Democrats and progressives love to lavish praise upon the Clinton Administration for the economic boom of the 1990s. And it's easy to see why -- without the 1993 balanced budget Clinton doesn't have much of a political legacy to speak of. But ask an economist what was responsible for the golden days of the 90s and you'll get a different perspective; they'll tell you that the growth probably had little or nothing to do with Clinton's balanced budget, but stemmed from a variety of factors including a surge in productivity from expanded use of personal computers and Internet, supply-chain efficiencies, globalization of production, and a boom in investment.
So it's inspiring to hear a Democratic candidate breaking free of the rut that the Clinton-era Democrats have dug themselves into. Obama gets that the discourse of deficit reduction does not and cannot serve progressive social ends. A much better way to stimulate the economy -- and a nod to the historical roots of the Democratic party -- is to focus on social investment. Obama is thinking less in terms of deficit reduction and more in terms of investment in infrastructure and R&D.
Obama is on the right track, but he should step the message. He has called for $150 billion investment in clean energy over the next ten years -- more than any other presidential candidate, but short by at least half the size it should be. Global warming won't be solved by tossing pennies at it and hoping private industry will do the rest. Nor will it be solved with a limited, single issue-based approach. As an impassioned orator, Obama is poised to lead the Democratic Party from a message of timidity and aversion to one of greatness. A politics based on fiscal parsimony and deficit reduction is not sufficient to build the kind of wealth and security people in this country are hungry for. The benchmarks of this political movement should not be things like the House Democrats' PAYGO rules; they should be aspirational proposals like a new Apollo project on clean energy.
As Michael and Ted wrote in the last chapter of "Break Through,"
A new politics should inspire Americans to grapple with the existential questions Nixon asked in his 1970 State of the Union address: What kind of country do we want? How can we achieve it? These questions implicitly contain a question about investment: how will Americans invest our wealth and our labor?