Voters want growth, not income redistribution: as Barone writes
Here.
Asked most feel growth is more important than a wealth gap in
America.
Also promoting a class warfare has not produced a Democratic
President in a long time.
Obama Democrats' assumption that economic distress would make Americans more supportive of, or amenable to, big government policies
may therefore be in error.
We have all been taught by the great and widely read New Deal historians, and that
this lesson has been absorbed by
generations of politicians and political pundits.
Lesson: If you want redistribution, you better first
produce growth.
Barone writes:
a recent Gallup poll showing that while 82 percent of
Americans think it's extremely or very important to "grow and expand the
economy" and 70 percent say it's similarly important to "increase
equality of opportunity for people to get ahead," only 46 percent say
it's important to "reduce the income and wealth gap between the rich and
the poor" and 54 percent say this is only somewhat or not important.
In addition, by a 52 to 45 percent margin, Americans see the gap
between the rich and the poor as an acceptable part of the economic
system rather than a problem that needs to be fixed. In 1998, during the
high-tech economic boom, Americans took the opposite view by the same
margin.
As Galston notes, these findings suggest that Obama's much praised
speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, decrying inequality, "may well reduce his
chances of prevailing in a close race."
Class warfare politics, as I
have noted, hasn't produced a Democratic presidential victory in a long,
long time.
Where Galston misses a step, I think, is that he seems to regard the
move away from redistributionist politics in this time of economic
stagnation as an anomaly in need of explanation. He seems to share the
Obama Democrats' assumption that economic distress would make Americans
more supportive of, or amenable to, big government policies.
That, after all, is what we have all been taught by the great and
widely read New Deal historians, and that lesson has been absorbed by
generations of politicians and political pundits.
I believe that historians have taught the wrong lessons about the
1930s. And I believe there is a plausible and probably correct reason
why economic distress has apparently moved Americans to be less rather
than more supportive of big government.
To understand the lessons of the 1930s, you need to read the
election returns. Franklin Roosevelt's big victory in 1932 was a massive
rejection of Republicans across the board. Republicans lost huge ground
in urban and rural areas, in the West and Midwest and most of the East,
even in their few redoubts in the South.
Lesson: If you want redistribution, you better first produce growth.
Which the Obama Democrats' policies have failed to do.