Pete Buttigieg's plan to make the government big again

It seems very odd that the mayor of South Bend (Indiana) ignites as a presidential candidate.

Until you talk to Pete Buttigieg. So it does not seem so weird.

I sat down with Buttigieg for my podcast and left unexpectedly impressed. There's a lot of talk about Buttigieg's eight languages ​​and his passing as a Rhodes Scholar and Naval Intelligence Officer, but what strikes me most is that Buttigieg has a coherent theory of what's wrong with US policy and what is needed to correct it. It's rarer among presidential candidates than you think.

In 2007, Mark Schmitt wrote an article I often think about. He explained that the fight between Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards "does not focus primarily on ideological differences or eligibility, but rather on a difference in the implicit assumptions of the candidates about the current situation and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track. "That was," he said, "the theory of primary change."

Obama won this primary and in the short time that the Democrats got 60 votes in the Senate, he managed to pass a lot of bills. However, while Democrats largely revered Obama, there is a consensus that his theory of change eventually crushed under the shells of Republican obstruction. As a result, many of the problems that Obama had solved and failed to address – from inequalities to climate change to stagnant wages, from money to politics to gerrymandering – have worsened and the Democrats see Trump as the poisoned fruit of these failures.

Nam Y. Huh / AP

Buttigieg argues that the main lesson of Obama's presidency is that "any decision based on the presumption of good faith on the part of Republicans in the Senate will be defeated." The hope of being able to pass laws through a bipartisan compromise is dead. And that means that governance fails systematically and reliably to solve people's problems, which in turn makes them more radical against the government itself.

"We can not go that long with this divergence that we have between the center of the American people and the center of the US Congress," said Buttigieg. "Donald Trump was not exactly a fix, but it was a consequence of the fact that people saw their government moving away from more and more of their goal."

Buttigieg's response – Senator Elizabeth Warren and Governor Jay Inslee, hopes for 2020]is to restructure the government so that the popular majorities translate themselves more neatly into governors. He discussed the elimination of the electoral college, the removal of the systematic obstruction and recasting of the Supreme Court so that each party appoints the same number of judges and the vacant posts become less "apocalyptic" .

There is nothing new in a Democratic candidate who promises to fix the system. Obama had discussed similar themes in 2008. The House Democrats opened their session by passing a considerable package of government reforms. But once the Democrats have taken power, a concrete policy change, with the immediate benefits it promises, tends to outweigh the abstractions of procedural reform. It is easier to claim re-election to boast of a tax reduction than a weakening of the electoral college.

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The Obama presidency, in this regard, was typical. Once he was elected – and this is understandable, given the economic free fall – the repair of the system took a step back to get legislation into the system. Obama has stabilized the financial sector and extended health insurance to tens of millions of people, but he has left intact the influence of corruption that money plays in our policy.

What has surprised me to talk to Buttigieg, is his insistence that he gives priority to political reforms to the winners. "It's the difference between someone who thinks of 2024 and someone who thinks of 2054," he says. "For me, yes, it is worth it because we are talking about defining the terms of the debate as they will be played for the rest of my life."

Democrats must debate their theories of change

Until now, the 2020 Democratic primates have been fought through ambitious political promises, mainly, but not exclusively, around health care. Meaning. Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris believe in creating a universal health insurance program and in the abolition of private insurance. Senator Cory Booker and former Texas Representative Beto O'Rourke believe in creating a universally accessible health insurance program and maintaining private insurance.

These differences seem vast and ideologically, they are. But what do they mean when they are translated into practical politics? Democrats are not going to have 60 votes in the Senate, and you can not abolish private insurance with 51 votes, or even get Medicare for America that way.

The key question here is not what the president believes, but how the Senate works. If the Democrats do not remove the filibuster, their only chance to enact a major legislation is the anti-obstruction budget reconciliation process. The main constraint to reconciliation is that each provision must be mainly budget nature, and reforming the health system on this scale requires a large amount of regulation changes. Nobody really knows what the Senate MP will agree to and will not allow, but the experts I spoke to thought that the two bills would be disqualified dozens of times.

