Reform Your Way to Victory
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By BRUCE REED
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 7, 2004
nytimes.com
WASHINGTON - John Kerry needs to start putting one crucial word from his record at the heart of every speech: reform. With an agenda that builds on the reformist impulse he has shown throughout his career, Mr. Kerry can claim the label President Bush has squandered since the 2000 campaign: "a reformer with results."
Mr. Bush can't use that slogan this time around, because reform and results are both in short supply. By failing to provide the resources to make education reform work, Mr. Bush has set back the movement to hold our schools to measurable standards. He put the next round of welfare reform on hold while overseeing an I.R.S. crackdown to keep the working poor from receiving the earned income tax credit. He hasn't put forward a Social Security reform plan because his tax cuts have robbed the Treasury of the money that makes reform possible.
Senator Kerry's reform credentials glisten by comparison. When I went to the White House with Bill Clinton in 1993, the budget office and Justice Department were pressuring us to back off Mr. Clinton's promise to hire 100,000 new police officers. At the time, most members of Congress wanted us to scrap the president's campaign priorities in favor of their own.
Mr. Kerry did the opposite. He beat down our door until we kept our own campaign promise. He was convinced that hiring only a few thousand police officers wouldn't be enough to change the way communities fought crime — and he was right.
During the 1996 debate over the welfare reform bill, Mr. Kerry helped secure more child care money and other improvements so the president could sign a bill — at a time when many Democrats were sitting back and hoping for a veto. Welfare reform was perhaps the toughest test for Democrats during President Clinton's tenure, and Mr. Kerry voted for it even though it was highly unpopular in his home state.
On both community policing and welfare-to-work, Mr. Kerry showed he was not afraid to break with liberal orthodoxy. And in contrast to Mr. Bush's record thus far, the reforms Mr. Kerry championed have made an impact. In the 1990's, the crime rate dropped by a quarter, while poverty among single mothers fell by a third. While there were certainly other factors involved in both trends, the changes in Washington helped.
Senator Kerry will need those reform instincts in this campaign for two reasons. First, now that President Bush cannot credibly claim to be a reformer, his campaign may try to convince the country that Mr. Kerry isn't one, either. In his new stump speech, Mr. Bush tries to portray Mr. Kerry the way he portrayed Al Gore last time around, as a Washington politician who won't take risks and defends the status quo.
Mr. Kerry's record makes such a charge difficult to support. Mr. Kerry embraced deficit reduction in the mid-1980's, for example, and pressed the case for education reform as early as 1998, long before it became fashionable in Washington. He can defeat the president's argument by showing voters that he has worked consistently to fix government, not expand it.
There's another reason for Mr. Kerry to make this agenda the centerpiece of his campaign: America needs a reform president.
The job of education reform is not done, and neither is welfare reform. An overhaul of our intelligence bureaucracies is long overdue. Tax reform, under President Bush, is headed in the wrong direction. The political system in Washington is badly broken, from campaign finance to lobbying disclosure to balancing the budget.
Mr. Kerry has already begun to lay the groundwork for a reform-minded campaign, with plans to control health care costs, close corporate loopholes and increase lobbyist disclosure. He wants to bolster domestic security by hiring 100,000 firefighters and stopping Mr. Bush from mothballing the 100,000 policemen program. Mr. Kerry can outflank Mr. Bush with more such proposals, from giving communities the resources and responsibility to make sure every teacher in every classroom is qualified to reforming the tax code.
A failed reformer like the president won't fare well against a candidate with real plans to transform education, welfare, domestic intelligence and the culture of Washington. As Mr. Bush's scant State of the Union agenda made clear, with modest proposals like drug testing for professional athletes and a re-entry program for parolees, reform and results have become casualties of revenue.
George Bush was right four years ago when he said the country needed "a reformer with results." He was just wrong to think that he was that reformer. This year, John Kerry should hold those words against him — and deliver on the promise this president discarded long ago.
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Bruce Reed, domestic policy adviser in the Clinton administration, is president of the Democratic Leadership Council. |
