The estimable Jon Chait has a Los Angeles Times column criticizing the GOP claim that they are the party of ideas and Democrats are the party of the status quo. Here's the key passage:
All this was based on a deep confusion between cause and effect. Republicans were pushing new ideas because they had political power; they didn't have political power because of their ideas. (Anybody who believed last year that Bush won reelection because of his support for privatized Social Security surely has been disabused of that delusion.) When you lack power, the best you can do is prevent bad ideas from being enacted. That's not the same thing as failing to have new ideas.
In truth, Bush's agenda has run aground not because he has no ideas but because he has no power. His approval ratings have plummeted, and Republicans in Congress are running for cover. If Bush could rule by fiat he would have plenty of ideas to implement -- more tax cuts for businesses and upper-income individuals, cutting regulations and poverty programs. He simply lacks the juice to implement them.
So he's left defending the status quo against "new ideas." Remaining in Iraq is status quo; pulling out is a new policy. Keeping the tax cuts is status quo; repealing them and using the resources elsewhere is new. If the situation were reversed, conservatives would be taunting liberals for having no ideas and defending the tired status quo. Turning the taunt around is satisfying, but it doesn't really explain the situation.
Chait is on to something here. This is a layman's version of the pivotal politics theory popularized by Keith Krehbiel, David W. Brady and Craig Volden. Imagine a single left-right dimension of ideology with all the members of Congress and the president represented as points from the most liberal to the most conservative. The gridlock zone represents the ideological range defined by the filibuster and the veto. In the current Congress, it ranges from the 41st most liberal senator (the filibuster pivot) to the 67th most liberal senator and 290th most liberal House member (the veto pivots).
According to pivotal politics, legislative action happens when a policy that is outside the gridlock zone gets mapped into it. For instance, consider a policy that only the 20 most liberal senators support. It is trivial for the chamber to create a super-majority coalition that can't be overriden by a filibuster or veto and to move that policy to a point on the ideological spectrum between the two pivots. However, once the policy is mapped inside the gridlock zone, it's trapped -- any action to change it will be blocked by one of the two pivots, who will prefer the status quo to a change.
Pivotal politics is a powerful explanation for the travails of President Bush (as well as other second-term presidents). In the first term, shifts in the composition of Congress and/or the party of the President often mean that a number of policies are outside the gridlock zone. So Congress and the president can move policies that are outside the gridlock zone inside of it. For Bush before 9/11, this included education, stem cells and the tax cut. 9/11 shifted the political terrain further, allowing more policies to be moved ranging from the Patriot Act to invading Iraq.
But at this point, there are few policies outside the gridlock zone that Bush wants to move. As Chait points out, this doesn't mean the party is out of ideas. The President still has a long wish list, but almost none of it is politically feasible (ie the policies are trapped in the gridlock zone). So he's forced to play defense -- protecting those policies that are threatening to slip out of the gridlock zone and be revisited by an increasingly skeptical Congress. New "ideas" aren't worth much if they're infeasible.
Correction 8/22 12:34 PM: Krehbiel points out that the 41st most liberal senator is the current filibuster pivot, not the 40th. The mistake is corrected above -- apologies for the error.
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