"I had the impression that provisions that look like regulations, such as lowering the purchase of Medicare to 55, tend to be considered as such by the parliamentarian, which means that 60 votes, said political scientist Sarah Binder. Congress procedure expert.

The challenge posed by systematic obstruction to the progressive agenda – or indeed any program – is only one of the ways in which the differences between theories of political change of candidates matter as much, if not more, than differences between their policies. But candidates rarely discuss these issues openly, in part because we have almost no vocabulary to describe this dimension of politics.

The words we use to describe the ideologies of presidential candidates are imperfect, but at least they exist. There are liberals, neoliberals, socialist democrats, leftists, conservatives, neoconservatives, centrists, paleoconservatives, libertarians and New Democrats, to name a few. The boundaries between these groups may be unclear, but on the whole, it is a vocabulary flexible enough to describe what one or that politician believes.

There is also no similarly accepted shortcut between candidates such as Warren and Buttigieg and Inslee, who are considering radical reforms in the way laws are passed, and people like them. former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Amy Klobuchar, who point out that their relations with Republicans are better equipped to maximize the changes in the system we have. Their categories also do not clearly describe the approaches that candidates intend to take to elect allies or mobilize public opinion, nor further discuss whether they give priority to extending the tax credit to the public. earned income instead of limiting money to politics.

We all too often assume that political ambition corresponds to the political style, but this shortcut often misleads us. Sanders, for example, has proposed raising tens of billions of taxes to create a European-style welfare state in America. But, asking him if he would remove the obstruction, he said "not crazy" the idea. And he is not alone. Meaning. Kirsten Gillibrand, Booker, and Klobuchar offered a pure and simple defense of the filibuster and Harris dodged the question. As far as I know, the only senator to run for the presidency who seems to seriously consider eliminating the rule is Warren.

On the other hand, among other presidential candidates, the buccaneer is not so revered. Alongside Buttigieg, Inslee and O'Rourke both considered ending the practice (as should be noted, President Donald Trump).

Similarly, Republicans have obstructed Merrick Garland's appointment to the Supreme Court and the advantage they hold in the electoral college to retain the generational control of the court. In the Democratic circles there has been talk of restructuring the Court in response. Buttigieg adopted an interesting idea (proposed for the first time in this article by Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman in Vox) that Democrats and Republicans could each appoint five judges and then jointly appoint five additional members to the court. Harris, Warren, Gillibrand and Inslee were open to adding judges, although they avoided offering specific plans.

But Sanders threw cold water on such proposals. "What worries me is that the next time the Republicans are in power, they will do the same thing," he said. This is a reasonable point of view – arguably the most reasonable point of view – but the Conservative control of the Supreme Court compromises Sanders' broader agenda. What is his plan for that?

Democrats who want to reform the political system have a long list of policies to choose from. Granting state status and political representation to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico is a sensible decision and could well tip the balance of power in the Senate, where Democrats are currently operating at a significant geographical disadvantage. The elimination of the electoral college requires almost unanimous support on the ground, even if no one has a viable plan to do it. The reform of campaign finance is both popular and long overdue. The Washington Post provides a useful overview of the position of the various candidates on some of these issues.

But these ideas require the power to implement them and the Democrats do not even have them right now. What are the candidate theories of party building, so that congressional allies are more likely to be needed to make these kinds of changes? How would they manage to govern if Republicans held the Senate, as the most likely outcome for 2020?

We discuss better what candidates want to do than how they will do it. This hole in our political vocabulary is important because it is difficult to debate the fundamental question of any political campaign: how will candidates really improve the lives of real people?

Towards the end of our conversation, I asked Buttigieg for his vision of US national identity. "The only semi-convincing justification for American exceptionalism," he replied, "is this idea that America represents a way of governing, a way of doing things, that makes us all better off "

That was not the answer I was waiting for, but it is a challenge for Buttigieg and the rest of the Democrats: how does the party that believes in a government make good government again?