It's late August, we're getting close to the Major League Baseball playoffs to see who gets into the World Series, and the LA Dodgers have amazingly gone from worst to first. With that kind of record I can't call the Dodgers "bums." But if you want to know more about baseball and the Dodgers, you'll have to go look somewhere else, because the only bums I'm thinking about right now are American politicians. This time, it's a thoroughly bipartisan thing, too.
Some people think that America would be better-off without its traditional system of political parties, or at least better-off without the two dominant parties--Republican and Democratic. Oddly, both parties seem to be hard at work helping to make the case for those who argue that the country would have better government without them.
You probably received mailers from both Democratic and Republican organizations during the run-up to last year's election, and my guess is that most of them ended up in the trash pretty quickly. Earlier this year, in the aftermath of the 2012 election, both parties started sending out a different sort of mailer; one from each party is on my desk in front of me right now. Each mailer--according to the way it presents itself--is intended to collect voter opinions to help set the party's course in preparation for the next election. For the Democrats, it's a "survey;" to the Republicans, it's an "assessment." Different terminologies, but they mean the same thing.
Each party survey, of course, is intended to convey the message that these are folks who are working for the best interests of the country. Consequently, they want to understand--so they say--how people feel about the major issues. Since these things cost a lot of money, I have to assume that they are serious about this. In which case, I have to tell you that they are both flawed and need fixing.
It's all about what's missing. The same thing is missing from both assessments. You would think that after more than twenty years of continually hearing a small piece of trite wisdom, both parties would know by heart, that, yes, in fact, it really is all about "the economy, stupid!" That simple statement is as true today as it was in 1992 when it was first uttered by a key strategist in Bill Clinton's successful campaign for the presidency.
So, perhaps each party would want to ask voters how they might want to go about having an improved economy in 2013 and beyond? Well, don't look for this in these two voter surveys; it's not happening there. It's really not happening anywhere else, either.
Almost unbelievably, both assessments glaringly omit any substantive query about opinions on how to improve America's economic environment. It's not that these things are really short on space, either; each one asks approximately two dozen questions. At least one of them could have been something exquisitely-focused on the simply-stated question of "how does the country go about getting more people employed, and how does it go about getting more people employed in better-paying jobs?"
Nope. Not there. And yes, I have re-read each survey just to be sure I didn't miss it.
The Democratic survey tantalizes by having an entire section titled "Part II: Economic Recovery." It contains three questions, so at first it seems promising. But the most direct question of that group is "Do you think the President's economic recovery plan will continue to expand the U.S. economy?"
Now, that's just an odd pitch in a hardball game. No matter how you hit it back, it's going to go foul. I'm a big fan of President Obama--no surprise there--but even I have to admit that his economic recovery plan cannot "continue" to do anything much more than has already been done because the part that was enacted during his first term has done pretty much all that it can do, and there's no chance that the next part will make it through a Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
Why not simply ask how people feel about getting some more Federal funding out into the economy for things that are directly linked to job creation? That's what the party poobahs are really thinking about. Or, maybe a question about different things that might be done to motivate big U.S. companies to put some of their trillion-dollar stash of cash to work by hiring more employees? These might be riskier fast-ball types of questions, but at least they aren't the screwballs that the survey is throwing out.
As for the Republican survey, it contains just a single question on the subject: "Do you think President Obama's government-centric economic policies have slowed job growth?" Come on, guys, we already know that's what you believe. Isn't it time to come up with the logical second half of that question, which would be something like "Here are our top ten new economic ideas, tell us how you would rank them in priority order?"
I don't think that either party is in danger of immediate demise because of a single flawed assessment document mailed out to selected groups of people. What's more worrisome is that their general public pronouncements have, in both cases, tended to mute any kind of constructive conversation on "the economy, stupid!" There are plenty of other strategic issues and initiatives that are worthy of debate--I would highlight foreign policy, immigration reform, education, the environment, healthcare (beyond the implementation of Obamacare in 2014), taxation reform and long-range Federal budget planning--but none of these, and none of the others that might be added by somebody else, can be adequately addressed without a healthy, growing American economy.
I believe that the two-party system of American politics has given us a better form of government than any other political system. It ought to continue to do so. But, at the moment, watching the two parties fritter away time on lost opportunities for economic development is like watching a baseball game where there's nothing but errors on the field.
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