Daniel Henninger: Bush Could Be the Deng Xiaoping of American Politics

Daniel Henninger, in the WSJ (Oct. 15, 2004):

If the people of the United States hand him victory in the 2004 election, George W. Bush could emerge as the Deng Xiaoping of American politics. Mr. Bush would become the leader who sent his people forward into a world both uncertain and inevitable.

Deng, who died in 1997, was the former Communist Chinese revolutionary who recognized in the 1980s that the moment had come for China to break from an irrelevant status quo, which had determined economic policy for the entire postwar period. Led by Deng, China changed its economic policies to make them appropriate to the world as it existed, not as China wished the world would be. China flourished. And it is not alone.

India the past five years has similarly broken with its longtime statist past. Brazil is attempting a similar transformation. All three are huge countries in the process of rapidly creating a smart, globally relevant business class. This country's biggest problem isn't "Halliburton" but the realization, just sinking in, that internal U.S. labor costs are being set by a suddenly thriving, truly global marketplace. This is the real cause of the famous "middle-class squeeze," and it's a force more powerful than any one person sitting in the Oval Office.

After three presidential debates, it is clear that George Bush is asking the American people to make a similar, abrupt break with the comforts of the political past. Proposals such as Social Security privatization or individually run health-savings accounts are not being offered as just an intriguing "policy" alternative. These ideas are an historic necessity to surviving in the world economy as it exists today.

Intellectually, the case for making the leap is compelling. Emotionally, the way forward is less obvious. Most Americans have already adjusted to the disturbing realities of Iraq and of waging -- and leading -- a war on global terror. But it's quite a lot to ask them in the same election to step away from 50 or more years of federally guaranteed social protection. That would have been large without Iraq and terror.

The Kerry campaign is riding on the belief that the American electorate, at the margins in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, isn't ready to make the break. And they may be right. That to me is the meaning of the relentlessly close poll results that persist in this election. John Kerry is a fundamentally weak presidential candidate, but about half the electorate is uncertain whether it is able to sign up for all the risk and uncertainty implicit in the next Bush presidency.

The choice in the 2004 election is about much more than merely aligning oneself with this or that party. Politics alone, and certainly not campaign politics, rarely alters the social or economic course of this country. More often it is an event that "changes everything."

Back in the 1920s, Republicans won presidential elections with whopping 60% majorities. Calvin Coolidge presided over an economy growing at nearly 5% annually. A nation tied to business success was working. The Depression changed everything.

With the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt reset the economic philosophy of the United States, and the nation validated it by giving him nearly 61% of the popular vote in 1936. Then World War II changed everything.

Historians may argue whether war demand rather than Roosevelt's economic policies rescued a depressed U.S. economy. What is undeniable is that from 1930 to nearly 1950, the American electorate experienced massive blows to its sense of personal and economic security. It is hardly a surprise that in the postwar years, the system of unprecedentedly broad federal economic presence and protection, created by Democrats, lived on, no matter the size of Gen. Eisenhower's large electoral majorities for the GOP.

It would now take a force much stronger than the normal process of American politics to change the nation's political economics. Despite periodic displays of strength by both parties (the two-term presidencies of Reagan and Clinton) our politics has invariably reverted to a steady-state stand-off. Since and including 1960, the popular vote in presidential elections has split nearly 50-50 in 1968, 1976, 1980 and 2000. It remains so today....