Don’t rush me off the fence, part III

Brad DeLong and Daniel Gross make compelling cases for me to get off the fence on the Kerry side of the yard. Their argument? The Kerry economic team beats the Bush economic team. Brad links approvingly (yes, approvingly!!!) to a Jonathan Weisman story in the Washington Post, which opens as follows:

From a tightknit group of experienced advisers, John F. Kerry’s presidential campaign has grown exponentially in recent months to include a cast literally of thousands, making it difficult to manage an increasingly unwieldy policy apparatus. The campaign now includes 37 separate domestic policy councils and 27 foreign policy groups, each with scores of members. The justice policy task force alone includes 195 members. The environmental group is roughly the same size, as is the agriculture and rural development council. Kerry counts more than 200 economists as his advisers. In contrast, President Bush’s campaign policy shop is a no-frills affair. Policy director Tim Adams directs about a dozen experts who make sure the campaign is in sync with the vast executive branch that is formulating policy. Adams’s group also analyzes Kerry’s proposals and voting record. Fewer than a dozen outside task forces, with five to 10 members, also help out on education, veterans’ issues, the economy, and energy, environment and natural resources, said campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel.

The campaign policy gap argument sounds pretty persuasive — except that the lack of a campaign policy team for the Bushies shouldn’t be surprising. Indeed, the Weisman article notes that the Gore campaign had the same set-up in 2000:

[T]he difference in structure between the Kerry operation and then-Vice President Al Gore’s campaign in 2000 is “black and white,” said Bianchi, who formulated economic and budget policy for Gore as well. Back then, Gore had a wealth of policies already formulated by the Clinton administration. After eight years in power, weary Democratic policy experts weren’t clamoring to share new ideas. A stripped-down campaign policy shop existed mainly to push proposals that moved only incrementally beyond then-President Bill Clinton’s or to ensure Gore’s campaign proposals were consistent with the administration’s record.

The party out of power is always going to have the bigger policy team. The campaign policy team for a sitting President or VP should resemble the current Bush arrangement — ensuring coordination with the relevant economic policymaking bureaucracies. Indeed, if you read Ray Simth’s front-pager in today’s Wall Street Journal on skyrocketing property tax increases, Adams seems to hold his own in the spin department:

In many parts of the country in recent years, strapped local governments have imposed big increases in property-tax rates, as well as in home assessments, to fill budget shortfalls. In response, voters have organized efforts to repeal or slow property-tax boosts in states from Virginia to Oregon, in some cases with the support of frustrated local officials…. Nationally, Democrats have tried to seize on the rising anger over property taxes and shortfalls in municipal budgets to attack the Bush administration for tax cuts that reduce funds available to local governments, contributing to what presidential candidate John Kerry has dubbed a “middle-class squeeze.” Sen. Kerry has proposed an economic stimulus package that includes payments to state governments to help them avert spending cuts and tax increases. “Sen. Kerry has long recognized that the decision to focus on tax relief for the wealthy over any form of state fiscal relief has led to many backdoor tax and tuition increases at the state and local level,” says Gene Sperling, a Kerry economic adviser, who headed the White House’s National Economic Council during the Clinton administration. Tim Adams, policy director for the Bush-Cheney campaign, counters, “The effect of the Bush administration’s tax cuts on state revenues is minimal compared to the impact” of the economic downturn. He adds that some of the states’ budget problems can be traced to spending sprees in the 1990s, as well as other broader economic shocks. There’s no doubt that many state and local governments experienced big shortfalls with the economic downturn that began in 2000 after the flush years of the 1990s boom. Sales taxes, which had been rising rapidly, suddenly tumbled, while revenue from corporate taxes shrank. Tax cuts spurred reduced federal spending. Many states, feeling the pinch, cut back their funding to local governments, dealing them a double whammy.

[Er, blaming the bad economy is good spin for the Republicans?–ed. Yes, because most Americans have proven surprisingly sophisticated in recognizing that a lot of the hits the economy took a few years ago — the dot-com crash, the terrorist attacks, the corporate scandals — had little to do with Bush.] Spin is one thing, substance is another — and here, DeLong does have a suitable counterargument, linking to Stan Collender’s National Journal column from late June:

Has anyone seen or heard from the Bush administration’s economic and budget teams lately? National Economic Council Director Stephen Friedman has been practically invisible since he took the job. Greg Mankiw, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, essentially hasn’t been heard from since he made a politically incorrect statement back in February about the outsourcing of jobs. Joshua Bolten, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has hardly been a public advocate for the Bush administration’s budget policies and projections. Indeed, he has been one of the least visible OMB directors in decades. Treasury Secretary John Snow has been making a few television appearances in recent weeks. But he hasn’t said much that has made the news and seems to be perceived more as a cheerleader than as a policymaker. And Vice President Dick Cheney, who in the past has spoken up for the administration on the economy when it needed someone to do so, now has serious overall credibility problems because of the foreign policy and military decisions he has helped shape…. All of this presents the White House with a huge problem: Less than five months before the election, no one within or even near the administration has the standing or credibility to defend and promote the Bush budget and economic records other than the president himself…

Similarly, Daniel Gross’ Slate article — which speculates on who would be Kerry’s Robert Rubin — opens with this line:

Quick—name the secretary of the treasury. I bet you can’t. Or if you can, you had to think about it before you remembered the eminently forgettable John Snow.

