Month: June 2017

In Election 2016, Democrats seemed to assume that the unpopularity of Donald Trump would be enough to keep him out of the White House. It’s true that most Americans viewed him unfavorably, but the same was also true of Hillary Clinton. Given such an unappealing choice, millions of voters decided that Trump was the lesser of two evils.

In a series of 2017 special elections, Democrats have continued to make the same mistake. They look at the president’s low Job Approval ratings and assume that simply opposing President Trump should be sufficient to win elections. That was the theory behind Tuesday’s special election in Georgia where Democrats from around the nation financed the most expensive Congressional campaign in history but still came up empty.

Blinded by rage at the president, many Democrats are struggling to come to grips with how this could happen. Convinced that the continuous headlines about Russia and special prosecutors and James Comey have made impeachment a real possibility, they failed to notice that the president’s Job Approval rating has been steady for three full months.

Perhaps the most succinct rationale was provided by Representative Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Ohio: “Our brand is worse than Trump.” In other words, the president may be unpopular, but many voters in the middle still consider his team the lesser of two evils.

Data from earlier this year backs him up. Simmons Research found that 17% of voters are unhappy that Trump is president but happy Clinton isn’t. At the time Simmons did their research, 52 percent of voters were either happy that Trump was president or at least happy that he kept Clinton out of the Oval Office. Those data points were collected a little more than a month into the Trump administration, between February 27 and March 5. At that time, the president’s approval was only 44 percent, so there was an 8-point gap between the job approval and the combined support for Trump’s victory.

There is no data measuring that gap today. However, it may be even bigger today than it was a few months ago. The president’s declining job approval rating may have been offset by an increase in the number who still consider him the lesser of two evils. If so, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that a narrow majority of voters remain pleased that Clinton is not serving as president.

Tuesday’s results from Georgia indicate some support for that theory. The final results were very similar to the president’s showing in the district last fall. Anecdotal evidence also comes from the fact that many Republicans and conservatives complain about the president while also expressing relief that he added Justice Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court.

For Democrats, therefore, being opposed to Trump is not enough. They must convince some of reluctant Trump supporters that things have changed enough for the Democrats to be considered the lesser of two evils. That will require paying less attention to the president and more attention to the legitimate concerns of those who voted for him.

Such hypocrisy is, of course, bi-partisan. Republicans who lauded state resistance to Obamacare are deeply troubled by state and local resistance to the Trump Administration on immigration and other issues.

The blatant hypocrisy is one of many factors contributing to a toxic political dialogue. The only way to reduce both the hypocrisy and the political tension is to do something that neither party wants to do when their team is in charge—disperse power more broadly.

No matter how much the political class wishes it were true, one-size fits all solutions simply can’t work in a wonderfully diverse society like the United States. Rules that make sense for life in Washington, DC or New York City are often absurd in Michigan or Colorado. To catch up with the reality of a decentralized pluralistic society, it is time to decentralize political power and shift ever more decision-making authority to state and local governments.

Unfortunately, America’s political class has spent the last several decades going in exactly the wrong direction by centralizing power in a Regulatory State. Based upon the flawed premise that leaders in official Washington know what’s best for the rest of us, they have worked to insulate the bureaucracy from any accountability to Congress and the American people. Such a regime is a fundamental rejection of our nation’s historic commitment to freedom, self-governance, and equality.

While twenty-first century life does need a set of rules and regulations, the power to set them should be taken away from 285,000 distant bureaucrats and brought closer to home. Congress can put the American people back in charge by passing a simple modification to the federal rulemaking process.

Just about all federal regulations should be set to automatically expire after five years (allowing for a handful of exceptions like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission). As the regulations expire, they would instantly become state regulations. Each state would then have the responsibility for enforcing the regulations within their borders.

Just as important, each state would have the authority to modify the regulations to fit their particular circumstances. California and New York might make different modifications than Idaho and Texas, but that’s a good thing because the states are so different.

The advantage to this approach is not that state regulators are wiser or more honorable than federal regulators. With the past 24 hours, I’ve had a run-in with some particularly idiotic regulations in my home state of New Jersey. But, when the rules are established on a state-by-state basis, the people hold the ultimate decision-making power.

That’s because we have more power as consumers than we do as voters. While we rarely think of it, states are always competing for residents and businesses. The average American moves 12 times during their life and nearly half live in a different state from where they were born. Bad policies hurt a state’s ability to compete and that reality places serious limits on state regulators.

To move America forward, we must end the arbitrary power of the Regulatory State. It’s time to return power to the people.

There are two ways of looking at America.

One approach offers hope for a bright future, focuses on common ground shared by most Americans, and is grounded in pragmatism and reality. The other offers a depressing outlook, encourages polarization, and is grounded in ideology and fantasy.

The positive approach is built upon America’s founding ideals of freedom, self-governance, and equality. At its core is a belief that the people are in charge and that the culture leads society. It acknowledges a role for government, but not the lead role. It recognizes that change begins outside the political process when people use their freedom to work together in community.

The negative approach is built upon the self-serving view of America’s political class that every problem must have a political solution. In this worldview, it is the government and elected politicians who determine the fate of the nation. Conservatives and liberals in the political class have different views about which policies are best, but they agree that elites are responsible for making the rules for the rest of us to live by.

President Theodore Roosevelt long ago expressed the underlying view of the political class by complaining that we need to talk less about the rights of individuals and more about their duty to government.

But, no matter how much the political class wishes it were so, this view of politics and government leading the nation has no basis in reality. As I note in my new book, Politics Has Failed: America Will Not, the culture always leads and politicians always lag behind. To take just one recent example, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have had a bigger impact on the nation than the combined legacies of all eight men who have been president since Apple and Microsoft were founded.

Looking ahead, while the ideological wars rage over how to reform health care, the real change will come from new technologies that give patients more control over their own health and health care choices. Pragmatic community problem solving will build upon these new tools and disrupt the health care industry in ways we can’t even begin to imagine. The politicians will then try to catch up.

These contrasting views of America lead to fundamental differences of opinion about the way government should work and the role it should play.

Those who believe in top-down rule by the political elite are frustrated with America’s constitutional system of checks and balances. They want a more energetic government that can quickly implement changes to fix whatever they believe is wrong with American society. Unfortunately, government has been moving in this direction for decades. Proponents of this view have created a Regulatory State by turning more power over to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington.

The Regulatory State is the death star of the political class. It is meant to bring order to the nation and is built on the mistaken ideological belief that a one-size fits all approach can work in the iPad era.

Fortunately, as our dysfunctional political system continues to break down, change is coming. No matter how powerful it may seem, the Regulatory State is no match for America’s founding ideals. Things will probably get worse before they get better, but freedom, self-governance, and equality will lead us to a brighter future.