http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_koffler/2008/01/substance_not_style.html
Substance, not style
US elections 2008: Despite what many believe, there are significant differences in policy between Barack Obama and the other candidates
Daniel Koffler
It has become a common view among pundits observing the Democratic primary campaign that there isn't a great deal of substantive disagreement between the frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and so the contest between them comes down to a contest of style - more specifically, Obama's style and Clinton's lack thereof - or perhaps, if Andrew Sullivan is right, a tectonic generational conflict. To the extent that both the media and the leading campaigns are propelling the idea that the underlying dynamic in the race is "change versus experience", it's true, and self-fulfillingly if not trivially so, that substantive ideological and policy differences will not settle the Democratic nomination.
But the fact that campaign strategies, and the media narrative enfolding them, have obscured genuine, substantive disagreement between Obama and Clinton, does not entail that no such disagreement exists. On the contrary, there is a deep and profound disagreement between the candidates on how to approach public policy questions, one that implies highly discrepant visions of governance. Every so often, in speeches and in debate, either Obama or Clinton or both offer glimpses of their philosophical differences. Saturday night's presidential debate was one such occasion.
Obama put it this way:
We do have a philosophical difference. John [Edwards] and yourself [ Hillary Clinton] believe that if we do not mandate care - if we don't force the government to get - to - if the government does not force taxpayers to buy healthcare, that we will penalise them in some fashion. I disagree with that because as I go around town hall meetings, I don't meet people who are trying to avoid getting healthcare; the problem is they can't afford it. The costs are too high. And so, as a consequence, we focus on reducing costs.
Obama's preference for reducing healthcare costs while preserving the freedom to choose whether or not to participate in the healthcare system, as against Clinton's (and Edwards's) insistence on mandating participation, is not a one-off discrepancy without broader implications. Rather, Obama's language of personal choice and incentive is a reflection of the ideas of his lead economic advisor, Austin Goolsbee, a behavioural economist at the University of Chicago, who agrees with the liberal consensus on the need to address concerns such as income inequality, disparate educational opportunities and, of course, disparate access to healthcare, but breaks sharply from liberal orthodoxy on both the causes of these social ills and the optimal strategy for ameliorating them.
Instead of recommending traditional welfare-state liberalism as a solvent for socioeconomic inequalities and dislocations, Goolsbee promotes programmes to essentially democratise the market, protecting and where possible expanding freedom of choice, while simultaneously creating rational, self-interested incentives for individuals to participate in solving collective problems. No wonder, then, that Obama's healthcare plan is specifically designed to give people good reason to buy in, without coercing them. Likewise, as George Will reported in a column from October, Goolsbee's proposal for reducing income inequality is to lower barriers to higher education, the primary factor in determining future earnings, and noticeably does not rely on state interventions in the market, which can succeed at equalising income at the price of reducing it across the board.
Goolsbee and Obama's understanding of the free market as a useful means of promoting social justice, rather than an obstacle to it, contrasts most starkly with the rest of the Democratic field on issues of competition, free trade and financial liberalism. Back in the spring of 2007, when the term "subprime mortgage" was beginning its ascent to ubiquity, Goolsbee composed an impressive op-ed in the New York Times, noting that - fraudulent lending practices aside - subprime products are a powerful tool for democratising the credit market and opening it up to lower socioeconomic strata, and had been substantially successful in reducing financial constraints on working-class people. Crack down on fraud by all means, but don't cut off an important avenue of economic empowerment for working people, and most of all don't do so in the name of working people.
The evidence that Obama heeds Goolsbee's lessons is ample, his healthcare plan being but one of many prominent examples. Whereas Clinton has recently taken to pulling protectionist stunts and rethinking the fundamental theoretical soundness of free trade, and Edwards is behaving like the love child of Huey Long and Pat Buchanan, Obama instinctively supports free trade and grasps the universe of possibilities that globalisation opens up, and seamlessly integrates it into his "audacity of hope" theme. As he remarked in a recent debate: "Globalisation is here, and I don't think Americans are afraid to compete. And we have the goods and the services and the skills and the innovation to compete anywhere in the world."
At the moment, Obama's and Clinton's positions on trade are roughly equivalent - both deserve credit for taking initial steps toward dismantling the obscene US government-supported agricultural cartels - but the present dynamic is Obama moving more and more in the direction of economic freedom, competition and individual choice, and Clinton wavering if not moving away from it. Obama proposes to address the "actuarial gap" in entitlement programs - actuarial gap being a term congenial to if not lifted straight from Niall Ferguson's analysis of generational accounting - in part by raising the cap on payroll taxes, but in part by creating incentives for personal retirement accounts, fostering, if you'll pardon the term, an ownership society. The idea, as with his approach to healthcare, is to bring individual self-interest and collective needs into harmony, and let rationality do the work from there. (Hillary Clinton, in case you're wondering, disagrees.)
