America’s Leftward Tilt?
The presidential election is now a close contest, but barring an Electoral College tie, someone is going to win, someone is going to lose, and both sides will have to make sense of it all.
The obvious story line of this election, whoever wins, is that Americans want pragmatic solutions to the relentless distress they have experienced for over a decade, whether that means a more active or a more passive government. They are looking for anyone who can provide a coherent vision of how to fix an economy that is not working for people who work for a living. But rather than a victory for pragmatism, we may well see both the winners and losers take away a very different lesson: that this election was a mandate for another shift to the right.
If Mitt Romney loses, conservatives will no doubt conclude that he just wasn’t conservative enough, that they should have picked someone more appealing to their base. If President Obama loses or squeaks out a victory just four years after President George W. Bush destroyed the economy (which should have discredited conservative economics once and for all), many Democrats are likely to conclude that he tried to move too left too fast when he pushed for a stimulus and health care reform for which Americans were simply not ready, rather than that he simply sold both programs poorly (something he now acknowledges).
Similarly, whichever candidate wins, the first order of business will be deciding which programs to cut — unless a deal to prevent us from going over the fiscal cliff is reached during the lame-duck session of Congress after the election. Most voters intuitively understand that jobs and deficits are linked — too much of an emphasis on deficits leads to too few jobs — because working people with money in their wallets drive demand, whereas wealthier people with money in their wallets drive Jaguars (and send the rest of their income to their hedge fund managers). Even in the heart of red America, people understand that high unemployment and income disparities of the magnitude we are now witnessing are bad for economic growth.
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/americas-leftward-tilt/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121104
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