{"id":6405,"date":"2010-08-04T12:47:09","date_gmt":"2010-08-04T16:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=6405"},"modified":"2010-08-04T12:47:09","modified_gmt":"2010-08-04T16:47:09","slug":"it%e2%80%99s-the-geography-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/6405\/it%e2%80%99s-the-geography-stupid\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the Geography, Stupid"},"content":{"rendered":"

As usual, Jay Cost has an eyebrow raising piece of analysis<\/a> \u2013 today discussing in Technicolor detail how President Barack Obama\u2019s narrow geographic popularity foretold of a need to govern from the center of the country; not the center of his party.<\/p>\n

What he should have done instead was disarm<\/em> his opponents. If he had built initial policy proposals from the middle, he could have wooed the moderate flank of the Republican party, marginalized the conservatives, and alleviated the concerns of those gettable voters in the South and the Midwest. This is precisely what Bill Clinton did between 1995 and 2000, and it is what the President’s promises of “post-partisanship” suggested.<\/p>\n

Our system of government can only produce policy when geographically broad<\/em> coalitions favor it. The Senate, more than any other institution, forces such breadth. Obama created breadth the wrong way. He watered down initially liberal legislation to prompt just enough moderate Democrats to sign on. Instead, he should have built policy from the center, then worked to pick up enough votes on either side. The left would have been disappointed, but the right would have been marginalized and, most importantly, Independent voters – who have abandoned the President in droves – might still be on board.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the great ironies of liberal politicians is that they so often discount the yen of conservative intellectuals to participate in policy making.\u00a0 People like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) are driven by ideas, and enjoy the process of fashioning policies that get as many of them enacted as possible.<\/p>\n

But they are not necessarily \u201cmy-way-or-the-highway\u201d types.\u00a0 Ryan\u2019s Roadmap for America\u2019s Future<\/a> is a multi-decade plan for balancing the budget.\u00a0 Implicit in its longevity is Ryan\u2019s willingness to work out compromises that preserve Social Security and Medicare while making them fiscally sound.\u00a0 For his part, Gingrich has always been the kind of politician willing to hammer out solutions with the other side, as he attempted to do with Bill Clinton<\/a>.<\/p>\n

People wonder why we don\u2019t have bipartisan breakthroughs anymore.\u00a0 In part, it\u2019s because politicians like Barack Obama don\u2019t have the political sense to \u201cspread the success around\u201d turning their adversaries into cooperators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As usual, Jay Cost has an eyebrow raising piece of analysis \u2013 today discussing in Technicolor detail how President Barack Obama\u2019s narrow geographic popularity foretold of a need to govern from the center of the country; not the center of his party. What he should have done instead was disarm his opponents. If he had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143,501,861,235,869,802,919,461],"class_list":["post-6405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-barack-obama","tag-bill-clinton","tag-healthcare","tag-medicare","tag-newt-gingrich","tag-paul-ryan","tag-roadmap-for-americas-future","tag-social-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6405"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6410,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6405\/revisions\/6410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}