As the first anniversary of 9/11 approaches, it's increasingly clear that the United States needs a vigorous Democratic Party to complement and counter a confused and compromised Bush administration and a hapless, interest-group-driven GOP on a wide array of foreign and domestic issues.
At one of those rare moments when public responsibility and political opportunity almost perfectly converge, Democrats can do themselves and their country an enormous service if they are willing to stand proudly for leadership in the national interest.
There is unmistakably a "leadership gap" in Washington waiting to be filled.
The administration's one great success in the fight against terrorism, the military campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, is beginning to look like an exception to a general rule of uncertainty and drift.
In the wider war against terrorism, the administration's policies are often at cross-purposes with the president's ringing rhetoric about a global struggle for democracy, human rights, and prosperity. Its foreign policies combine unilateralist contempt for our democratic allies with a dangerous reliance on Middle Eastern autocrats. Both mistakes reflect an atavistic domestic agenda on energy and the environment that makes Middle Eastern oil suppliers our indispensable friends and environment-conscious Europeans our disposable enemies.
The administration's record on homeland security has been and continues to be, as one security expert recently told The Washington Post, "a fiasco." After nine months of opposition, the president abruptly went on national television and endorsed a Democratic plan to create a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. But the administration continues to accept confusion and dysfunction in such critical areas as domestic intelligence-gathering and coordination of state and local government first responders. Indeed, the president still opposes the McCain-Lieberman proposal for a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate intelligence failures prior to 9/11.
Nor has the administration overcome its ideologically driven hostility to the idea of providing assistance to cash-strapped state and local law enforcement agencies, despite the availability of new technologies that could help not only deal with terrorist acts but reduce violent crime.
The president's economic record is an even bigger mess, guided by the most intellectually barren and market-insensitive policies since the Hoover administration.
While the fundamentals of the U.S. economy remain stubbornly strong, the administration is steadily undermining the 1990s policies that made it strong: fiscal discipline, open markets, technology and innovation, and investment in the knowledge and skills of the American people. Rather than continuing these successes, the administration is promoting huge long-term structural budget deficits that drain capital and sap confidence; imposing a broad array of new protectionist measures that cause market-closing foreign retaliation; refusing to deal with a host of issues affecting technology and innovation, from basic research to broadband development; and fighting against new investments to fund its own education reform initiative, along with other critical knowledge and skills needs.
The administration's only economic policy proposal has been a continuous and relentless effort to reduce taxes on the highest-earning Americans, whatever the cost and whatever the evidence that it is not working to help the economy as a whole.
While the president and his advisers have never come quite out and endorsed the hoary and discredited supply-side theory that marginal tax rates on high incomes is the philosopher's stone for creating economic growth, it's the only logical basis for their economic and fiscal policies. And if the failure of supply-side policies in the 1980s was not sufficient to bury this snake-oil theory forever, the current record definitely should. One year after Congress approved the supply-side Bush tax cuts that were supposed to produce an investors' paradise of new capital investments, the U.S. economy is undergoing a capital flight -- a crisis of investor confidence in our economic management that has, so far, drained an estimated $2 trillion from equity markets, with a devastating effect on the financial and retirement security of millions of Americans, not to mention the ability of our companies to invest in new technologies and other productivity-enhancing measures.
Aside from the return of fiscal red ink and the insecurity associated with an uncertain fight against terrorism, this crisis of investor confidence is attributable to a corporate crime wave that the Bush administration is uniquely ill-equipped to police. The president's occasional speeches on the subject are similar to his occasional speeches on the wider war against terrorism: fine rhetoric disconnected from policies that run in very different directions. From its relentless drive for high-income tax favors and corporate protectionist concessions, to its support for corporate assaults on environmental regulations, campaign finance reforms, and the accounting reforms designed to stem the corporate crime wave -- this administration, in its personnel, its ideology, and its policies, has largely abandoned the entrepreneurial capitalism that helped America boom in the 1990s in favor of a crony-capitalism that threatens economic growth today.
The Bush administration's failure of leadership goes well beyond its core foreign and economic policies. As noted above, its tax-cut-driven fiscal policies have led it to seek to sabotage the president's one significant domestic achievement, K-12 education reform. The same fiscal dynamics may soon lead the president to veto legislation extending the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation, on the grounds that the federal government cannot afford the paltry sums necessary to give welfare recipients the child care and job support necessary to move millions of Americans into the mainstream private-sector economy. The administration's energy and environmental policies, as also noted above, are a domestic and international joke, based on the conservative fantasy of achieving energy independence through domestic oil production and the conservative denial of global climate change.
Despite rising numbers of uninsured people and rapidly rising health care costs, the administration has nothing to say on health care other than occasionally endorsing insincere congressional Republican measures to neutralize Democratic proposals on prescription drug benefits or HMO regulation. And despite his theoretical support for Social Security reform, the president, whose tax policies have drained the budget surpluses that might help finance either a continuation of current benefits or a reform initiative, has fallen silent on this issue as well.
The bottom line is that there are a host of issues on which Democrats can properly take issue with the Bush administration and the Republican Party without sliding back into the pre-Clinton stereotype of weakness on foreign policy, defense, security, fiscal discipline, or management of the economy. State-level Democrats are already successfully challenging Republicans across the country for the same blind and narrow policies championed by the president and congressional Republicans: fiscal indiscipline; a tax-cutting mania; corporate welfare; insufficient support for welfare reform, education and workforce development; inadequate access to quality health care; indifference to the environment, quality-of-life issues, road congestion and energy conservation; and shortsighted policies on crime and homeland security.
New Democrats should take the lead in advancing a national leadership agenda that includes security, opportunity, responsibility, and reform.
New Democrats should champion a security agenda that includes an aggressive pursuit of the wider war against terrorism, including multilateral efforts to promote democracy, tolerance, and economic growth in the Islamic world. They should also push for a truly comprehensive homeland security strategy that includes a new domestic intelligence agency and a coordinated state and local law enforcement initiative employing the best and latest technologies for fighting terrorism and rising violent crime.
New Democrats should champion an economic growth and opportunity agenda based on the successful strategies of the 1990s: fiscal discipline, open trade, support for innovation and new technologies, and investment in better education and skills.
That agenda should also focus on continuing and intensifying the great social accomplishments of the 1990s: reductions in welfare dependency, teen pregnancy, and crime and increases in real incomes, employment, homeownership, and business ownership.
And most important, New Democrats should champion a responsibility and reform agenda that restores confidence in the public and private sectors alike -- from setting high standards and insisting that the corporate world play by the rules, to modernizing big public systems like Social Security and Medicare, to making sure Washington lives within its means and sets a good example.
If New Democrats do nothing more than create the political pressure for the Bush administration to continue purloining our proposals -- as the administration has already done in education reform, national service, welfare reform, and reorganization of homeland security agencies -- we will have served our country well. But New Democrats have the opportunity to lead the Democratic Party in a direction that will differentiate the two parties on a broad array of issues and re-establish Democratic strength on those very issues where Republicans now enjoy an undeserved advantage.
It's a matter of leadership, and New Democrats can once again show that good government is the best politics. To paraphrase George W. Bush's own litany in his 2000 speech accepting the Republican nomination for president: "They haven't led." But New Democrats can and should.
