The Deficit and Elite Opinion

The election, at a minimum, suggested that the deficit was not such a great electoral issue. The economics of the deficit were at best obscure. Why, then, one might ask, did the election not cause the issue to begin to fade away? If the public was basically satisfied, and experience suggested it gave no partisan advantage, then why didn't the politicians find something else to worry about?

Error and inertia and the short-run attractiveness of banging on the other side explain some persistence of the deficit issue. We would emphasize another factor as well. Unlike Time 's student in Youngstown, the politicians could not so easily separate the nation's debt from their self-esteem. The deficit was their responsibility as the nation's governors and thus a measure of their own worth. True, the public kept returning incumbents to office, seemingly indicating satisfactory performance. Yet within their own group, as well as the realm of opinion formation and debate to which they paid most attention, the deficit became a sign of their own ineptitude.

This intermediate realm of "informed," "elite," or "responsible" opinion is what V. O. Key called the "political stratum." Throughout the budgetary struggles we have seen politicians verbally mortifying themselves over their deficit sin, lamenting their own lack of courage, and prophesying the visitation of the sins of the fathers upon the children and grandchildren unto endless generations. You would think they were discussing the sacking of the Temple of Solomon. We have seen commentators galore, the mass media and academics, holding politicians accountable; the newsweeklies running cover articles on the deficit monster searching for ill effects and, as they stubbornly refused to appear, stubbornly concluding that retribution was inevitable. The deficit battle has been, in large measure, a panic of responsibility, a panic among the responsible .

There is a quality of group-think to our story that might best be left to the social psychologists. Politicians are a group, talking to each other, reinforcing their own opinions. And they pay close attention to their, peer groups of Washington influentials, the media and policy experts.^[41] Yet the tendency to all say the same thing resulted also from some ways politicians relate to the public.

American politicians are entrepreneurs in a market for representation. They are continually insecure, fearful that their market will be raided by a competitor. Worse yet, their customers' preferences are fickle, influenced by other noncompetitive but also uncontrollable actors (the media, academics, etc.) who are not competitors but also cannot be controlled. Politicians can never be sure what the public wants. All of us come to understand other people by associating them with ourselves; politicians similarly expect the public to share their personal fears and values even while suspecting that the public may be different. Fear of both opponents using the deficit and other influencers increasing the marketability of antideficit appeals, encouraged politicians to believe that the public would punish deficit makers. This belief, of course, was fed by many pieces of evidence ranging from poll data to personal contacts. But it was wrong.

Democracy, a wise man (we think Adlai Stevenson) once said, is a political system in which the people get the kind of government they deserve. In a fair world, politicians could tell the public that it should resolve the contradictions within itself. What did it want compared to what it was prepared to pay for? In the real world, politicians could not blame the voters. That is not only a bad way to get reelected (compare Jimmy Carter and his "malaise" to his buttering up the public in 1976), but it also admits politicians' impotence, a denial of responsibility for governing the nation. Politicians of all stripes would take the moral objections to deficits more seriously because, if the deficit signified bad management, they were the bad managers.

When the press blasted politicians, it quoted politicians to do so. Dan Rostenkowski declared that "word of our impotence will precede us"; Warren Rudman described himself and his colleagues as "a bunch of turkeys." The whole complex of moral notions surrounding the deficit—household management, trusteeship, care for future generations, good government—spoke to the self-worth of the nation's governors more than to that of the public. The politics of responsibility was self-imposed by many of our leaders upon their visions of themselves.

In 1980 and 1981, the deficit ostensibly had been so important because it had something to do with the economy. By 1983 and 1984, deficits were much worse, and the economy was somewhat better. If the real concern were the economy, worry about deficits should have diminished.

On balance, worry about the deficit did diminish among the public, but agony over it among politicians increased. The issue remained, but its meaning changed.

The deficit became a symbol of order and legitimacy within the political household. Both its persistence and level of budgetary strife convinced politicians they were failing to govern the nation. Thus, the failure to solve the problem became the problem: the deficit mattered because it proved the politicians were too inept to handle it. Desperate to show they could act, Congress and the president adopted two radical proposals: tax reform and Gramm-Rudman-Hollings.

There are many differences and similarities between the politics of 1985–1986, when GRH and tax reform were adopted, and the politics of 1981, the year of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act and Economic Recovery Tax Act. The most important difference is in the stakes. In 1981 the question was whether the government could command the economy. In 1985–1986 the question was whether the government could control itself.