[00:00:49:08] To what extent are issues like race, immigration, poverty versus wealth—but especially race—getting played out implicitly?

I think there are a few things you could say.

One is, race is never far from the surface in society or in American politics. One.

But, two, if you look at the things that were said about Bill Clinton when he became President and throughout his presidency, the active attempts to delegitimize him, including a series of Wall Street Journal editorials that hinted at the idea that he was an accessory to murder when he was Governor of Arkansas, really tells you that the blood sport that Vince Foster sadly wrote about was there.

The attempt to build not a broad coalition but the narrowest one possible was Karl Rove’s strategy in both 2000 and 2004. Rove now is trying to re-write that history. But there’s little doubt that he saw the way to victory in 2004 was to get 50.1 percent with Republicans and a few stray others, if you could get them. But, it wasn’t an attempt to try and find the broad ground in the center. It was an attempt to keep it at one end.

And, you know, the fact is both parties have their tough leaders and strategists who are going to use whatever tactics they can. But, in this case, race is a part of this. And it’s a dangerous game to play not only because it adds to the tribal elements here. But, to look at the larger focus that you’ve suggested, it’s not just race, we have greater economic inequality in the country than we have had in the last century or even more. We are now on a par with Juan Perón’s Argentina and it’s growing worse. And that is not a formula for long-term stability and satisfaction in a society. And, if you play on those division, and in particular if you want to pursue policies that are going to heighten the inequality, you’re going to reap the whirlwind. And that’s a real danger here.

So, ironically it turns out that in times of economic inequality, the squeeze on the Middle Class, Working Class tends to lead to resentments. And the resentments get sometimes directed upwards to the Moguls, the Billionaires but just as often gets directed at those who aren’t like us. They could be immigrants from Europe in an earlier era or they could be blacks or Hispanics or someone else. But, the anti-immigrant sentiment coincides with the racial dimension and economic inequality to produce a volatile mix of very strong opinions and resentments that fuel the polarization going on. And you end of getting very strange coalitions. Who would have had thought that the Republicans’ two major constituent groups, and this is the part of business, are evangelical Christians and white Working Class Americans. That’s the core of their vote, if not their financial support.

[00:05:38:23] Listen. If you go back, historically, Democrats have no reputation for fiscal probity. In fact, the Republicans were the green eye shade party while Democrats were trying to grow government and often times not too much concerned with whether the books balanced.

But, this really began to change in the late 70s. The Prop 13 in California, anti-tax movement sort of resentment and really led to a transformation of the Republican party from one of fiscal probity and what we consider to be “conservative” to a party that was dedicated toward cutting taxes, primarily.

Jack Kemp, who was one of the champions of this policy, was never much concerned about spending. I mean, come on. Spend. That’s no problem. It will do good things and get the economy running. And that sort of carried on. So, ironically, Republicans in government, controlling the White House, have shown little concern for balancing the books while Democrats...and they don’t care if government goes bankrupt because they don’t like government.

Democrats, on the other hand, wanting a resource there, whether it’s for social safety net or pumping up infrastructure spending or whatever just realize if things get completely out of balance, there will be no room to maintain much less increase these programs. So, Bill Clinton led and had a remarkable success in doing that. And George Bush came into office and his first move was to cut taxes and when it came to spending for the wars and even an expansion of Medicare with prescription drugs, there wasn’t any concern for paying for it at all.

Now, ironically, Republicans are saying, ‘Well, Mr Obama is a big spender and he’s given us all these deficits.’ Well, that’s not where the deficits came from.

And you can see the dynamic is the same because Paul Ryan’s plan and Mitt Romney’s economic plan for reviving the economy and solving the deficit problem is to cut taxes—not just extending the Bush tax cuts but going well beyond that and having an asterisk as to how it will be compensated for by other things. So, it’s a radical restructuring of government assistance, especially for lower income families, the Medicaid, Food Stamps and other governmental activities and lowering taxes.

It’s almost by necessity Democrats who like spending, who created Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and now health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, now feel obliged to figure out a way to pay for it because they know, otherwise, it will all collapse. So they’re the party with the incentive to be fiscally responsible now.

[00:09:22:21] You know, it’s an interesting question.

Of course, we start the book by talking about the debt limit debacle. You know, we’ve had several dozen votes on the debt limit in the last 50 years. And both parties have been utter hypocrites in carrying them out. You have lots of members, when the other party holds the presidency, who vote against increasing the debt limit because they want to look like they’re the fiscal guardians. And then they turn around and behave in exactly the opposite fashion when their party holds the White House.

But, what we’ve always seen in the past with both parties is that the leaders and many of the followers understood that, in the end, you can play these political games, that’s part of what happens in a Democracy, but you’re not going to endanger the Full Faith and Credit of the United States. So, the leaders had votes in reserve. Members could vote against raising the Debt Limit to protect themselves against attack ads. But, if you needed them, you would get them.