Similarly, while Obama's support of immigration and immigrants undoubtedly derives in part from straightforward internationalism and humanitarianism - Obama's lead foreign policy advisor is Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell, under whose guidance Obama has directed far more attention to the Darfur genocide than any other candidate - it's likely that part of Obama's embrace of immigration stems from a Goolsbeean view of free movement of labour as inextricable from and essential to a free global market.
Perhaps it goes without saying that Obama's belief in freedom in labour markets and freedom in capital markets, sets him apart from the Republican field as well as the Democrats. Under ordinary circumstances, one would expect Republicans at least to respect free trade, but alas, they are inconsistent at best. As for freedom in immigration, even in politically propitious times, the modern GOP makes tactical concessions toward its xenophobic wing; in this season of famine, the Republican candidates, even those who have supported immigration in the past, have set up their nominating contest as a race to see who can take the most thuggish and contemptuous possible attitude toward Mexicans (the euphemism for this posture is "out-Tancredo-ing Tancredo").
Ironically, the nativist lunacy sweeping through the GOP underscores the conceptual connection between free trade and immigration, as mutually supporting pillars of economic freedom. Obama properly understands economic freedom as the best vehicle for accomplishing the historic goals of the left, which Irving Howe and Lewis Coser long ago described as wanting "simply to do away with those sources of conflict which are the cause of material deprivation and which, in turn, help create psychological and moral suffering."
In other words and in short, Obama's slogan, "stand for change", is not a vacuous message of uplift, but a content-laden token of dissent from the old-style liberal orthodoxy on which Clinton and Edwards have been campaigning. At the same time, Obama is not offering a retread of (Bill) Clintonism, Liebermanism, triangulation, neoliberalism, the Third Way or whatever we might wish to call the business-friendly centrism of the 1990s. For all its lofty talk of new paradigms and boundary shifting, the Third Way in practice amounted to taking a little of column A, a little of column B, and marketing the result as something new and innovative. Obama and Goolsbee propose something entirely different - not a triangulation, but a basis for crafting public policy orthogonal to the traditional liberal-conservative axis.
If this approach needs a name, call it left-libertarianism. Advancements in behavioural economics, public and rational choice theory, and game theory provide us with an opportunity to attend to inequality without crippling the economy, enhancing the coercive power of the state, or infringing on personal liberty (at least not to any extent greater than the welfare state already does; and as much as my libertarian friends might wish otherwise, the welfare state isn't going anywhere). The cost - higher marginal tax rates - is real, but eminently justified by the benefits.
"Stand for change"? I think I will.
Substance, not style
US elections 2008: Despite what many believe, there are significant differences in policy between Barack Obama and the other candidates
Daniel Koffler
It has become a common view among pundits observing the Democratic primary campaign that there isn't a great deal of substantive disagreement between the frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and so the contest between them comes down to a contest of style - more specifically, Obama's style and Clinton's lack thereof - or perhaps, if Andrew Sullivan is right, a tectonic generational conflict. To the extent that both the media and the leading campaigns are propelling the idea that the underlying dynamic in the race is "change versus experience", it's true, and self-fulfillingly if not trivially so, that substantive ideological and policy differences will not settle the Democratic nomination.
But the fact that campaign strategies, and the media narrative enfolding them, have obscured genuine, substantive disagreement between Obama and Clinton, does not entail that no such disagreement exists. On the contrary, there is a deep and profound disagreement between the candidates on how to approach public policy questions, one that implies highly discrepant visions of governance. Every so often, in speeches and in debate, either Obama or Clinton or both offer glimpses of their philosophical differences. Saturday night's presidential debate was one such occasion.
Obama put it this way:
We do have a philosophical difference. John [Edwards] and yourself [ Hillary Clinton] believe that if we do not mandate care - if we don't force the government to get - to - if the government does not force taxpayers to buy healthcare, that we will penalise them in some fashion. I disagree with that because as I go around town hall meetings, I don't meet people who are trying to avoid getting healthcare; the problem is they can't afford it. The costs are too high. And so, as a consequence, we focus on reducing costs.
Obama's preference for reducing healthcare costs while preserving the freedom to choose whether or not to participate in the healthcare system, as against Clinton's (and Edwards's) insistence on mandating participation, is not a one-off discrepancy without broader implications. Rather, Obama's language of personal choice and incentive is a reflection of the ideas of his lead economic advisor, Austin Goolsbee, a behavioural economist at the University of Chicago, who agrees with the liberal consensus on the need to address concerns such as income inequality, disparate educational opportunities and, of course, disparate access to healthcare, but breaks sharply from liberal orthodoxy on both the causes of these social ills and the optimal strategy for ameliorating them.
