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Is America Going Soft?
Will this election mark a turning point? Let's hope not.

BY PETE DU PONT
Monday, June 14, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

Since his death a great deal has been written about Ronald Reagan. About his vision and his ability to communicate with regular Americans. About the extraordinary economic growth his tax rate reductions created, and his belief that Soviet communism was an evil empire, not an alternative form of government that must be understood. About his foreign policy leadership that led Sen. Ted Kennedy to eulogize him as "the president who won the Cold War."

But Reagan was something more: a turning-point president who believed that the policy directions of the past were wrong, and that with different policies our future could be far better. We have had other such presidents, Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Their elections were turning points in America's policies, as was Reagan's.

Could America be at another turning point in 2004? Another time like the '60s, and '80s when people decided it was time to change the direction in which our public policies were headed? That is the question political scholar Michael Barone indirectly poses in his new book, "Hard America, Soft America, Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future."


Following the postwar enthusiasm of the 1950s, America's policies softened. In the '60s and '70s government grew, regulation increased, welfare programs expanded, crime rose while prison populations dropped, schools lowered standards and limited testing, and the distribution of wealth became more important than its creation. As Lyndon B. Johnson said, we must accept "greater government activity in the affairs of the people."

Then came Ronald Reagan with the opposite view, and the '80s and 90's saw a hardening America, one in which liberty was more important than equality, so that expanding markets became more important than expanding government. Welfare was replaced with work, mandatory sentencing drove prison populations up and crime rates down, education began to return to testing and standards, and the creation of greater national and individual wealth became our economic focus.

Soft policies, Mr. Barone writes, are "the product of elites--the advocates of the regulatory state and welfare state protections," while the hardening of the '80s and '90s "came not from centralized elites, but from decentralized ordinary people," who desired higher incomes, more choices and safer communities.

Soft and hard policies are starkly different. In the late 1960s Lyndon Johnson began expanding welfare, so that "by 1970 the various welfare programs provided more economic benefits than a minimum wage job." Between 1965 and 1975, welfare rolls tripled, and welfare spending escalated from less than $100 billion in 1970 to more than $200 billion in 1980 and $300 billion in 1990. Then in 1996 President Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act, requiring healthy individuals to work instead of receiving checks for not working. Welfare rolls peaked at 14.2 million in 1993; by 2001 they were down to 5.4 million.

In the soft '60s and '70s crime was believed to be the fault of society, not criminals. So the prison population fell from 212,000 to 196,000 from 1960 to 1970, and as a result the rates of violent and property crime rose 143%. In the next decades America became harder. Police forces grew 80% between 1982 and 2001, mandatory sentencing began, and prison population rose from 240,000 in 1975 to 1.1 million in 1995. American communities became safer.

The soft years also saw a dramatic lowering of educational standards and diminution of emphasis on mastering difficult subjects. Testing became less frequent and tests easier. In the words of education analyst Diane Ravitch, there was "a pronounced shift in state goals of schooling, away from concern with intellectual development and mastery of subject matter to concern for social and emotional development." That began to change in the 1990s, with more student testing, charter schools, even controversial vouchers and school choice in some places. The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which requires testing, has led to pressure to lower test standards so that fewer students fail. So the soft/hard argument in education is far from over.

Finally, in LBJ's presidency growing government increasingly burdened and controlled the American economy. Then Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls and decoupled the dollar from gold. The soft economic establishment believed, in Mr. Barone's words, that the "private sector economy could be counted on to grow perpetually at any rate of taxation and any regime of controls." But it couldn't; the Carter years saw double-digit inflation, 20% interest rates, and an economy in decline. In the 1980s hard market economic policies returned. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volker's tight money and President Reagan's tax rate reductions produced 15 years of economic growth.


So where is America headed in 2004? President Bush has begun a hard American pre-emption policy toward terrorism, a hard tax rate reduction policy, hard individually owned medical savings accounts for health care, and a hardening but hotly contested education policy. He has also proposed hard individually owned Social Security accounts for retirement. On the other hand, he has been soft on steel tariffs and farm subsidies, and very soft on government spending and growth.

Angry Democrats are supersoft. They want to cede American security to international organizations, nationalize health care and raise income tax rates because for them income redistribution is more important than income growth. John Kerry is soft--the candidate of concern, compromise and consensus--and his positions are very soft--against the death penalty, for raising tax rates, for limiting trade to nations that have intrusive labor and environmental regulations, and promising to veto individually owned Social Security accounts. Regarding foreign policy, in the words of the Washington Post, Mr. Kerry has a "deep commitment to negotiation and international institutions as a way to advance U.S. interests."

Americans seem unsure about it all. The president's approval ratings have declined, and moderate and conservative Republicans alike are questioning the direction of the administration. Last week's Zogby poll has Mr. Kerry leading Mr. Bush 296 electoral votes to 242, and the Gallup poll has him leading Bush by 6% among likely voters. There is a war on and the liberal and media establishments are vigorously opposing Mr. Bush is helping Mr. Kerry. But perhaps there is something else at work as well--another of America's 20-year turning points.

Spring polls are notoriously inaccurate predictors of fall voting, and Reagan's middle-class voters are in the end unlikely to support Mr. Kerry. But still, Mr. Kerry is soft and doing better than expected. Maybe the American people are just sending the president a message that his hard policies aren't working well enough. But perhaps America will decide to turn soft. A return to the economic and social policies of the 1960s would be a terrible mistake--Reagan was right that liberty is more important than equality--but perhaps that is what the American people are considering.

Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is policy chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.
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bumping this for any flip-floppers.

Night all!
_________________
On Sale! Order in lots of 100 now at velero@rcn.com Free for the cost of shipping All profits (if any, especially now) go to Swiftvets. The author of "Sink Kerry Swiftly" ---ASPB