May 28, 2009

In the Debates over Economic Policy — and the Sotomayor Nomination — What Happened to the Loyal Opposition?

President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court hasn’t triggered a conservative firestorm; and like the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes story, that’s part of a larger pattern affecting policy well beyond the Supreme Court. Granted, partisan conservatives find themselves facing an engaging, activist, Democratic president with very broad public support at his back. So it should be unsurprising that most GOP senators are withholding public judgment on Judge Sotomayor’s nomination, and even the RNC has taken the tact, “we haven’t found anything on her — yet.” Even the predictably, over-the-top Rush Limbaugh couldn’t manage anything beyond calling Judge Sotomayor “a hack” who would be “a disaster on the court.”

The problem for partisan conservatives is that nobody wants to listen to them except the bare quarter of the country that already agrees with them. The other three-quarters of us are comprised of partisan progressives, often as unreflectively sure of their opinions as partisan conservatives, and the great plurality of Americans with views about many things but no unvarying, partisan or ideological take on reality. And everyone has fresh memories and often personal feelings about the damage left by the very recently departed, partisan conservative government. So, almost nobody is very interested today in hearing about conservative alternatives to the President’s policies and decisions.

Eventually, the not-very-partisan or ideological majority of Americans will accumulate some unhappy memories and personal disappointments about the current administration, and then they’ll be ready to at least listen to the conservative message. That could take several years; and for now, the Republican’s pitiable default position has become “just say no” to the most popular president in a generation. So, the same partisan conservatives who used to advance some fairly radical ideas — many of which became Bush administration proposals — are reduced to being predictable defenders of the status quo, whatever it happens to be.

Economic policy is suffering from this result. The administration’s approach to the financial market crisis, for example, has been properly questioned as not going far or deep enough into the problem by Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, Simon Johnson and other progressives (including myself). But questions from the progressive side have little political significance, since no administration listens to outside advisors once its proposals are public, and everyone else knows that friendly critics have no place else to go. The alternatives that matter in politics have to come from the opposition. But the Republican position here has been that government should be involved in the crisis as little as possible — which is as close as they could come to a status quo, when the status itself is a disaster. So the public debate never forced the administration to sharpen its own thinking and improve its policies. The result is an economic program which might succeed — or, equally likely, could leave us with a financial system and economy that remain weak for years.

As for the debate over soon-to-be Justice Sotomayor, the Republicans are simply cooked. They can’t credibly say she isn’t up to the job — the meme on Harriet Miers —since her academic record is brilliant. They can’t credibly say she doesn’t have the requisite experience, since she’s been a sitting judge longer than any Supreme Court nominee in a century. And they can’t credibly call her a radical, since her opinions place her squarely in the center-left territory occupied by the Justice she’s replacing. In this last respect at least, she represents the status quo that Republicans currently cling to. But their followers wouldn’t hear of it. So they’re left with another just-say-no message that’s certain to further alienate Hispanics, the largest voting group not yet locked in to one of the parties, and many women, the largest voting group period.

The President can rest easy: It’s likely to be a long time before most Americans listen to new ideas from conservative Republicans. And the rest of us will have to settle for a debate over a Supreme Court nomination that’s likely to be as incoherent and enervating as the recent public discussions of the great economic issues of our time. In both cases, it’s a genuine shame.