OBSTRUCTION IS A TRAP FOR DEMOCRATS
The GOP gains if voters hate the government. But my party loses.
On Inauguration Day in 2009, top Republican leaders and strategists gathered at the Caucus Room restaurant to discuss how they were going to obstruct and derail Barack Obama’s presidency. It wasn’t a policy dinner about their ideological concerns, Robert Draper wrote in his 2012 book about the GOP-run House. It was a political dinner about obstruction as a tactic.
Many Democrats — myself included — are asking whether our leaders need to have a similar dinner Jan. 20 to discuss how we can obstruct and oppose every move by the Trump administration. The theory goes that obstruction was successful at stymieing the Obama administration, and that the strategy led to the GOP’s electoral successes. Some say we should take it straight from their playbook and use it against them.
I get the feeling. It’s partially an emotional reaction to this election and to eight years of unmitigated and unjustified obstruction. Having helped lead political strategy for Democrats on Capitol Hill during those years, I know it’s also partially a reaction to the fact that Republican obstruction was remarkably effective. As even President Obama has said, it was a “pretty smart and well executed” tactic. IN THE LONG RUN There’s a big problem with this political strategy for Democrats: In the long run, it won’t work. If one thing is clear from the past three decades — since President Reagan’s election in 1980 — it’s that the more voters hate government, the more Republicans benefit. That’s their strategy. We can’t play into it. To quote Star Wars' Admiral Ackbar, “It’s a trap.”
If our only plan is to make government non-functional like Republicans did to us, then we will end up invalidating the basic progressive thesis: Government action can improve people’s lives. We can’t win the public debate about a progressive agenda if we end up proving the central hypothesis of the conservative agenda — that government can’t get things done — to be true instead.
Republicans win among voters who hate government, so Democrats’ political strategy can’t be to make more people hate government. According to exit polls, among the 29% of voters who were either enthusiastic or satisfied with the federal government, Hillary Clinton won with 76%. Among the 69% who were dissat- isfied or angry with government, Donald Trump won with 57%.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting compromising with Trump out of political expediency or caving under his political pressure. The president-elect won despite having the largest popular vote deficit of any president in U.S. history, and he faces the lowest approval ratings of any president-elect in modern history. Democrats in Congress can feel absolutely comfortable opposing him when they want without political repercussions.
We don’t face a bully pulpit. We just face a bully. FOR THE PEOPLE We should strongly oppose him at every turn when he proposes dangerous plans, reckless ideas and elements of his out-of-touch agenda — from his Muslim ban to his health care repeal and all the rest. But we should strongly oppose him and his policies because they are bad for the country, not because we think sheer opposition will help us politically.
Instead, we can and should show that there is an alternative type of government that can work for people. Despite record high disapproval of Washington and Congress, according to a 2015 survey by Global Strategy Group, 69% of the country believes that government is still capable of doing great things, even though it’s broken today.
Republicans continue to run on the premise that government isn’t working. When they win an election, they govern in a way that proves the premise true.
While we face no political pressure to roll over and help the new administration, it’s not in our interest to reflexively obstruct only for the sake of obstruction — further eroding confidence in the institution of government. That just plays into the Republicans’ hands.
It’s too soon to tell whether 2018 will be another change election. If it is, the conclusion we want voters to reach is that Trump’s government doesn’t work for them — not that government doesn’t work at all.
We’ll never hate government more than Republicans do, and we never should.
Jesse Ferguson, who was deputy national press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, also was executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Independent Expenditure Program and communications director of the DCCC.