Sixth in a Series
In past installments, we’ve examined the issues of election legitimacy, campaign inefficiency, voter uncertainty, and media superfluity. Now let’s look at another problem, politicians’ unaccountability. That is, how do we get politicians to keep their promises? How do restore trust? One answer, as we shall see, is to make promises, in the form of pledges—and then keep them.
George H.W. Bush Breaks His Pledge
This author had the experience of working, for seven years—in his political action committee, in his presidential campaign, in his White House—for the modern political figure who is probably most famous for breaking a campaign pledge. That would be George H.W. Bush, who famously said, while accepting the Republican presidential nomination, “Read my lips. No new taxes.” Those sound-bite words were spoken on August 18, 1988, at the Republican convention in New Orleans.
In fact, candidate Bush had pledged not to raise taxes the year before, and that pledge had helped him to secure the GOP presidential nomination—fending off tax-cutter Jack Kemp and clarifying the difference with tax-raiser Bob Dole—as well as helped him win the presidency against Michael Dukakis, the governor of the Northeastern state dubbed “Taxachusetts.”
Yet once in office, the 41st president was persuaded to break his no-new-taxes pledge by Office of Management and Budget director Richard Darman, who saw himself as the Henry Kissinger of fiscal policy. Bush was a good man, and overall, a good president, and yet he had never particularly believed in the no-new-taxes pledge; it went against his innate Wall Street-mindedness and his genteel aversion to California Reagan-Kemp-types. Yet it took Darman’s Svengali skills to bring Bush to abandon his promise.
Alas for the 41st president, Darman’s grand plan, so intricately conceived with help from the DC establishment, was not only cynical mendacity, it was also a failure. The deficit went up after the 1990 budget deal with pro-tax Democrats, even as Bush’s political standing went down. That plummet was disguised for a while by the surge in patriotic feeling from Operation Desert Storm, and yet by the end of 1991, Bush’s peril was obvious, and in fact, by 1992, Bush’s standing had collapsed. Having won nearly 54 percent of the popular vote in 1988, he fell to 37 percent of the vote years later; it was the most dramatic slide for an incumbent president in U.S history. And so Bush became a one-termer, bringing an era of Republican national dominance—seven victories in ten elections—to a close.
Looking back, we are reminded of the power of a pledge. At the time, as a mid-level White House domestic policy aide—albeit marginalized from the Darman tax negotiations, which I opposed—I joked that Bush could have done just about anything else, no matter how foolish, on domestic policy and suffered less blowback than he did for breaking the tax pledge. That is, the pledge was so clear that it was simply obvious that Bush had broken his word in a way that couldn’t be spun. Even ardent Bush loyalists had to admit he had, er, changed his mind. And plenty of people who simply assume that a promise is a promise took Bush to be a liar. That's why pledges, and oaths in general, have power: Regardless of policy wherefores, people like the truth, and they especially don't like to be lied to.
We should recall that the pledge was more than Bush’s words on the campaign trail, or even at the New Orleans convention. The pledge was also, in fact, a formal, albeit terse, document, composed by Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), the policy group founded by conservative activist Grover Norquist. ATR and Norquist had brilliantly distilled anti-tax sentiment down to a tightly worded anti-tax pledge. Bush had signed it in April 1987, as a way of further enunciating his conservative credentials.
Indeed, the pledge was, and is, so simple and clear that no amount of obfuscation could save a pledge-breaker from the realization that he or she had broken he pledge. To be sure, not everyone opposes tax increases, or even cares about the tax issue, either way. And yet for those who do care, the ATR pledge is clarifying.
The Power of Pledges
In fact, clarity is the friend of the issues-minded voter, but it’s not necessarily the friend of the politician, who often feels that he or she has more to gain from non-clarity. So the challenge to the issues-minded is to inject reciprocity into the process, so that the implicit-not-explicit “contract” between the electors (the voters) and the elected (the candidates) is upheld. That is, the voters and the politicians should both keep their promises, and be rewarded, politically. The voter should get what he or she wants (the position on the pledge, whatever it might be) and the politician should get what he or she wants (election victory, with the presumption that once in office the policy pledge will be kept).
So we can see that pledge-based politics could be a valuable tool, both for campaigning and governing. In a sense, pledges are what campaign platforms used to be, but over the decades, platforms have become so bloated and wordy that they have lost their conciseness. And at the same time, pols have gotten better at being slippery. So that’s why policy-minded types are thinking more about pithy ATR-type pledges—or at least they should. Because, after all, Norquist and ATR have changed Republican politics in the past three decades; the GOP is much more firmly the anti-tax party.
We can add a possible refinement on the tax pledge, and other pledges: if the pledge is seen as going both ways, to the voter and to the candidate, it could help both sides of the political transaction. If the pol takes the pledge on an issue the voter cares about (such as taxes), the voter could pledge to vote for that candidate, or at least another candidate who has taken the same pledge. So that’s a way of enshrining trust.
