COULD 2001 HAVE BEEN THE NEW 1937? Matt replies here to my post from yesterday about the 2000 election. There seem to be two separate arguments he's making here. On the less important issue of whether Gore squandered an opportunity because he failed to "propose a particularly ambitious domestic agenda during the 2000 campaign," I suppose that all things being equal I would have preferred that he do so. But as I said yesterday, I don't think that it's terribly consequential in terms of what he could have accomplished, and given the states in play he had sound strategic reasons for not doing so.
The more important question is "would [it] have been feasible for a progressive president to secure a similarly-scaled, though differently directed, package of reforms." I am certain that it would not have been. The fact that, from a rational policy perspective, 2001 would be a good time for an ambitious progressive agenda is neither here nor there in terms of the political viability of such a program. The key variable in the two periods of major progressive reform -- FDR's second term and under LBJ -- was massive Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. (And even with that, it's amazing how many concessions FDR had to make; for example, most New Deal programs allowed local administrators to largely exclude African-Americans in order to appease Southern members of Congress.) Gore would not have had even a bare majority in the House, and even had Jeffords still switched the nominal Democratic majority in the Senate certainly would have been nowhere near the progressive super-majority necessary to pass major reform legislation.
Bush's tax cuts are a bad analogy because they were an issue where his (already much more homogeneous) coalition is maximally coherent and where unprincipled "moderate" Democrats were especially likely to be peeled off. Something similarly ambitious in the other direction would have been much more likely to meet the fate of Bush's attempts to privatize Social Security, which never got off the canvas despite GOP control of both Houses. In other words, the best Gore could have done was exactly what he proposed -- maintaining the government's fiscal solvency and trying to pass some small reform initiatives that could be built on in a more favorable institutional context. The Bush administration, on the other hand, will make it harder for Democrats to get a reform agenda passed in the future, which is precisely what made the Naderite "heighten-the-contradictions" logic that put Bush in the White House so stupid.
--Scott Lemieux
