Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage (28 page)

When I asked these groups to support higher taxes (or a more reasonably sized military), I usually received one of two responses. The groups that proudly saw themselves as apolitical maintained that they could not threaten their group’s solidarity by espousing such controversial causes. The more consciously ideological groups, which knew they had ideological opponents, told me that they were focused on their own—undeniably worthy—issue. They could not rally their like-minded members to push for more general increases in funding without assurances that they would get a large share of it—assurances that I was unable to give.

I had occasional successes—as when the Massachusetts Hospital Association voted to support higher taxes without the unachievable commitment that much of the new money would go into Medicare and Medicaid. More often I was met with stark disappointment, usually politely expressed, that I was complicating the conversation.

The leaders of the left also frustrate their own ambitions when they advance the self-fulfilling prophecy that our political process is so corrupted by the influence of wealth that the people’s voice will never be heard. To be sure, this view would be easier to refute if it were less true. From the standpoint of democratic theory, money has had undue weight in our political system since the nineteenth century.

Representative government in a capitalist society involves the coexistence of two systems—an economic one, in which a person’s influence necessarily increases with his or her wealth, and a political one, in which every citizen is supposed to have an equal say. If the mechanisms of the free market are going to work, that is, if they are going to increase productivity through incentives and allocate resources efficiently, money must drive decisions. For democracy to fulfill its moral promise, everyone’s vote should have the same weight in making the rules by which we govern ourselves.

To the extent that money is allowed to buy political influence, the inequality principle dilutes the equality principle. Some of this is, of course, inevitable—the two systems can never be hermetically sealed from each other. And the very strong protections for freedom of expression that are fortunately embodied in our Constitution make it harder to restrict money’s influence in the United States than in most other Western countries. When I was in France in the days leading up to the reelection of Fran
ç
ois Mitterrand, I was struck by the complete absence of campaigning on the day before the election—as was mandated by French law.

Especially after the Watergate scandals, our electoral rules sought to preserve some balance between the moral demands of democracy and the Constitution’s prohibition of the tight controls imposed in other countries. But then came today’s five-member activist right-wing Supreme Court majority, which has ruled against any significant effort to protect the equality principle from money.

I agree with those who regard the Court’s campaign finance decisions as among its worst in recent years. I agree that we should do everything possible to overturn them, and until we can accomplish that, we should limit their impact to the extent possible—for example, by holding political donations to higher standards of transparency. And I agree that the decisions’ impact is wholly negative, tilting the scales of democracy heavily in favor of the wealthy.

But I strongly disagree that this impact is so great that it renders other forms of political activity useless. I deplore the extent to which many of my allies on the left preach this to people who should be hearing the opposite message—namely, that as influential as money has become, it can be countered by the effective mobilization of public opinion. I will provide some evidence for this claim when I discuss the passage of the financial reform bill (which I will not hereafter be calling Dodd-Frank, because the only person I have ever heard refer to himself in the third person without sounding both silly and pompous was Charles de Gaulle).

The claim that big money is politically invincible is especially self-defeating with regard to voter participation. It is now a truism that a critical factor in deciding whether the left or the right will do better on Election Day is turnout. Telling lower-income people and other supporters of liberal policy changes that their votes won’t matter because big money has rigged the outcome is not as effective a means of voter suppression as the right wing’s adoption of formal barriers to voting, but it does contribute to the same result.

The failure of the left’s leaders to effectively support government activity is a persistent problem. But the even deeper quandary is why so many middle-and working-class white men, who would benefit from the enactment of liberal programs, vote so heavily for the conservatives who oppose them. The consensus answer is that their conservatism on social issues outweighs the appeal the left could make to them on economic ones. That is the thesis of Thomas Frank’s
What’s the Matter with Kansas?
It is embodied in the progressive lament that “God, guns, and gays” form the basis of the right wing’s appeal to those we think should be voting for us; during the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama was caught on one of those ever-present digital recorders regretting the unbreakable attraction of religion and guns to many white guys.

If that analysis were true—and I acknowledge that I bought into it to a great degree at the time—then we did have a profound dilemma. We could soften our advocacy of these issues—same-sex marriage, limits on gun ownership, abortion rights—to increase our share of the white male vote. Or we could persist in our stances, while trying to persuade ourselves that we could talk our target voters out of their deeply held positions. “Gun control can be made popular if it is presented in the correct way,” I was told by well-meaning people who generally avoided actual discussion with those whom they believed could be so easily converted. (Jim was exasperated by people who condescendingly explained to me how easy it would be to talk angry voters into supporting liberal stances. At a public meeting, he asked one of them why, if he knew how to get majority support for controversial progressive positions, he hadn’t run for—and presumably easily won—high office.)

The good news is that the choice between dropping our support for social issues and redefining them is unnecessary. Those issues are not as salient as the “God, guns, and gays” argument implies. There are elements of truth in it—mostly regarding guns—but it is essentially the wrong explanation for the alienation of white men from the cause of activist government.

In my view, white men reject activist government not because they reject a major role for the public sector but precisely because they support one—implicitly, perhaps, but nonetheless strongly—and have been punishing government for its failure to fulfill that mission. In one very important respect, the 1992 Clinton campaign mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid,” was even truer than its chanters realized. Where middle-and working-class white males are concerned, the issue was not simply the importance of recovering from the recession of 1990–1991 but also the need to slow—and ultimately reverse—the steady erosion of their economic status that began in the mid-1970s and continues today.

