For the first time in…well, forever, Fred Hiatt has written a column I largely agree with. Of course, I quibble with the false equivalency he levels at the Democrats, and I don’t think the Democrats are wrong to adopt a populist tone. But Hiatt is right about this:
There is widespread agreement that the pillars of past U.S. growth, such as cheap credit and taxpayer-subsidized housing, will have to be replaced. But by what? And how will the transformation take place? You might have hoped to hear such questions debated this year.
It’s not that President Obama, for one, hasn’t tried. For the past two years he has propounded, frequently and at length, a theory of the economic transformation America needs, built on the reform of health care, education and energy. He’s even told Americans they will have to “consume less and produce more,” as the Post’s Charles Lane noted earlier this year.
And he hasn’t stopped during the campaign. “This is what we stand for,” Obama told a town hall meeting last week. “Innovation, research and development, skilled workers, lifelong learning — all the things that are required to make sure that this is a competitive 21st-century America that is playing for number one on the global stage.”
But the vision hasn’t caught hold.
We should have seen a bunch of positive ads with windmills and optimism about a green-energy future with America pioneering the innovations of the 21st-Century. But what Hiatt is missing is that Democrats are being deluged by undisclosed sources of corporate money made legal by the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court ruling.
At this point in 2006 (the last midterm), the Democratic and Republican party committees accounted for 82 percent of all outside spending on express advocacy. Outside groups accounted for only 18 percent. Fast forward to 2010, the numbers have flipped dramatically. As of the end of last week, outside groups have spent more money on independent expenditures than have the party committees — 59 percent to 41 percent.
It’s indisputable that the Republican Party is the party of Wall Street and that they are the overwhelming beneficiaries of this undisclosed largesse. Maybe Hiatt would like to see the Democrats just roll over and take it, but it seems to me like a better route is to offer the voters a choice. Fighting back against the offshoring of jobs, fighting back against fraud in the mortgage industry, fighting back against unaccountable campaign contributions…all of this is smart and just. So, yes, the positive vision gets lost in the process, but it’s hard to stay positive when your opponent is benefitting from millions of dollars of corporate money that is being used to call you ‘the taxman’ or a ‘Marxist.’
Meanwhile, even Hiatt knows that it isn’t just O’Donnell who is nuts. Maybe he ought to pick a side.
