The Economist
The president chooses his ground
Barack Obama offers America a new square deal
EVERY time a president seeks re-election, it is something of a parlour game in Washington, DC, to ask which of his predecessors’ campaigns he will take as a template. Will Barack Obama attempt to persuade voters, as Ronald Reagan did in 1984, that the darkness of recession was giving way to “morning in America”? The enduring listlessness of the economy makes that a tricky sell. Could he perhaps emulate Harry Truman’s successful tirade of 1948 against the “do-nothing Congress”? Mr Obama is better at warming cockles than thumping tubs, and in any case control of Congress is divided, making Democrats as responsible for its ineffectiveness as Republicans are. This week Mr Obama put an end to the debate by publicly invoking a different role model: Teddy Roosevelt.
On December 6th Mr Obama travelled to Osawatomie, a small town in Kansas where Roosevelt gave a celebrated speech in 1910, laying out the platform that he would eventually adopt as a third-party candidate for president two years later. Before a crowd of 30,000 he elaborated on his longstanding theme of a “square deal” for working Americans—a concept that had made him wildly popular during his nearly two terms in office. America’s economy and political system were biased towards the rich, the former president complained; he promised to give the little guy a fair shake.
In a speech to a more modest crowd in the local high school, Mr Obama said much the same. Getting into the middle class and staying there has been growing ever harder in recent years, he lamented, and yet the rich have got ever richer. The solution, he maintained, is higher taxes on the wealthy to fund more investment in education and infrastructure while keeping America’s debt in check. The alternative, he said, was a “you’re on your own” economy, marked by falling wages, rising pollution and emasculated unions.
Mr Obama was at pains to make clear that he had no wish to punish success or suggest that government had the solution to every problem. “This isn’t about class warfare,” he said at one point. “This is about the nation’s welfare.” The word “fair” cropped up again and again: the rich should pay their “fair share” of taxes; poorer Americans should get a “fair shot” at success; it was “the height of unfairness” that billionaires should pay a lower effective tax rate than middle-class folk.
All this is quite clever. By invoking a Republican president, Mr Obama can and did claim to be rising above partisan politics. He also shifts attention from his personal stewardship of the economy, which Americans consider inept, to the broader and more abstract question of inequality, where Democrats should be on firmer ground. In essence, he is attempting to direct the widespread sense that America has lost its way—something that would normally count against him—into exasperation with the Republicans.
But Mr Obama must walk a fine line. As Chuck Schumer, a Democratic senator, noted earlier this month, Americans are put off by anything that smacks of soaking the rich, but are attracted to the notion of fairness. (Roosevelt, it should be noted, lost the election following his Osawatomie speech, dividing his party and leaving it in the political wilderness.) The Democrats in the Senate have for months suggested paying for a series of worthy-sounding schemes—most recently an extension and expansion of a soon-to-expire reduction in payroll taxes—by raising tax rates for millionaires. These proposals, all so far stymied by Republican opposition, are intended to show that Republicans, when forced to choose between the interests of the middle class and those of the rich, will abandon the struggling mass of Americans without a second thought.
Most polls suggest that voters agree with Mr Obama and the Democrats in principle. Our own Economist/YouGov poll finds that a majority of Americans would like to see the payroll-tax cut extended, for example, and two-thirds of those think a surtax on millionaires is the best way to pay for it.
Yet Mr Obama has been harping on about raising taxes on the rich since his first election campaign. The Republicans do not seem to have paid an electoral price for dismissing the idea as class warfare and preventing its implementation in Congress. Indeed, Democrats in swing states have often voted with them when the idea has been put to the test, for fear of being labelled tax-and-spend liberals.
Mr Obama seems to be hoping that his Republican opponents, many of whom have put forward proposals for regressive flat taxes, for example, will take their coddling of the rich too far for most voters’ tastes. That case will be harder to make if Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, wins the nomination. He has the least doctrinaire tax plan in the Republican field, complete with tax breaks exclusively for middle-income groups.
In our latest poll, however, Mr Romney has seen his support among likely primary voters decline to 15%, less than half the level of Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives who appears to be benefiting from the “suspension” of the campaign of Herman Cain, a candidate dogged by multiple accusations of sexual impropriety. Mr Gingrich supports a flat tax and has denounced Mr Romney’s plan as Obama-style class warfare. That presents Mr Obama with a bigger target. He told the crowd at Osawatomie that the debate about inequality “is the defining issue of our time”, meaning that he would like it to be the defining issue of the presidential campaign.
http://www.economist.com/node/21541407
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