I first began to doubt the argument that Democrats were losing the support of white males because of social issues when I attended a dinner in Washington that brought together a dozen or so House liberals with several national labor leaders. When some of my colleagues claimed that our recent losses in West Virginia and Pennsylvania were largely due to our pro-gun-control stance, and lamented the backwardness of those working-class whites who voted against their own economic interests because of it, one of the union men exploded. He angrily—almost threateningly—denounced those making that argument, insisting instead that working-class men were in fact voting to defend themselves economically—against Democrats who ignored the weakening economic position of people who worked with their hands in favor of environmental concerns, international trade, and the new economy.

My first reaction was to resent his anger, and his accusatory tone. And I still believe that he had unduly minimized the importance of gun control in the recent election results. But I have come to think that he was more right than wrong. The strongest piece of evidence against the “God, guns, and gays” explanation is that we—gays—have clearly played a negligible role in the decline of Democratic fortunes among the party’s most traditional supporters. There is no evidence that any Democrat has lost his or her seat because of support for LGBT rights. Neither is there any evidence that we are being punished for being insufficiently religious. Abortion has been a factor in some Republican victories but has not been a dominant theme. The issue that has hit Democrats the hardest besides guns is the environment—and even that is primarily because of economic factors: Liberals are believed to support measures that would kill jobs. The same goes for the fraught politics of race. The chief political problem for Democrats is not anger at integration but the belief that the Democratic focus on “pleasing minorities” extends to giving them preference for scarce jobs. White working-class and middle-class men have not lost faith in government in general; they have lost faith in the willingness of Democrats to use the power of government to protect them from hurtful economic trends.

In short, a great many have high expectations of government’s potential and then blame government when it does not live up to those expectations
.
The
Washington Post
columnist Robert Samuelson makes a similar point, albeit from a conservative perspective:

Since World War II, American government has assumed more responsibilities than can reasonably be met … Government is, among other things, supposed to: control the business cycle, combat poverty, cleanse the environment, provide health care, protect the elderly, subsidize college students, aid states and localities … Most are essentially postwar commitments … Government becomes almost “suicidal” by pervasively generating unrealistic expectations. The more people depend on it, the more they may be disappointed by it.

His answer to the confidence problem is to scale back people’s expectations. My answer, as I will argue later, is to give government the resources to meet them. Politically, the burden of the disappointment with government—in fact, the sense of betrayal—falls almost exclusively on the Democrats because we are seen as the Party of Government. Democrats will regain a fighting chance to win majority support among working-and middle-class white men only when we demonstrate the will—and capacity—to respond to the economic distress inflicted on them.

In my own work, I did what I could to remind voters that government plays an indispensable role in their lives. Whenever I received public acknowledgment for a government benefit that I had helped bring to my constituents, I pointed out that the benefit was not the result of my personal largesse but rather an example of my success in seeing that tax dollars were being spent on their needs. In Ted Kennedy’s posthumously published memoir,
True Compass
, he poignantly recounts the story of the last speech he gave before he was first stricken by his fatal illness. We were in New Bedford for the reopening of an important historic building that had burned down; he and I had secured the necessary funding for rebuilding it. Kennedy eloquently described the building’s historic significance, situated as it was in the midst of the National Waterfront Park we had created, and noted its economic importance to the city. (As he noted, he left New Bedford for Cape Cod and was stricken the next morning.) When it was my turn, I began my speech with a phrase I used regularly—“Welcome to an earmark.” I emphasized that we were able to do what we’d done for the city only because there was enough government money available.

These assertions worked well enough in my district to insulate me against attacks on my support of higher government spending. But too few of my colleagues advanced the same line of argument for it to resonate more broadly.

At the time, I could at least take some encouragement from the popular backlash against Newt Gingrich’s shutdown of the federal government in November and December 1995. The shutdown was a logical extension of Gingrich’s heretofore successful campaign not just to oppose the Democrats but also to delegitimize us—and the government with which we were identified. From our standpoint, the failure of Gingrich’s shutdown had two very positive aspects. First, it broke the right’s political momentum and invigorated Democrats who had become pessimistic about Clinton’s reelection chances. Second, Gingrich suffered politically because it turned out that there was far more public support for government than he had believed. Many of my Republican colleagues confidently predicted that the shutdown would benefit them because people would not miss the nasty old government—in fact, they would cheer its repudiation. The opposite occurred: People reacted angrily to the denial of services they liked or needed. Representing a district with a lot of Portuguese Americans who had close ties with friends and relatives in the Azores, I heard several complaints about the unavailability of passport and visa services. This was the sort of government people took for granted—until it wasn’t there. And that realization was important. The absence of government services led many to see that it wasn’t just the specific program they wanted back—it was government as a whole that they missed, and they did not want it to disappear from their lives.

*

As the 1996 race took shape, I was determined to support Bill Clinton’s reelection, despite my differences with many of his economic policies. The return of LGBT rights to the national stage dramatized what was at stake. Republicans were setting out to protect America from the terrifying threat of two people being inappropriately in love—that is, from same-sex marriage.

In the past, the party’s right-wing fringe had driven its anti-gay activity. But this time, that activity came from the center. With the collapse of Gingrich’s government shutdown, and the improving economy, Clinton’s fortunes were improving and his opponent Bob Dole needed help.