That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [139]
The toll we’re taking on ourselves is just getting bigger and bigger, said Murphy, who is not running political campaigns anymore. “Our politics [today] is almost like a parasite eating at the national interest for short-term gratification—so that your team can cheer and feel good for a few minutes,” he told us. “If we don’t save the store, the questions between the center right and center left, between apples and oranges, will be irrelevant. We will all be working at TGI Friday’s in Beijing.”
Murphy then paused for a moment to recall one of the best pieces of advice he ever got from a wise old hand in the ad business. “Negative ads work,” the old hand told Murphy, but then added a word of caution: “Do you know why McDonald’s never ran a negative ad against Burger King, saying their burgers were all full of maggots? It might have worked for a year or two but then no one would have ever eaten another hamburger.” The old hand concluded with this piece of advice for Murphy: “Never destroy the category.”
Reflecting on that insight, Murphy note that just at a time when we need politics in America to be at its most credible and constructive in order to define and pursue the national interest, “we’ve destroyed the category.”
Mount Rushmore
These problems are compounded by the fact that the two parties’ programs are rooted in narrow readings of their histories that are much less useful for the future than they were in the past. The parties trace these programs to the two most celebrated presidents not on Mount Rushmore: in the case of the Democrats, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who has had to settle for his profile on the dime; and for the Republicans, Ronald Reagan, whose name adorns a Washington-area airport. Each is regarded as the founder—even the prophet—of the modern version of his party, the man who established the core agenda that defines what it is to be a Democrat and a Republican today. In the case of Democrats, their central priority is the preservation and expansion of federal social welfare programs—which means resisting any modification to Social Security and Medicare and promoting universal health-care coverage. In the case of Republicans it is the reduction of taxes—which means resisting any new tax for any reason at all. At different moments in our history, both agendas made significant contributions to American growth and power. And, to be sure, all other things being equal, continuing to do both would be highly desirable.
But all things are not equal in the wake of the Terrible Twos, and behaving as if they are is getting in the way of our responding—vigorously, sensibly, and expeditiously—to our four big challenges. You wouldn’t know that to listen to the debates today. As Senator Robert Bennett remarked to us, “We have great issues in politics, and then we have great diversions, and we spend most of our political time arguing over the great diversions and never facing the great issues.”
It is not that every issue that each party favors is trivial or unworthy, but if our political system cannot put the nation’s priorities in order—increase revenues, reduce benefits, and reinvest in the sources of our strength—this too will have a huge cost. Ironically, neither party’s iconic president believed precisely what his contemporary disciples think he believed. Roosevelt, although the founder of the modern American welfare state, announced, when campaigning for the presidency in 1932, his intention to engage in “bold, persistent experimentation.” In office, he practiced what he preached. He would surely not have regarded any federal program as untouchable for all time. Reagan, although a champion