EVENTS

Date:	Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Time:	1:30 PM -- 3:00 PM
Location:	Hubert H. Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs, University of Minnesota 301 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455 in conjunction with the Humphrey Institute (by invitation only)

2009: A White House Odyssey

MINNEAPOLIS, SEPTEMBER 11, 2008--Forget all the campaign boilerplate. How would a McCain administration or an Obama administration actually govern? At a panel discussion held during last week's Republican National Convention, a group of senators, journalists, and political scholars offered insights and predictions.

The event--sponsored by AEI and the Brookings Institution and hosted by the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs--featured Republican Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Brookings Institution senior fellow Thomas Mann, AEI resident scholar Norman J. Ornstein, Chicago Sun-Times Washington bureau chief Lynn Sweet, and New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes.

As Mann noted, the next president will almost certainly be working with a heavily Democratic Congress. Which means it could be very difficult for a President McCain to enact his market-oriented healthcare proposals, pursue a bold free trade agenda, and place staunch judicial conservatives on the Supreme Court. McCain and Democrats would also spar over making the Bush tax cuts permanent. As economists John Cogan and R. Glenn Hubbard (who served in the Reagan and Bush 43 administrations, respectively) have written in the Wall Street Journal, the expiration of those tax cuts at the end of 2010 would lead to "the largest increase in personal income taxes since World War II."

New York Democrat Charlie Rangel, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, agrees with McCain that the federal corporate tax rate should be trimmed. McCain has suggested reducing it from 35 percent to 25 percent. Last October, Rangel unveiled legislation ("the mother of all tax reforms") that would lower it to 30.5 percent. This could be a possible area of bipartisan cooperation between a President McCain and Chairman Rangel, though it might well be overshadowed by separate tax debates or scuttled by partisan acrimony.

At the forum in Minneapolis, Senator Kyl observed that some of the biggest domestic reforms in recent decades have been produced by divided government. Prominent examples include the 1986 tax reform bill (passed by a Democratic House and signed by President Reagan) and the 1996 welfare reform bill (passed by a GOP Congress and signed by President Clinton). "It's an interesting and somewhat paradoxical phenomenon," Kyl said. With a President McCain and a Democratic Congress, "it might be possible to tackle a couple of big things." As Kyl noted, McCain is "very unpredictable" and has repeatedly "worked on big things with Democrats."

What "big things" might be feasible under a McCain administration? Two possibilities are immigration reform and a "cap-and-trade" system to regulate carbon emissions. McCain's presidential bid nearly imploded in mid-2007 after the Arizona senator supported a comprehensive immigration bill that included a "path to citizenship" for illegal immigrants and a new guest-worker program. The bill triggered ferocious opposition from conservative Republicans, and ultimately died in the Senate. McCain managed to rejuvenate his campaign, and has since altered his tune on immigration, placing greater rhetorical emphasis on border security.

But if congressional Democrats sent a liberal immigration bill to President McCain's desk, would he sign it? Given McCain's history of bucking his own party on the issue, it's a good question. (McCain did not mention immigration in his convention speech.) At a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) event last week, CFR scholar Edward Alden said that the prospects for comprehensive immigration reform would be "somewhat better" under a McCain administration than they would be under an Obama administration.

As for regulating carbon emissions, the cap-and-trade approach is highly popular among Democrats, much less so among Republicans. McCain, however, favors a cap-and-trade regime. Senator Kyl affirmed that the GOP presidential nominee is "closer" to Senate Democrats on climate change than he is to Senate Republicans. But Kyl also stressed "how hard it is to get something done" in the Senate, due to the "corrosive" partisan bickering and other factors. (Ornstein has examined Senate gridlock in The American.)

At the GOP convention, McCain touted his maverick credentials, lobbed criticisms at his own party, and vowed to "shake up Washington." This may be a shrewd strategy in a Democratic year, when the Republican brand has been deeply damaged. Yet as Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes points out, "having as president and head of the Republican party someone who proudly strays from party orthodoxy or ignores the party entirely--that's a recipe for difficulties in Washington." If a President McCain sought "to impose his every wish on congressional Republicans, he'd risk alienating them," Barnes writes. "If he brushed them aside in pursuit of bipartisan compromises with Democrats, that would make matters worse. It would split Republicans and wipe out hopes of a full recovery by the party from its collapse two years ago."

What about a President Obama? If Obama is elected, said Ornstein, the Democratic left will expect him to pursue an ambitious liberal agenda. If a President Obama instead chose to honor his post-partisan rhetoric and work with congressional Republicans, he would risk angering his base.

"This is a time for bold action to get things done," said Senator Klobuchar. She reckons that an Obama administration's top three priorities would be health care reform ("the number-one domestic battle"), energy and climate policy, and "changing the way our country does business with the rest of the world." Sweet said that a President Obama would benefit from having loyal "enforcers" in Congress, namely, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin and House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel, both (like Obama) from Illinois. She also speculated that Obama might be willing to "go over the head" of Congress and rely on his nationwide grassroots network of supporters to promote his initiatives.

Barring a complete GOP meltdown, Democrats probably won't gain a filibuster-proof 60-seat Senate majority. But an Obama administration would not necessarily need 60 Democratic senators to push through its agenda, said Kyl, provided it could peel off a few liberal and moderate Republicans. That agenda would ostensibly include raising taxes on the top income earners, expanding government management and regulation of American healthcare, boosting subsidies for renewable energy sources, slapping a "windfall profits tax" on Big Oil, establishing a cap-and-trade program to regulate carbon emissions, and appointing liberal judges to the federal bench.

Of course, how--and whether--this agenda would actually be implemented remains uncertain. "In an economy like this," Obama said in his convention speech, "the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class." But if the economy is really that bad, why should we raise taxes on anyone? For that matter, if the economic environment got worse between now and January 20, would a President Obama rethink his proposed tax hikes? In a recent interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Obama suggested that he would.

It is unclear what exactly an Obama administration would mean for trade liberalization, but free traders have ample reason to worry, given both the Illinois senator's record and the protectionist bent of the Democratic Congress. Whereas McCain is a robust champion of free trade, Obama voted against CAFTA, has hinted that he might seek to renegotiate NAFTA (before backpedaling), and has opposed bilateral free trade pacts with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea.

On other foreign policy issues, most notably Iraq, the differences between McCain and Obama seem rather stark. In many ways, these differences reflect a broader schism in the American electorate. A 2005 Pew Research Center political typology study concluded that "Foreign affairs assertiveness now almost completely distinguishes Republican-oriented voters from Democratic-oriented voters; this was a relatively minor factor in past typologies."

On the other hand, Iraq has diminished public support for U.S. military intervention, and major changes in American foreign policy tend to be dictated by outside events and contingencies, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks. University of London political scientists Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh, authors of a new book on U.S. foreign policy, argue that no matter who wins the 2008 presidential election, "the current foreign policy will live on in the next White House."

All administrations contain surprises. As Calmes said of McCain and Obama at the forum in Minneapolis, "You can't really predict from the past how they'll govern in the future." She cited the example of George W. Bush, whose presidency wound up taking a course that nobody could have predicted in 2000.

--DUNCAN CURRIE

A version of this report first appeared on American.com.

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