What's the point in voting? It's not going to change my life," said Sandra, a woman I interviewed just outside the Hopkins medical campus, who was only willing to give me her first name.
A brief inspection of Sandra's street in Middle East Baltimore, adjacent to the Science and Technology Park being constructed near the Hopkins medical campus, was enough for me to almost fall in agreement with her words. Deserted commercial buildings and decaying row houses border her street. Sandra's experience of poverty, however, clearly extends beyond just housing, encompassing crime and gang violence, failing schools and poor public services.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has proposed a $6-billion plan to combat urban poverty through a variety of social, cultural and health programs. Yet even the presidential hopeful himself conceded the difficulties in implementing his proposal, saying in July of last year, "Changing the odds in our cities will require humility in what we can accomplish and patience with our progress." Obama has professed repeatedly that, as a Washington outsider, he will be a "different" kind of president, one that isn't involved in backroom dealings or influenced by corporate lobbyists. He proclaims that he will rise above the political haggling between parties, passing policies that fundamentally change how Americans live in this country. But is it rational to believe that just by reaching across the aisle, he will convince Republicans to agree with him and radically "change Washington"? History dictates that Obama will inevitably need to compromise with his opposition.
Obama claims that he would use his executive power to push through a national agenda, but the Framers of the Constitution designed the American system of government to prevent exactly this. The Framers were afraid of concentrating power in the executive branch and therefore gave tremendous power and fierce independence to the legislative branch. In the U.K., the legislative branch follows a national agenda or the government collapses. But American congressmen have little interest in following a national policy agenda or incentive to follow the executive branch. Congressmen are largely motivated by either liberal or conservative ideologies and self-interest. It is for this reason that elections in America rarely produce the magnitude of change that they do in other countries. Presidential elections are not so much critical as they are reflective of whether or not the past four years have been "good" or "bad."
Bill Clinton ran a campaign similar to Obama's - one of "hope" and "change" - but in his first 100 days in office, Republicans blocked every major proposal. FDR and LBJ both pushed "national agendas" but did so with sweeping Democratic majorities in Congress. And a Democratic super-majority in the 111th Congress is unlikely.
The Constitution moderates the pace of change, making it neither easy nor impossible to adopt radical proposals. The Framers of the Constitution favored a Congress that was deliberative, not decisive. The American government is designed so that congressional procedures make passing a bill and bringing about political change very difficult. Opposition has ample opportunities to kill proposed legislation as it moves through committee, floor and conference action.
In 2004 for example, when the Republicans controlled Congress, President Bush tried to enact Social Security reform (privatization of Social Security, the dream of the Republican Party) but was blocked by Democratic legislators, even though they were in the minority, because they refused to agree on a compromise. In the 110th Congress, the GOP Senate minority has systematically blocked almost everything but the Senate chaplain's Morning Prayer.
But the American national government is designed as a deliberative democracy that provides for such action. Obama's proposal for a "new kind of politics" neglects how government works in the real world. Obama writes in his bestseller, The Audacity of Hope, that the "elaborate machinery" of separation of powers, checks and balances and federalist principles in the Constitution hampers progress and changes in public policy. But the argument of public policies in public forums is one of the underlying principles upon which America was founded. Such a claim by Obama serves only to illegitimize the collective judgment that results from deliberative processes.
