The War of Ideas

(2 of 2)
In 2008, a fresh, maybe even exciting federal response to the interlocking national economic, energy and security crises should be front and center of the debate, but none of the Democrats running for President seems to have the courage or sagacity to make the offer. Their timidity was obvious when George W. Bush proposed a larger economic-stimulus package — roughly $145 billion — to meet the looming recession than Clinton, Obama or John Edwards did. Worse, the Democrats seemed willing to play on the Republican side of the field, proposing short-term fixes and tax rebates rather than a more comprehensive, thematic solution to the problem. Think about it: the terrorist threat to national security, the relative decline of the American middle class, the sudden flimsiness of the international economic structure — to say nothing of the potential destruction of the planet — all are influenced by the fact that, as Clinton often says, "we borrow money from the Chinese to buy oil from the Saudis." Somewhere in there is a big campaign theme waiting to be born.

The intensity of these problems is so obvious, even the Republicans — especially John McCain, Mike Huckabee and the latest edition of Mitt Romney — are talking about them. But G.O.P. credibility is undercut by its antediluvian Reaganism: its reflexive opposition to any solution — and therefore any sense of nonmilitary national purpose — coming out of Washington.

All the leading Democrats have produced impressive energy-independence plans, with Clinton's the most sophisticated, but none of them have extrapolated, none of them have made this the central theme of their campaign, the national purpose that provides the spine for their economic and national-security plans. Clinton, to her credit, threw $5 billion for weatherproofing and retrofitting into her stimulus package, but it was an afterthought. "We weren't being as creative as we might have been," one of her economic advisers told me.

Creative would have been to announce a Great American Renewal, to announce — for starters — that we're going to attack the looming recession by unleashing an army of unemployed construction and manufacturing laborers to insulate every public building in America, replace every incandescent lightbulb, rebuild the rail system for high-speed travel and start building solar and wind farms to provide electricity for our military installations and every other federal building. Or whatever. But something big, something that recognizes that the word United, which appears prominently in the name of our country, is probably the biggest Democratic idea of all.