David Michael Miller
Liberals have a hunger for policy details. When I was a candidate it was common for liberal interest groups to demand that we be “specific” when responding to questions on their questionnaires.
One reason for Elizabeth Warren’s popularity among the left is her two-dozen or so detailed plans. “I’ve got a plan for that,” is Warren’s de facto campaign slogan.
I think that’s exactly wrong for both political and governing reasons. Let me make a case for vagueness.
First off, details will bring a candidate nothing but pain and heartache. Approximately 99.9 percent of voters will not read your plans. But among the one tenth of one percent who will scour them will be opposition researchers. They’ll be sure to pick out the one or two most unpopular points and drive those home. So, for example, Warren has a detailed plan on health insurance, but the only detail that will matter should she win the nomination is that her plan would take away private health insurance from the 180 million Americans who have it.
And that’s an especially devastating argument in a must-win state like Wisconsin because our union legacy means that more people have private insurance through their employers than in most states.
Second, it’s better both as a candidate and ultimately as an office holder to set a broad goal and be flexible on how to get there. So, sticking with health care, Americans are overwhelmingly in favor of universal coverage. But when you start to drill down, things change. So if your universal coverage plan is single-payer, and people come to understand that that means that they can’t keep their current insurance plan, support rapidly turns to opposition.
And once in office it’s much better to have been committed to an ultimate goal as opposed to a specific path to get there. Party activists who are committed to a single-payer solution won’t forgive a candidate who said she was for that but then changed her mind when she found that it was a political nonstarter. So, that hems her in when she tries to compromise. Committing to one path makes it harder to navigate to a solution through the legislative process. Flexibility is the key to legislative success. Obamacare is a mess of compromises but it’s working to insure tens of millions of people who had been without coverage. And, even at the hands of an extremely hostile administration, it’s proving to be remarkably resilient.
Third, and probably most importantly, the liberal love of details obscures the bigger picture. Democrats seldom make clear appeals to broad values. Instead, Americans are left to discern the party’s values from dozens of disjointed pieces of specific plans. And since most of those plans are about big government spending programs (Medicare for all, paying off everyone’s college debts, free college tuition, reparations for slavery, etc.), the overall impression voters get is that the party stands for handing out lots of money and for higher taxes to pay for it all.
In the rare instances when Democrats do provide a value statement they provide the wrong one. So, on health care, the standard Democratic response is that it is a “human right.” I agree, but that’s just a terrible political argument. Americans don’t want to hear about what they’re owed. They want to hear about what they can earn.
Better to have no specific plans at all. Instead, make strong, clear value statements. Say you’re for hard work, personal responsibility and individual freedom. (Those are my values, not necessarily those of the Democratic Party, but I think they’d resonate with the blue-collar voters the Dems need to win back.) When asked for details, say you’re for things like universal health care, common sense immigration reform, fairness in taxation, etc. And just leave it at that. Provide no details.
A good example of how to do it right is John Kennedy’s leadership on America’s moon shot. In 1961 he set a clear goal: land a man on the moon by the end of that decade and get him safely back to earth. That was a remarkable goal since when he said it the country had sent only one man into space and that was for all of 15 minutes. There wasn’t so much as a telecommunications satellite in orbit at the time.
Then Kennedy laid out the justification for the effort that would eventually cost an astounding 2 percent of the entire gross national product.
In a speech at Rice University in Houston he said, “We choose to go to the moon… not because (it) is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills…”
Leaving the podium when he was done he passed in front of NASA administrators and quipped, “All right. Now, you guys do the details.” (You can read more about all this in Douglas Brinkley’s excellent new book, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race.)
And there you had it. A clear, ambitious policy goal and the value-based justification for doing it, but no detail whatsoever. In fact, at about that time there was a debate raging inside NASA over which of three lunar landing strategies to pursue. Each one came with its own price tag and set of risks and JFK could have inserted himself into that debate. He didn’t. He left it to the rocket scientists. That’s leadership.
Detailed plans among candidates are bad politics and worse governing. Moreover, they are fantasies as nothing ever plays out in the real world of policy-making according to plan. Good leaders set clear policy goals and make compelling value statements to underpin them while maintaining their flexibility on the exact route to get there.
Instead of having a plan for that, better to have a value for that.
