treating the rest of the world as though it did not exist. You would not have received that impression from the Democratic candidates. They seem to be running for Bill Clinton’s first term.

Second: A similar dilemma afflicts domestic policies. As a society, we have committed ourselves to more programs and subsidies than we can easily afford. Despite this, the candidates seem wedded to yet more expensive experiments in social policy.

Shortly before last week’s debates, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released the latest version of its annual long-term budget outlook. Even with the economy near “full employment,” the federal government runs massive annual budget deficits, meaning that we spend more than we tax. At the moment, those deficits equal about 4 percent of the economy (gross domestic product), or about $1 trillion annually. Under present tax and spending policies, deficits will grow for decades. The resulting debt — the accumulation of past annual deficits — is now about 78 percent of GDP, up from 35 percent of GDP in 2007.

If we cut military spending to zero, something manifestly impossible, it would still not be enough to fill the hole in our budget. We will be extending credit to ourselves for the foreseeable future and our ability to do that depends on the dollar’s remaining the world’s save haven currency, see the primacy of foreign relations, above.

Third: leadership. The power of the presidency, the late political scientist Richard Neustadt constantly argued, is the capacity to persuade — that is, to convince other people that what the president wants is what they ought to want for their own good and the nation’s good. Neustadt’s imperative applies to both individual power brokers and to mass constituencies of voters.

On this I’m willing to cut the candidates some slack. Presently, they’re preaching to the choir—they don’t need to convince the already convinced. They need to rev them up. The graver questions are whether any of them can be elected solely by revving up the base or whether they can appeal to the unconvinced while revving up the base. I don’t believe they can.

There was something deeply nostalgic about the debates. They are running for president of the United States they wish we had rather than the one we have. Democrats have dug a hole for themselves, shovelful by shovelful, for many years. My advice: stop digging.