Yes, But Is It Working?

By Ezra

Over at The Washington Monthly's place, Jacob Hacker and and Paul Pierson are doing the guest-blogger thing, explaining and working through ideas from Off Center. Should be fun. But while they're around, I'd like to see them reexamine their premise a bit. While the continued electoral success of ideological extremists is a bit of a head scratcher, the furtherance of their agenda has not, so far as I can tell, been going according to plan:

In this first entry, however, we want to focus on what we consider the biggest and most important puzzle. If the GOP has moved so far off center, why hasn’t it provoked a backlash, or, at a minimum, found its agenda completely stalemated?

But haven't they? I mean, sure, they've passed some candy-and-ice-cream proposals like tax cuts, they've been bright about under-the-radar regulatory changes that can have far-reaching impacts, and they've engaged in some fairly impressive foreign policy adventurism, but their agenda, such as it goes, can't count much to its name. Slashing taxes without cutting spending -- and both Bush and Newt have tried and failed to cut entitlement spending, notable on Medicare and Medicaid -- is no great feat, it's just kicking the reckoning down the road. Social Security privatization failed, the expanded drug benefit passed; abolishing the Department of Education failed, expanding federal funding and regulatory control through No Child Left Behind passed; the federal marriage amendment failed, stem cells passed; and so on.

The question of how extremists get elected is a good one. At the national level, Bush ran as a moderate in 2000 (and lost the vote) and then campaigned as a warrior in 2004, so that may be part of it. So too does the traditional GOP lead on national security appear to be paying dividends now -- while Republicans may wave buh-bye to the center domestically, they tend to represent large swaths of it in their attitude abroad (though that may now be changing). But the fact remains that while the moderate middle hasn't kept the crazies out of office, neither Gingrich's Revolution nor DeLay's Parliament has been able entrench the conservative agenda. The easy sells, like tax cuts, are sunsetted and, without spending slashes, heading for certain reversal. The tough sells, like privatization, have failed outright. And the cost of continued power has been the institution of a raft of liberal-sounding policies, from an expanded Medicare program to NCLB.