Despite the odd way it was designed and carried off, Monday night’s debate between U.S. Senate candidates Erskine Bowles and Elizabeth Dole was, for the most part, substantive and informative. Viewers had ample opportunity to learn more about the candidates’ backgrounds, positions, and areas of disagreement.
What struck me most was the role reversal that Bowles has accomplished. Usually, Democrats running in a moderate-to-conservative state like North Carolina find that they must run towards the center to be competitive. In 1998, for example, John Edwards — who was mostly apolitical in the years before his campaign but was generally considered a traditional, liberal trial lawyer — introduced himself to North Carolina voters as a common-sense moderate. Four-term Gov. Jim Hunt did the same. Two-time Senate loser Harvey Gantt didn’t, and lost. Ditto for Terry Sanford, who was elected in the 1960s as a moderate governor but who lasted only one term in the Senate as a liberal.
Bowles isn’t following the pattern. He isn’t a liberal pretending to be a moderate. He’s a moderate pretending to be a liberal. On a host of issues — Social Security reform, Medicare, free trade, business regulation, etc. — Bowles talks a liberal game, but he isn’t really believable. He attacked Dole for her position on allowing personal investment within the Social Security system, even though the Clinton administration (in which he was prominently involved) flirted with the same idea and eventually settled on the somewhat similar notion of direct government investment of Social Security funds in the stock market. Dole’s plan differs only in that individuals, not politicians, would decide whether the money would be invested and control its dispersal. Whatever he says now, Bowles is very likely to support something similar, either as senator or as a private citizen, because he has enough sense to understand that the alternatives of higher payroll or income taxes or lower benefits are nonstarters.
Similarly, Bowles was clearly a free-trader in his pre-political life, and carried the Clinton administration’s water on the issue for years. This is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, Clinton’s trade policies were among the few things he got pretty much right during his tenure, so Bowles deserves credit for having a moderating influence on an otherwise clueless administration. Now, though, Bowles is running as a protectionist out of the 1950s or 1920s or something. It’s embarrassing, and completely unbelievable.
Lastly, I’ll mention the Democratic candidate’s incessant warbling about raising the minimum wage. Once upon a time, neo-liberal or moderate Democrats of the Clinton-Rubin-Bowles ilk admitted the economic irrationality of making low-skill labor more expensive to employers — it tends to make employers less likely to hire low-skill labor, as anyone with a modicum of sense understands — and instead argued that the government could best help low-income workers by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The EITC is essentially a federal wage supplement, a bad idea in my opinion, but at least it doesn’t shove a wedge between workers and the businesses that might hire them. Wages are allowed to rise or fall to the level at which employers perceive it profitable to hire workers. If “society” believes these wages, reflecting the real productivity of the workers, do not provide a sufficient standard of living, then it supplements the wages directly.
Clinton made this argument early in his term, though he did stumble back into workplace socialism later on. But Bowles certainly knows better, and is peddling his minimum-wage scheme merely to appeal to populists in his own party who need a reason to turn out.
Dole, for her part, is a moderate-conservative who is presenting herself to the voters as, well, a moderate-conservative. While issuing the appropriate promises regarding abortion, gun control, taxes, and so on, she is not really claiming to be the next Jesse Helms. Moderates like her talk about glass ceilings and auto safety and the Red Cross. Conservatives like her surprisingly strong advocacy of free trade, market-based reforms in Social Security and health care, and her strong support for the president’s foreign policy.
Dole may be acting, but the role isn’t much of a stretch. Bowles, however, is taking off his expensive necktie, changing from his designer suits into jeans, stuffing his Rolex in his pocket, and pretending to be Al Bundy from “Married with Children.” It’s painful to watch.