Gross also has this killer quote from Richard Nixon’s former Secretary of Commerce founding Concord Coalition member and classic Wall Street Republican Peter G. Peterson, from his just-released book, Running on Empty:

In sum, this administration and the Republican Congress have presided over the biggest, most reckless deterioration of America’s finances in history. It includes a feast of pork, inequitable and profligate tax cuts, and a major new expansion of Medicare that is unaccompanied by any serious measures to control its exploding cost.

DeLong goes on to observe:

The stunning contrast between the enthusiasm with which economists–lots of economists–lots of very good economists–are donating their time to Kerry and the extraordinary silence on the Bush side is, to my way of thinking, the most interesting thing that emerges from Weisman’s article…. John Kerry is not Bill Clinton, but John Kerry’s economic policies could still be very good for America. It will be our job–Sarah Bianchi’s and Jason Furman’s, George Akerlof’s and Lael Brainerd’s, Harry Holzer’s and David Cutler’s, Alan Auerbach’s and Ceci Rice’s, Larry Katz’s and Roger Altman’s, Gene Sperling’s and Alan Blinder’s, Laura D’Andrea Tyson’s and Bob Rubin’s, and mine and all the rest of our’s–to help him make it so. Who will George W. Bush have to help him? Tim Adams? John Snow?

So maybe I should get off this fence — no wait!! Two possible counterarguments: 1) Kerry gets hamstrung by the loony left. Even if Kerry’s economic team is fiscally prudent, his governing coalition might not be. In the early nineties, Clinton had a similar choice between two sets of policy advisors, and went with the fiscal conservatives. Would Kerry have the latitude or the inclination to make the same choice? As Brad put it, “Kerry is not Clinton.” This is Jason Zengerle’s concern in The New Republic (subscription required). The key graf:

[W]hen Clinton was president, liberal Democrats were quiescent enough to let him govern from the center; he embraced welfare reform and fiscal conservatism without suffering a reelection primary challenge. In a Kerry presidency, the Democratic Party’s far more energized left–conditioned by [Fahrenheit 9/11 director Michael] Moore to guard against Democratic sellouts–may not be so forgiving.

2) Kerry may not listen to his advisers. Bruce Bartlett makes the following comment on Brad’s blog:

I do believe that Kerry would help himself by making fiscal responsibility the key message of his campaign. I say this as a Republican, because I believe that my side has gotten off on the wrong track and because I believe competition is good in the political arena as well as in the economy. The problem is that Kerry has yet to throw the smallest bone to the fiscal responsibility crowd. Brad is willing to take him on faith because he trusts his advisers. I won’t, nor will most middle of the roaders. They need to see something tangible on the table.

Both of these concerns — as well as my qualms with the Bush economic team — could be addressed during the general election campaign. Sooooo…. it’s still too early to jump off the fence. Still sitting and learning, sitting and learning…. UPDATE: James Joyner thinks that the differences in teams is less significant in terms of policy outputs than DeLong:

I would argue that the near-invisibility of Bush’s economic team goes a long way towards proving a point I’ve been making for years: Presidents don’t much matter in domestic economic matters. The Fed has taken total control of monetary policy for years and fiscal policy operates within a very narrow range. The days of 70% marginal tax rates are beyond us for good and we’ve pretty much cut taxes as far as is likely. Presidents matter more in international trade, since they can encourage open markets or swing toward protectionism but, again, only within pretty narrow bands.

On the other hand, Steve Chapman points out in his Chicago Tribune column that the Bush administration has acquitted itself badly on one issue it has some influence on — pork-barrel tax cuts for corporations:

Corporate welfare–an array of direct subsidies, tax breaks and indirect assistance created for the special benefit of businesses–is one of those things that politicians would rather criticize than abolish. For the most part, it has a deservedly bad image. But when it comes to helping out companies from their own districts, most members of Congress think there is no such thing as unjustified federal aid…. Although his budget director once said it is “not the federal government’s role to subsidize, sometimes deeply subsidize, private interests,” President Bush has proposed only piddling cuts. Under his leadership, the budget for corporate welfare has remained as high as ever–about $87 billion a year, according to the Cato Institute in Washington.

FINAL UPDATE: Both Josh Chafetz and Noam Scheiber weigh in on the Weisman story.