In my rural southern boyhood, we had all sorts of fun things and a few disturbing things. Yet the thing that stays with me tonight is not the ghost light or the statue of the black cat. I'm thinking instead of a water tower that couldn't hold water. I'm thinking that what we must prove is less a matter of "blue dog v. progressive" than of showing that we are the only way forward.
I grew up in a very small town in rural south Arkansas. We had all the right things to make a childhood intriguing--a ghost light, a statue of a black cat with its tail curled up in the shape of the number 9, right by the railroad tracks, and an international lumber fraternal organization that went by the euphonious name "Hoo Hoo".
Once, we also had a new water tower. The water tower looked the part. It had that kind of "water tower" glow, as any good water tower should. We watched as it was built with a kind of understanding that this water tower was something new.
Then the day came when they hooked up the water tower. They turned on the water. A mismatch promptly ensued. The water tower could not weather the water pressure. People whispered all kinds of reasons, but that is just to say that the town matters proceeded as usual.
This was the bizarro planet inverse of the Joni Mitchell song; rather than
not knowing what one had until it was gone, one imagined one had something until it was hooked up.
I must confess that I hear a lot of things being built these days that look as shiny, new, and unable to withstand the pressure as that water tower. Let's take this idea of making permanent the Bush tax cuts. We hooked up that water tower once. The flow of money into the economy in that fashion did not create lasting prosperity; indeed, the deregulation of the financial services sector and its accompanying near-collapse damaged our near-term hopes for prosperity at all.
On the other hand, I do feel in our party we suffer from a bit of amnesia about how we Democrats did lead the country into real prosperity. We made sure that the money made sense. We took steps to manage spending in the right ways. I decline to join in the chorus who imagine that every act of fiscal restraint is "blue dog". I reject the notion that "progressives" can never be a bit monetarist in how they manage tax and spending issues.
The choice is never just Ronald Reagan or Tip O'Neill.
I'm not very interested in the current battle for the soul of the party, an inevitable battle that mirrors the battle for the soul of every party in every state or nation whenever an election turns out poorly for the party. A decision was made to use a majority to pass sweeping legislation during a deep recession. It's too early to see how that decision will turn out. The issue of who will be minority leader in the House interests me less than how will Democrats build an economic tower that will carry us past the deplorable conditions in 2008 and into the next prosperity.
This discussion will require some new vision about how to deal with government spending and taxation. This vision need not be the knee-jerk right/left debate which keeps cable television stocked with eTrade ads.
It's going to require instead vision as to what we can cut, what we must save, and how we are going to pay for it. I believe that only Democrats are equipped to have this discussion at present. I believe that only this discussion will recapture the moderates without sacrificing core principles.
The world of the late Clinton years is not so far in our past as all that. We can remember what we learned. We learned that Democrats can run an economy and yet achieve incrementally their goals for this country.
The reality is that we're going to reach a point in which we must resist
budget-busting tax breaks, make difficult decisions to pare back programs, and dispense with weapons systems that don't work, phase out agricultural subsidies that don't make our agri-business structure work, and yes, tackle the actuarial problem inherent in the Social Security and Medicare system.
I've tired of center-left v. left. It's a tired, inside-the-beltway
webcomic. I've seen the water tower that President G.W. Bush built. The pressure blew every water main in town. Let's see if we can build a proper system to water us back to prosperity instead. It's this, not who is minority leader, that will help us move forward in the next election cycle.