The paradigm for this snug arrangement is oddly familiar. It’s the traditional American family. “Daddy” locks the doors at night and brings home the bacon. “Mommy” worries when the kids are sick and makes sure each one gets treated fairly. This neat partition of authority and duty may seem an anachronism from the “Leave it to Beaver” era, but it’s an apt model for today’s political household.
The Democrats’ paralysis ended with the first sign of truce. With the troops heading stateside, the Mommy party suddenly found itself with a familiar role to play: it pushed through a welcome-home tray of educational, medical, child care, counseling, and family separation benefits faster than Harriet Nelson used to offer Cokes and cookies. But when it came time for the victorious commander in chief to address the relieved Congress on what needed doing back on the home front, all George Bush could think to mention was a brace of bills dealing with highways and crime—guy stuff.
Even when troops were mentioned, it was in the context of peace, not war. Thus, the biggest applause line of the conference was a pitch for national health insurance. “For too many of them,” Ted Kennedy said of the expected Desert Storm casualties, “the first wound will be the last time in their lives that they ever receive adequate medical attention.” Not to be outdone, Jesse Jackson instructed: “Another mark of our leadership must be that we support the troops when they are not troops.”
More menacing to the Chantilly Democrats than the Republicans’ locker-room ridicule are their recent raids into “mommy” territory. Last year Bush converted the child care bill from a piece of liberal social legislation to yet another tax cut initiative. This year, thanks to Lamar Alexander’s education initiative, Bush has shifted the terrain from a Mondalesque push for fairness to a “Just wait ‘til your Daddy gets home!” toughening of standards. And though the Dems love to nag about Bush “priorities,” their actual legislative plan for 1991 is limited to a narrow range of social issues, like parental leave and the civil rights bill, which Democrats are now desperately selling as a woman’s issue in order to deflect Bush’s assault on quotas. Thanks to last fall’s five-year budget deal, they can no longer make the spring budget resolution into a debate over “fairness.” With few goodies in the jar, the Mommy party seems a good deal less cuddly than it used to be.
What do the voters get from this two-parent system of politics they seem to like so much? From “daddy” they get a well-endowed defense and a fiscal policy that never asks them to match spending with taxes. From “mommy” they get endless growth in entitlement programs with no cuts in pocket money. The composite effect of the see-who-can-spoil-’em-the-most bidding war is a family that’s overdrawn its joint checking account by $2 trillion the last decade.
Voters, of course, would have it much better in the long term if the ruling duo modernized their relationship. If “daddy” started to chip in around the house, Americans might suddenly find themselves with two parties working to meet our huge home front challenges. If “mommy” started competing more feistily at the office, we might find ourselves facing foreign policy options when we go to vote. In place of the two-parent system, we might once again know the roar and thrust of a genuine two-party rivalry.
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