Jacob Hacker: All Related Content

Having just finished a book entitled The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement -- And How You Can Fight Back, I have no doubt that Stephen Rose will accuse me of offering a "message of misery." My defense, already laid out in greater length on the website of "The Democratic Strategist" in response to three of Rose’s colleagues, is that political candidates and leaders should, first and foremost, offer a message of truth.

Back when clouds began to gather around Tom DeLay, a White House source warned that the loss of "The Hammer" would be catastrophic. "It would be complete and total chaos," the source explained. "The House would descend into 'Lord of the Flies.' "

Nearly a year ago, voters following the presidential race heard a stirring call for social reform: "The times in which we work and live are changing dramatically. The workers of our parents' generation typically had one job, one skill, one career. ... And most of those workers were men. Today, workers change jobs, even careers, many times during their lives, and ...

In a 1938 address on the third anniversary of the Social Security Act, Franklin Roosevelt declared, "There is still today a frontier that remains unconquered an America unclaimed. This is the great, the nationwide frontier of insecurity, of human want and fear. This is the frontier the America we have set ourselves to reclaim." And reclaim it FDR and his fellow thinkers did.

In 1994, Republicans in California distributed a voter education pamphlet titled "The Welfare Mess." On its cover was a vivid montage of ghetto pathology: food stamps intermixed with hundred-dollar bills, drug paraphernalia alongside a snub-nosed pistol. Inside, the pamphlet catalogued welfare's pernicious effects. Teen pregnancy, runaway crime, moral decay, even falling SAT scores--all were blamed on a welfare system run amok. The pamphlet closed with a dire warning: "If You Don't Vote, THEY WIN."

Vice-presidential hopeful John Edwards is right about one thing: There are two Americas. In one, "our economy is growing again and creating jobs and nothing will hold us back." In the other, "wages are falling, health care costs are rising, and our great middle class is shrinking."

These are, of course, the warring economic assessments of President Bush and Senator John F. Kerry. That the two men differ so fundamentally may seem par for the course -- candidates always play up their own achievements and denigrate those of their opponents.

American politicians have always seen pure profit in siding with the middle class. Bill Clinton invoked the "forgotten middle class"; Richard Nixon called on the "silent majority"; FDR sided with the "forgotten man." In a country where being middle class is a badge of honor and even the super-rich identify themselves as "upper middle class," rare is the candidate who does not claim to speak for the unheard American middle.

Tomorrow, President Bush is set to sign Medicare's biggest overhaul in 38 years into law. But after watching the shrill yet perfunctory debate that culminated last week in the passage of the bill, even close observers of Washington politics can be forgiven for wondering just what exactly it was all about.

Still smarting from defeat, a leading activist ruefully explained why once-promising plans to expand health coverage had failed. Health legislation, he said, affected "powerful group interests" and was easy fodder for scare-tactic attacks. "All these fears, some justified, some exaggerated, and some altogether fanciful," he said, "produced such a confusion of group conflicts that only a clear recognition of the need... might have overcome it, and that clear recognition was lacking."

Last week, when Senate leaders announced they had agreed upon a bipartisan compromise for Medicare reform, Majority Leader Bill Frist insisted that the new proposal "meets all of the president's principles that have been laid out to date." Nothing could be further from the truth. When George W. Bush unveiled his vision for Medicare reform during January's State of the Union address, he was intent upon transforming it from a government-run insurance program into a system of competing private insurance plans--with prescription-drug coverage doing the dirty work.

Democrats have long been tarred with the "tax-and-spend" label. Yet, as President Bill Clinton's recently released budget demonstrates, they might be better described as the "tax-and-credit" party. Still chastened by policy defeats in the mid-1990s, the president and congressional Democrats have shied away from new spending programs and instead proposed targeted tax breaks for health care, child care, education and other social aims.

A striking feature of social policy in the United States is the heavy reliance of public agencies on private institutions. At the state and local level, social services are delivered through a welter of nonprofit organizations, community institutions, and profit-oriented providers.