Will this happen? It already has happened; how much more is up to the people and the pols. But we can see that if the pledge were expressed in those terms; it could be powerful. Such pledging might not be the stuff of a binding legal contract, but it could be a moral contract, or even, who knows, down the road somewhere, a blockchain-y smart contract.
Some will wonder: Could the ATR pledge model be extended to other issues? Some might argue that the tax issue is relatively straight-forward, in terms of a yea or nay vote, and yet as we know, nothing in politics, including fiscal politics, is simple. For instance, Norquist himself has been asked about closing loopholes—does that count as a tax increase that violates the pledge? Norquist’s answer has been that closing loopholes is okay, so long as there’s at least an equal cut in taxes or tax rates somewhere else. That’s a perfectly good response, and yet we can see how uncertainty, even controversy, can slip into the mix as to what is, and is not, a tax increase.
So what of other issues, foreign and domestic? Without hashing through all the hypotheticals, we can just say that it’s a challenge to pledge-penners. For the sake of their issue, their goal should be precision. Because we should keep in mind that politicians have often sought to perfect the art of letting things—especially unpopular things—happen without their “fingerprints.” That is, the process is set up to be “automatic,” or on “auto pilot,” such that, say, a tax increase happens even without anyone visibly voting for it. An example of this is “bracket creep” in income tax rates, as voters are pushed into higher payments due to inflation. And if that’s possible about taxes, imagine what’s possible about foreign policy.
The Hypothecation Solution
In fact, on many issues, the opinions of the voters don’t seem to matter. Back in 2014, the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that voters have essentially zero impact on policy: “The estimated impact of average citizens’ preferences drops precipitously, to a non-significant, near-zero level.” Sure, they can vote for whomever they wish, but policy, Gilens and Page argued, isn’t affected by the outcome of an election. Indeed, in times of polarization, if each side knocks the other out, we could see the onset of a sort of negative Nash equilibrium.
So what’s the way out? One answer, as we have seen, is pledges. But there’s another answer from the policy world. As always, it’s best to identify, if we can, something promising that has already worked—and build on that.
Here we can introduce a useful concept: hypothecation, also known as ring-fencing. “Hypothecated” is a two-dollar word for dedicated: the idea of hypothecated taxes is that revenue is specifically dedicated to a certain goal, such as a sales tax that’s exclusively dedicated to schools or parks. Such taxes are common at the state and local level, where such taxes—even tax increases—prove often to be reliably popular. That is, voters might feel good about paying a special sales tax, for example, to build a park or a school or a new sewer system. In fact, the closer the citizen is to a problem, the more likely he or she will be sympathetic to arguments that more taxes could solve the problem.
We can note that popular federal programs often follow the same model of hypothecation. The Social Security system, for example, began in the 1930s amidst lots of stern talk about a sacrosanct “account,” into which the payroll taxes of future recipients were deposited. This account was always something of an accounting fiction, and yet the idea that the citizen, upon retirement, is merely drawing on “his” or “her” account is a powerful notion to this day—and helps explain why Social Security is so popular. To the extent that hypothecation implies ownership, or at least a property right, well, that’s powerful.
Another example of alleged federal hypothecation is the highway trust fund (HTF), financed by a “user fee” of gasoline taxes. In fact, DC lawmakers have long dipped into—some would say looted—the HTF. And that’s how trust is eroded. So that’s likely one reason why people don’t much like the federal government. According to one survey, just 28 percent of Americans hold a favorable view of the federal government; by contrast, the more often truly hypothecated state and local governments enjoy higher approval, 57 percent and 63 percent, respectively.
We can add that if politics were a series of pledges, that would be a limit on demagogues—they would, at least to some extent, find themselves constrained by their pledges. So maybe the feds should give dedication another try—and mean it this time. To be sure, there’s a counter-argument: that elected officials should do what they think best. The eminent British conservative Edmund Burke made exactly this argument in the 18th century. He lost. That hardly settles the matter, but for our purposes, we can say that it would be good if politicians kept their pledges.
To state the matter positively, once politicians are inspired with a message, they can be very articulate and persuasive. For instance, Abraham Lincoln. In the middle of the 19th century, the arguments for and against slavery were fast and furious. And yet in 1858, Lincoln summed up the abolitionist argument in a few crisp words: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” There in a snap: The anti-slavery argument, 14 words. By comparison, the ATR tax pledge, at 55 words, is a slog.
But whether it’s 14 words, 55 words, or even longer the key goal is to boil down the policy point to its comprehensible essential: as a pledge. If that can be done, voters and elected officials alike will be able to benefit. And the country, too, will benefit.
Next: Money in Politics
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