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Thursday, November 30, 2006

It's topsy-turvy time in Bobo's world
Posted by Jill | 7:16 AM
Is it just me, or is David Brooks recycling one of his old columns about Democrats here?

First, don’t listen to your consultants. Over the next few months, pollsters are going to pick out the key demographic groups (left-handed Catholic orthopedists) and offer advice on how to kiss up to those people. Majorities are never built that way. You end up proposing inconsequential micropolicies and selling your soul.

Don’t focus on groups, focus on problems. If you have persuasive proposals to address big problems, the majority coalition will build itself.

Second, be policy-centric, not philosophy-centric. American conservatism grew up out of power and has always placed great emphasis on doctrine. Today, in the wake of this month’s defeat, Republicans are firing up the old debate among social conservatives, free-market conservatives and others about the proper role of the state. This stale, abstract debate will never lead anywhere and only inhibits creative thinking.

The Republican weakness is not a lack of grand principles, it’s a lack of concrete policies commensurate with the size of 21st-century problems. If they would shelve the doctrinal debate for a second, Republicans — while not doing violence to their belief in the market, traditional values or anything else — could find plenty of policy ideas to deal with China and India, the entitlement crisis and so on.

Third, create a Republican Leadership Council. In the realm of ideas, Democrats own the center. Moderate Democrats have the Democratic Leadership Council, the Third Way and various cells within the Brookings Institution, such as the Hamilton Project. Republican moderates are intellectual weaklings. They have no independent identity, so it’s no wonder centrist voters prefer Democrats on one domestic issue after another.


Of course, then he dips a toe into Thomas Friedman's pond:

Fifth, support free trade, while responding to the downside of globalization. When the industrial age kicked in, many European nations built an elaborate welfare state, but didn’t aggressively expand educational opportunity. Americans didn’t build as big a welfare system, but, as the blogger Reihan Salam pointed out recently, we spent a lot on schools to foster social mobility.

The American way is to help people compete, not shield them from competition. Today that means nurturing stable families in which children can develop the social and cultural capital they need to thrive. (A significant expansion of the child tax credit would ease the burden on young parents.) It means publicly funded, though not necessarily publicly run, preschool programs in which children from disorganized homes can learn how to learn. It means radical school reform: performance pay for teachers, an end to the stupid certification rules, urban boarding schools where educators can set up local cultures of achievement, locally run neighborhood child centers to service an array of health and day-care needs.


Would someone please tell Mr. Brooks that the reason Americans can't compete isn't single mothers or bad schools, but wage pressure from sweatshop nations? Brooks is fortunate in that he does not work in a field that hasn't been outsourced to India, but not all of us are as fortunate. Young people are lost today because they have no idea what to do with their lives. The college-bound don't know what to study that will help them get a job, those not college bound are considering the military as their only option. Yesterday I spoke with a co-worker who is encouraging her science-enthusiast 13-year-old to start looking into careers in medical imaging, under the assumption that those involved in CT scan and other such machines can't be outsourced. Of course the READING of the results of such scans CAN be outsourced, which leaves the jobs remaining in the US as operator/techs -- hardly the high-paying areas.

But let David Brooks tell Republicans to continue their policies of race-to-the-bottom. We've seen signs that Americans are waking up to reality as a result of the recent election. Now the challenge for Democrats is to come up with real solutions to this race-to-the-bottom into which American and multinational corporations have forced us.
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