RALEIGH – We’ve all been there, haven’t we?
You’re talking to a friend, speaking to a small group, or engaged in a spirited debate about a controversial issue. You start to make a point, perhaps in response to an unexpected question, and your mouth moves faster than your brain. A bizarre example, an off-color remark, or a ridiculously exaggerated version of what you meant to say comes out of your mouth.
What do you do?
If you are Gov. Bev Perdue or House Speaker Thom Tillis, you apparently decide that the best course of action is just to plow ahead, finish the point, and then move on. As should now be obvious, this is the wrong thing to do. As soon as your brain catches up with your mouth, use it! Stop, admit your mistake or misstatement, and correct the record. Do it because you owe it to your friend or audience. Do it because in this day of ubiquitous recording devices, it is foolish to assume that your words won’t come back to bite you.
They certainly bit Perdue and Tillis.
What must be particularly galling to both politicians if that, with a more judicious choice of words and examples, they might well have been able to make a point that any fair-minded person could have accepted as at least reasonable, if not persuasive.
For example, Gov. Perdue seemed to be trying to argue that electoral calculations have made it difficult to get agreement in Washington on reforming taxes, balancing the budget, and creating jobs. Who could disagree with that? Few honestly would.
The real disagreement is not whether electoral calculations are scuttling good public policy, but which ones. I think the most-destructive electoral calculation is on the part of liberal politicians who know perfectly well it is impossible to balance the federal budget without reforming Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlements – and that it is also impossible to make a significant dent in the deficit by raising taxes on millionaires and billionaires – and yet are unwilling to admit this for fear of alienating their deluded political base.
Of course, left-wing analysts have a different electoral calculation in mind: that conservative politicians won’t agree to tax increases as a condition for a budget deal because they fear primary opposition from Tea Party candidates. My point here is not to refight the battle over federal fiscal policy. My point is that both sides see the problem as one of electoral considerations trumping good policy.
Perdue screwed up by seeming to suggest that politicians would behave better if they weren’t accountable to voters. A far better argument would have been that politicians ought to be making a stronger case for their position to gain more support from voters with mixed or tentative views on the subject.
As for Tillis, his suggestion before a Republican crowd at Mars Hill College that policymakers should “find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance” was a horrendous choice of words for a proposition that few people truly disagree with: that policymakers ought to distinguish between potential recipients of public assistance based on the extent to which their current and future choices explain their level of dependency.
When Tillis suggested that persons with chronic physical or mental infirmities ought to be treated differently than those who are poor because of repeated instances of substance abuse or out-of-wedlock births, he was on solid ground. An extreme view? Not at all. Many public policies have long reflected this distinction. The bipartisan welfare reforms of the mid-1990s, for example, were aimed at changing the incentives to work for able-bodied recipients of what was then called AFDC. They weren’t designed for SSDI recipients or the elderly.
Where Tillis went horribly awry was to say that “we have to show respect for that woman who has cerebral palsy and had no choice in her condition that needs help and we should help. And we need to get those folks to look down at these people who choose to get into a condition that makes them dependent on government.”
First of all, respect need not be selective. To the disabled who lack family resources and become wards of the state, a respectful policy consists of sufficient support for everyday living coupled with vocational rehabilitation to bring as many of them as possible back into the workforce, not only to defray cost but also to provide them the satisfaction of productive employment.
And to the able-bodied parent who loses a job, has a run in with the criminal justice system, or otherwise becomes unable to pay the family’s bills, a respectful policy consists of short-term aid coupled with pro-growth policies to create jobs and strong incentives for welfare recipients to take those jobs. Those incentives may well include a refusal to continue paying welfare benefits to those who repeatedly fail to take responsibility for their own actions.
As for trying to make the disabled “look down” on those who make self-destructive choices – to have multiple children out-of-wedlock, to drop out of school, or to abuse drugs and alcohol – Tillis’s idea is neither wise nor workable. We shouldn’t be trying to get anyone to “look down” on irresponsible or indolent welfare recipients. We should be trying to get those welfare recipients to “look up” – to recognize how their decisions are damaging their life prospects, and those of their children, and to aspire to something better.
To try to guess at what Perdue and Tillis meant to say is not to excuse their gaffes. After all, they are our elected representatives. They asked for the job of exercising governmental power on our behalf, which means they asked for the job of telling us what they mean to do with that power, and why.
We shouldn’t have to guess.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.