This was the first time that you actually had the Debt Limit taken as a hostage. And after it was over, [Senator] Mitch McConnell (R–KY) said, ‘Some of my colleagues thought this was a hostage worth killing. What we’ve learned is that it’s a hostage worth taking.’

And now we’ve got Speaker [John] Boehner (R–OH8), who, in his almost first act as Speaker-elect, warned his colleagues that now that they were going to be in the majority and shared some of the responsibility, they’d have to behave like grown-ups, and that included things like the responsibility for the Debt Limit. Now he’s leading the charge to hold the Debt Limit hostage again.

So, it’s an interesting question. If Democrats are in the minority and it’s a Mitt Romney Presidency, would they do the same thing?

I don’t think so, in part because, I think, you don’t have the kinds of radicals, like a [Congressman] Jason Chaffets (R–UT3), who said, ‘Would we have brought it all down? You bet we would have.’ And the [Congresswoman] Michele Bachmanns (R–MN6) who think that it would have been good.

I was at a session at the Bipartisan Policy Center a few weeks ago talking about these issues and a long-time conservative Republican, who had been Staff Director for the Budget Committee for many years, said that when he was up on the Hill cautioning the Republicans that this was a crazy thing to do, said he had one Member say to him, ‘You know what? If we take our stand and bring the Debt Limit down, it will improve America’s credit rating.’

And he looked at him and said, ‘Do you understand what a AAA rating is? You can’t improve the credit rating.’ And he had no idea what he was talking about.

You know, you’ve got ignoramuses on both sides. But, I don’t think you’d have it.

The danger here, however, is that the longer you go with a party acting in an irresponsible fashion, the more you’re going to build in the likelihood of a counter-reaction. The more you have Democrats who say, ‘Well, look, let’s try and work things out.’ And we’ve had many instances. [Congressman] David Price (D–NC4), a great political scientist and a terrific Member of Congress, on the Appropriations Committee in the House, tells all the time about working out bills in the Subcommittee in Appropriations where both parties are deeply engaged and they reached out and they take their ideas and they put together a thoroughly bi-partisan Bill and when it gets to the Floor all the Republicans vote against their own Bill.

How long are you going to do that?

There was a piece by Bill Keller in the New York Times a couple of days ago about [Senator] Ron Wyden (D–OR) who’s now viewed with great suspicion and some disdain in his own party for having given an imprimatur to Paul Ryan on the Medicare issue. But, Wyden has for a long time gone way out of his way to try and build bi-partisan policy positions with unlikely conservative legislators. The point of Keller’s piece at the end was, he may have made a mistake in this case, whatever it may be. People like Widen are potentially a vanishing breed because how long are you going to do this, if you end up being betrayed by the guy who you work your deal with and then vilified by your own party for doing it?

So, there’s a danger here that this polarization could lead us into even worse territory. And if we go through a cycle of changes in government where the party that doesn’t hold the Presidency immediately assumes the role of throwing grenades into the tent, we’re all going to get damaged.

[00:14:17:21] I think the Ryan blueprint is pretty clear on this. It really leads us into an era in which tax revenues for the federal government are south of 15 percent of GDP instead of north of 20 percent. When the main social safety net programs are changed from defined benefit to defined contribution, which means if you...the primary route to dealing with increasing health care costs which are just untenable, have to be dealt with, is cost-shifting to someone else. Where you reduce over a couple of decades the Medicaid program by 75 percent by turning it into a block grant with caps to the states and either the states are forced to pick it up or more likely you just reduce the level of activity for those people. And remember, a good share of Medicaid expenses go to older people who have spent out all their money and have to be in a nursing home.

So...and where you have defense, interest payments, your vouchers for Medicare, your block grants for Medicaid, and then the room for the rest of government, everything else that you can think of doing, air traffic control, food safety, infrastructure, education, at the federal level is reduced to one percent of GDP or less. I mean, it...there is no room for anything else.

So, it really is, if you will, a repeal of the last century of social and economic policy. It’s a...in many respects, Paul Ryan took Ayn Rand very seriously. And he trims it. He ignores the religious side of it. Ayn Rand was an atheist and wouldn’t cater much to Paul Ryan’s strong religious commitment and belief. But, the rest he’d really go with.

So that is the objective.

[00:16:59:00] And I think that’s exactly right. And it’s not just to take the country back before the New Deal, although I think a lot of—Paul Ryan and others would view the New Deal as a, you know, a terrible development for freedom in America. But it is to take it back before the era of Teddy Roosevelt, too. —TM: Right. It’s remove all of those regulatory impediments that Roosevelt brought in.

