Taking a break from issuing pungent critiques of Republican officeholders and ideas, Bloomberg View’s Josh Barro explains why America still needs the Republican Party, after all — and points to state houses as examples of GOP governance done right:
When I talk about the Republican Party being in dire political shape, the retort I most often hear is that Republicans hold 30 governorships. This isn’t a contradiction; in part, it reflects that Republicans are offering up much more appealing policies at the state and local levels than the federal level.
The idea that government should run like a business or a household has led Republicans dangerously astray at the federal level, but this actually isn’t a terrible frame for thinking about states. A highway department is a lot more like a business than Social Security is. Although the federal government mostly moves money around, states and localities have lots of employees and direct operations, so greater efficiency really can go a long way. And, state budgets really do need to be (more or less) balanced annually.
Republicans have also been more likely than Democrats to recognise that public employee benefits structures are outdated and needlessly costly, and that collective bargaining in the public sector lets unions sit on both sides of the negotiating table. The split isn’t totally partisan … But in general, Republicans have been more willing than Democrats to look for ways to provide government services more cheaply and efficiently, including by cutting the employee compensation costs that make up about half of state and local spending.
Barro’s absolutely right about this: From Chris Christie’s public sector reforms in New Jersey to Bobby Jindal’s education overhaul in Louisiana, Republicans are succeeding in the states not just because they have better messengers or messaging, but because (as he puts it) their “state-level policy agendas are markedly better than the party’s national one.”
The problem for the national party, though, is that the GOP’s state-level agendas are better in part because the state-level issues are different — which means that national Republicans can’t just take the approach that has made governors like Christie and Tennessee’s Bill Haslam so popular and scale it up to the national stage. This is a lesson that the party learned the hard way in 2012, when state-level successes at reforming what Walter Russell Mead has dubbed the “blue social model” didn’t translate into the kind of national support that so many conservative pundits expected. As I argued just after the election, that failure had a lot to do with the difference between state and national policy debates:
In many blue states, what makes the current fiscal picture unsustainable are mostly the promises that legislators have made to public-sector unions — a powerful and influential constituency, to be sure, but ultimately just one constituency, which can be successfully isolated and cast as an enemy of the common good.
At the national level, by contrast, our fiscal problems are almost all bound up in entitlement spending — and while there are specific interest groups that benefit from that spending, the ultimate beneficiaries are, well, all of us. This makes the conservative pitch on reforming Medicare and Social Security a harder sell to voters than the pitch that Republican governors have been making on union benefits and pensions. And it helps explain why, conservative optimism about the state’s tilt notwithstanding, the same Wisconsin electorate that kept [Scott] Walker in office last year delivered the state to the Democratic ticket pretty easily last week.
This is also why I can’t quite go along with the redoubtable Yuval Levin, whose glass-half-full take on the state of Republican policy thinking makes a useful counterpoint to my own post yesterday. It’s true, as he writes, that one can find in today’s “Republican legislative agenda—at both the state and federal levels” examples “of just the type of thinking” that the right’s reformers hope to see. But that “both” obscures how wide the gulf is between the states, where the party mostly stands for a plausible and popular vision of limited, effective government, and the national level, where Republicans are semi-united around one extremely important long-range idea — the Ryan-Wyden version of Medicare reform — but conspicuously lack the kind of broadly appealing economic agenda that that would be required to actually sell the public on entitlement reform.
That state-national gulf may narrow during the run-up to 2016. Certainly I hope it does, and that Levin is proven right when he suggests that the “next Republican presidential candidate would probably have trouble finding policy advisors who won’t be on board” with some kind of reform-conservative agenda. But a version of that agenda already existed in 2011 and 2012 (thanks in no small part to publications like Levin’s National Affairs), and the Republican presidential candidates mostly managed to avoid embracing any policy proposals that might have actually helped their general-election cause. Until the party’s rising stars actually break that pattern, and add more substance to their populist rhetoric, Republican reform will remain an idea whose time has not yet come.
© 2012 The New York Times News Service