Instead of recommending traditional welfare-state liberalism as a solvent for socioeconomic inequalities and dislocations, Goolsbee promotes programmes to essentially democratise the market, protecting and where possible expanding freedom of choice, while simultaneously creating rational, self-interested incentives for individuals to participate in solving collective problems. No wonder, then, that Obama's healthcare plan is specifically designed to give people good reason to buy in, without coercing them. Likewise, as George Will reported in a column from October, Goolsbee's proposal for reducing income inequality is to lower barriers to higher education, the primary factor in determining future earnings, and noticeably does not rely on state interventions in the market, which can succeed at equalising income at the price of reducing it across the board.
Goolsbee and Obama's understanding of the free market as a useful means of promoting social justice, rather than an obstacle to it, contrasts most starkly with the rest of the Democratic field on issues of competition, free trade and financial liberalism. Back in the spring of 2007, when the term "subprime mortgage" was beginning its ascent to ubiquity, Goolsbee composed an impressive op-ed in the New York Times, noting that - fraudulent lending practices aside - subprime products are a powerful tool for democratising the credit market and opening it up to lower socioeconomic strata, and had been substantially successful in reducing financial constraints on working-class people. Crack down on fraud by all means, but don't cut off an important avenue of economic empowerment for working people, and most of all don't do so in the name of working people.
The evidence that Obama heeds Goolsbee's lessons is ample, his healthcare plan being but one of many prominent examples. Whereas Clinton has recently taken to pulling protectionist stunts and rethinking the fundamental theoretical soundness of free trade, and Edwards is behaving like the love child of Huey Long and Pat Buchanan, Obama instinctively supports free trade and grasps the universe of possibilities that globalisation opens up, and seamlessly integrates it into his "audacity of hope" theme. As he remarked in a recent debate: "Globalisation is here, and I don't think Americans are afraid to compete. And we have the goods and the services and the skills and the innovation to compete anywhere in the world."
At the moment, Obama's and Clinton's positions on trade are roughly equivalent - both deserve credit for taking initial steps toward dismantling the obscene US government-supported agricultural cartels - but the present dynamic is Obama moving more and more in the direction of economic freedom, competition and individual choice, and Clinton wavering if not moving away from it. Obama proposes to address the "actuarial gap" in entitlement programs - actuarial gap being a term congenial to if not lifted straight from Niall Ferguson's analysis of generational accounting - in part by raising the cap on payroll taxes, but in part by creating incentives for personal retirement accounts, fostering, if you'll pardon the term, an ownership society. The idea, as with his approach to healthcare, is to bring individual self-interest and collective needs into harmony, and let rationality do the work from there. (Hillary Clinton, in case you're wondering, disagrees.)
Similarly, while Obama's support of immigration and immigrants undoubtedly derives in part from straightforward internationalism and humanitarianism - Obama's lead foreign policy advisor is Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell, under whose guidance Obama has directed far more attention to the Darfur genocide than any other candidate - it's likely that part of Obama's embrace of immigration stems from a Goolsbeean view of free movement of labour as inextricable from and essential to a free global market.
Perhaps it goes without saying that Obama's belief in freedom in labour markets and freedom in capital markets, sets him apart from the Republican field as well as the Democrats. Under ordinary circumstances, one would expect Republicans at least to respect free trade, but alas, they are inconsistent at best. As for freedom in immigration, even in politically propitious times, the modern GOP makes tactical concessions toward its xenophobic wing; in this season of famine, the Republican candidates, even those who have supported immigration in the past, have set up their nominating contest as a race to see who can take the most thuggish and contemptuous possible attitude toward Mexicans (the euphemism for this posture is "out-Tancredo-ing Tancredo").
Ironically, the nativist lunacy sweeping through the GOP underscores the conceptual connection between free trade and immigration, as mutually supporting pillars of economic freedom. Obama properly understands economic freedom as the best vehicle for accomplishing the historic goals of the left, which Irving Howe and Lewis Coser long ago described as wanting "simply to do away with those sources of conflict which are the cause of material deprivation and which, in turn, help create psychological and moral suffering."
In other words and in short, Obama's slogan, "stand for change", is not a vacuous message of uplift, but a content-laden token of dissent from the old-style liberal orthodoxy on which Clinton and Edwards have been campaigning. At the same time, Obama is not offering a retread of (Bill) Clintonism, Liebermanism, triangulation, neoliberalism, the Third Way or whatever we might wish to call the business-friendly centrism of the 1990s. For all its lofty talk of new paradigms and boundary shifting, the Third Way in practice amounted to taking a little of column A, a little of column B, and marketing the result as something new and innovative. Obama and Goolsbee propose something entirely different - not a triangulation, but a basis for crafting public policy orthogonal to the traditional liberal-conservative axis.
If this approach needs a name, call it left-libertarianism. Advancements in behavioural economics, public and rational choice theory, and game theory provide us with an opportunity to attend to inequality without crippling the economy, enhancing the coercive power of the state, or infringing on personal liberty (at least not to any extent greater than the welfare state already does; and as much as my libertarian friends might wish otherwise, the welfare state isn't going anywhere). The cost - higher marginal tax rates - is real, but eminently justified by the benefits.
"Stand for change"? I think I will.