It’s a set of radical goals in a lot of ways, using radical means.

And, if there’s a model for them now, it’s [Governor] Scott Walker in Wisconsin. It is, once you get elected, even if it’s by a narrow margin, you muster your forces, you build in the same unity in the majority that you had in the minority, you enact radical policies and then you lash yourself to the mast and believe that once they take effect and freedom reigns, then people will breathe that freedom for the first time and if it takes a while for them to have their lungs react to it, they will soon be blessing you for it.

In the meantime, you build in as many ways as you can to preserve power long enough to keep it from being reversed. And so, of course, the Walker plan was to cut the pins out from under the base of support for the Democratic party by devastating public employee unions. You’d see that even more at a national level, if they took power. And at the same time, we see in a number of states the voter suppression measures. Not just Voter ID laws but attempts to cut out early voting where it would benefit Democrats, to cut out voters who might otherwise go for Democrats, by purging voter rolls pretty indiscriminately when it comes to citizens versus non-citizens and a host of other ways. And my guess is you’d see this at the national level as well. A little bit more of a backwater.

It’s a grand experiment, if it happens. And Paul Ryan talked about it long before he was chosen to be a running mate. And talked about how, if they took all the reigns of power, they would put together the mother of all Reconciliation bills, using that technique that was used for the Bush tax cuts, as it was used for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, as it was used for the Affordable Care Act but in this case going way beyond them to implement this radical vision and avoid a filibuster in the Senate. And, if they win the Senate, even by the...narrow margin and win the House and win the White House, whether Mitt Romney wants it or not, that’s the Bill that will be sent to him and he will, of course, sign it.

And my guess is that if they can’t do it all fully in that fashion, and they would put enormous pressure on the parliamentarians in the House and Senate, enormous pressure on the head of the Congressional Budget Office to make sure that they could get the rules to work to their advantage. But, if it wasn’t enough, then you might see the filibuster either eliminated or brushed aside, believing that there’s a narrow window of opportunity to do this radical stuff.

[00:20:17:00] The only element I’d add to that, the means, is where the money comes back in, as well. We discussed that earlier. But, the Republicans through the so-called Super PACs, and their affiliated non-profit organizations, have gotten a sort of tremendous jump. The Press usually talks about this as ‘outside’ funding. Nothing outside about it. Look at each of those organizations. These are run by party operatives who’ve been very active working with the parties and their candidates at...Karl Rove sort of is Chair of a coalition of these groups. They meet regularly with their Presidents and Presidential candidates.

Sort of, Democratic Billionaires like [George] Soros are appalled by that role. They played this game back in 2004, differently, in a more constrained way, and they didn’t like it one bit. But, Mr [Sheldon] Adelson and Mr [Joe] Ricketts and a whole host of other very wealthy conservatives are perfectly happy to write checks for $10 or $25 or $50 or $100 Million and that soon becomes real money and is certainly part of the political strategy of gaining and retaining power in order to advance what we’ve described as a radical agenda.

—End of Part Three—

GWorks Interviews:

Thomas E. Mann & Norman J. Ornstein

Part One: We Are Not Hegelians

The book, the Republican party as

“insurgent outlier” and the value of

faith in government over conflict

Part Two: Ideology or Bust

The power ideology has over

politicians and the political process

Part Three: End Games

Race, political opportunity & what

Republicans are playing for

Part Four: Inflections

Is this a make-or-break moment

and is there cause for hope

GWorks Interviews:

Thomas E. Mann & Norman J. Ornstein

(Complete)

The one-hour interview in its entirety

For more interviews,

please visit GWorks Interviews

EDITOR’S NOTES

GWorks Interviews: Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein was filmed Tuesday 28 August 2012 in the offices of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, DC. GWorks would like to thank Mssrs Ornstein and Mann for their generous participation; AEI—in particular, Michael Pratt; and Caitlin Graf of Basic Books. Please note: Basic Books provided a Reviewer Copy of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.

Photo: Thomas Mann. Photo credit: Ralph Alswang. Courtesy Basic Books.

Photo: Norman Ornstein. Photo credit: Peter Holden. Courtesy Basic Books.

Photo: It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. Courtesy Basic Books.

1 Noted Congressional scholars and political observers, in Washington, DC for more than 40 years, Thomas E. Mann is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution; Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI. In addition to It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, Mssrs  Ornstein and Mann are co-authors of The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How To Get It Back on Track (Oxford University Press, 2006).

GWorks Interviews is a series dedicated to exploring governance issues of interest with persons given to thinking about and having relevant experience. GWorks invites a GWorks Interviewee to respond in depth to questions. GWorks does not edit the substance of what an interviewee says. GWorks edits GWorks Interviews only for editorial and technical considerations including style, length and productions issues. For more, please visit GWorks Interviews.