How Public Policy Became War by David Davenport & Gordon Lloyd

Author:David Davenport & Gordon Lloyd [Davenport, David & Lloyd, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, Executive Branch, American Government, General
ISBN: 9780817922641
Google: drbfwQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 43909094
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
Published: 2019-01-15T09:57:49+00:00

Hyperpartisanship and Gridlock

Grow Presidential Power and

Increase Domestic Warfare

We live in a time of hyperpartisanship and government gridlock, with the war metaphor increasingly ruling the day. Supreme Court nominations result in full-scale battles, with debates over whether to deploy “the nuclear option.” On seemingly every issue, battle lines are drawn and there is little or no deliberation. The most important legislation of the Obama years, the Affordable Care Act, was passed on a party-line vote, with no Republicans voting in favor, while the most important legislation of the Trump era thus far, tax reform, was passed on a straight party-line vote with no Democrats in favor. Bills are held in secret until fifty-one votes are available in the Senate, and then they are hurried onto the floor with little debate and few amendments.

This warlike atmosphere in domestic politics can be traced, in part, to the 2004 presidential election. Historically modern presidential campaigns had been a race to the center, with a bloc of Republican voters on the right and another bloc of Democrats on the left, and candidates seeking to reach the voters in the middle to win. Richard Nixon famously said he had to run to the right to win the Republican nomination and then to the center to win the election. But George W. Bush’s campaign adviser Karl Rove changed all that by designing a different way to win the presidency: turning out your base. By 2004, the number of independents in the center had dropped and it became possible to win by turning out your base. Appealing to your base can result in an ugly campaign, focusing on narrow issues that appeal to segments of voters and portraying your opponent as an awful enemy.

With Karl Rove in the White House as the director of political affairs, this same approach was used in governing. Rove’s idea was to build a new long-term Republican majority by playing to its base in government policy.55 Rather than pursuing bipartisan ideas such as No Child Left Behind in the first term, Rove saw an opportunity post-9/11 to build a conservative national security base, and began developing a set of conservative policy ideas to feed it, including faith-based initiatives, privatizing Social Security, and the like. Part of the strategy involved engaging the president in a continuous campaign of war, stirring up the base more than actually governing.56

Barack Obama famously ran against this sort of base-oriented view of politics and governing. In his campaign of 2008, he called for a politics of “hope and change.” Presenting himself as a “post-partisan” politician, Obama said he would turn the page on the “ugly partisanship” in Washington. As it turned out, however, partisanship grew during his presidency, with blue states becoming bluer and red states redder.57 The president proposed a bold agenda and Republicans in Congress resisted, leading to the passage of his signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, on a straight party-line vote of Democrats. Obama and Congress continued to frustrate one another until, early in his

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