Paging Bill Clinton!

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By Clint Reilly

How quickly the worm turns. Just last November, pundits were predicting 40 years of Democratic hegemony and the dawn of a new progressive era.

That was before America’s $12 trillion national debt descended like a dark cloud over the Capitol.

The effect of this staggering number is twofold. First, it puts a damper on future government spending for social programs. Second, it has prematurely revived the fortunes of the Republican Party.

A New York Times article by Edmund L. Andrews explained our problem: “With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion per year by 2019, up from $202 billion this year.”

Liberal columnist Paul Krugman dismisses such figures as “deficit hysteria,” claiming that $700 billion is a sustainable debt service payment for a greatly expanded economy in 10 years. But Krugman’s ideology is blinding him to the political consequences of such staggering sums.

For middle-class taxpayers, the sticker shock will almost certainly raise grave concerns about the cost and size of government and set the stage for Republican candidates to unfairly attack Democratic incumbents as “tax-and-spend liberals” in 2010 and beyond.

It is ironic that Republican President George W. Bush’s failed economic policies and hands-off regulatory agenda created the crisis. Even the most egregious bank bailouts came under Bush’s watch. But who ever said politics is about the truth?

Here in the Bay Area – one of the most progressive regions in America – we will not feel the ground shift immediately.

Our congressional delegation, headed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has been instrumental in designing the economic stimulus packages aimed at reducing unemployment and boosting the economy. As California’s unemployment rate climbs past 12 percent, leaders such as East Bay Congressman George Miller and Peninsula Congresswoman Anna Eshoo have worked relentlessly to find smart remedies to the situation.

But national polls tell a different story. President Obama’s job approval rating has dipped below 50 percent for the first time, a key indicator that trouble may be on the horizon in 2010. The rancorous health care debate in Congress seems to have repelled all but the hard core partisans on each side of the issue.
 
And red state independents, many of whom vested their hopes in Obama just 12 months ago, are now defecting due to their concerns about the ballooning national debt. Recent gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia saw Republicans winning handily; voters instinctively trusted them to make the right decisions on fiscal policy.

Miraculously, Republicans – who only months ago were stumbling in the dark – now have a signature issue on which they have more credibility than Democrats.

Luckily, Democrats already have a tried-and-true roadmap to success when faced with this scenario. They should take a page from the book of wily pol Bill Clinton.

Governing in a decade when voters were suspicious that Democrats were weak on crime, Clinton passed the largest national crime bill in history. Among other things, the bill put 200,000 new police officers on the streets, eliminated federal Pell grants for prison inmates and increased penalties for sex offenders. In addition, the crime bill pacified law-and-order Democrats while co-opting police officer unions and police chiefs.

Clinton didn’t stop there. Responding to an impulse for fiscal restraint that runs deep in the psyche of American voters, he enacted policies that reduced the national debt and curtailed social spending. He was severely criticized in his own party for triangulating Republican issues but his tactics worked. No longer assailable as a “tax-and-spend liberal,” Clinton cut the legs out from under a hapless Bob Dole in his 1996 presidential reelection campaign.

It does no good to point out that Republicans were the party in power when the national debt shot skyward. Today, American voters want leaders they can trust to fix it.

President Obama and Washington Democrats should heed Clinton’s example. They must break the bankers, not the bank.
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Clint Reilly was a leading political consultant for 26 years. His clients included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and former California State Senate President Pro Tem Dave Roberti.  More recently, Reilly led a battle to preserve media competition in the Bay Area via two landmark anti-trust lawsuits (Reilly v. Hearst and Reilly v. MediaNews, et. al.). This article first appeared on http://www.clintreilly.com and is republished with his permission.