×
As a sort of follow-up to my previous post, this argument from Yale's Heather Gerkin is important:
If the president asked me to identify a reform proposal for fixing what ails our democracy, I would tell him that he is asking the wrong question. We already spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what's wrong with our election system and how to fix it. The problem is that we are fighting reform battles on hostile terrain, and almost no one is thinking about how to change the terrain itself. Our focus should not be on end goals but on how to get from "here to there"—how to create an environment in which reform can actually take root.Reform is an uphill slog in this country. Even a crisis as profound as the one that occurred during the 2000 presidential race prompted only modest reform. Just think about that for a moment. In the wake of the Florida fiasco, there was a strong national consensus that we had a problem, lots of potential solutions, a reform community ready to act, and a cause that was at least superficially appealing to voters. Yet relatively little got done. If that is not a sign of a tenaciously difficult reform environment, I don't know what is. Even a newly minted president is likely to find it hard to get change passed.Rather than urge the president to fight the same fight in the vague hope that his proposal, unlike so many others, will take root, I would urge him to step back and think about how to create an environment that is more receptive to change generally. It is time to think less about end results and more about the institutional correctives and intermediary strategies that will help us get from "here to there." We have already spent a lot of time identifying the journey's end. Now is the time to figure out how to smooth the road that leads there.On some level, that's true for every policy. It's true for health care, true for global warming, true for taxes. It's why my major article on health care wasn't about what reform should look like, but how it should be accomplished. We know, in politics, how to talk abut problems in our policies, how to speak of the uninsured and the deficit. We're much worse, however, at diagnosing failures in our systems. So we have this abstract conversation about "theories of change -- Obama the uniter vs Edwards the fighter vs Clinton the worker -- when it's simply not the case that gridlock is particularly vulnerable to a more persuasive executive. The problem is in the Senate, and it can only be solved by 60 Senators, by a change in the rules, by a media more willing to explain who causes obstruction, or by voters more informed and interested in punishing recalcitrant politicians.
