“Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.”--Aristotle

A strange paradox of American politics is that the least democratic branch of the government, the Supreme Court, is the most popular and the most democratic, Congress, is the least popular. This data from Gallup illustrates this point:

Despite people's disdain for Congress incumbents are re-elected at very high levels:

The answer to this riddle lies in the old axiom: "People hate Congress but love their Congressman."

I was reminded of these paradoxes when Andrew Sullivan highlighted two writer's theories as to what is necessary to motivate the federal government to reign in the nation's deficit and debt? This crisis is becoming impossible to ignore as our debt to GDP ratio is approaching World War II levels.

George Hager argues:

There’s a short list of big, successful deficit-reduction efforts, and they all had at least two of these three elements in common: 1) The deficit situation had become dire or embarrassing, or both. 2) The president committed to the effort and/or signaled he’d give up a key pledge to get a deal. 3) The opposing party was willing to negotiate away a piece of its bedrock position to get a deal.

Bernstein takes issue with the second point:

What the three episodes [Hager] cites (1982, 1990, 1993) have in common was that in each case, the president's economic team told him that the problem was likely to have real, immediate effects on the economy, effects that would show up before the next election. In each case, that seems to have been both necessary and sufficient. Hager does include presidential involvement as one of his three conditions, but I'm making a slightly different claim: presidents will care about deficit reduction when they have an electoral incentive to care about it, and once they are on board, Congress gives it them to them.

I would argue that American's disgust with Congress is intimately tied to it's inability to get the budget under control. When you have the darling of the far right, Dick Cheney a supposed champion of fiscal conservatism, declare "Reagan proved deficits don't matter" you know you have a problem.

There are several forces at work that are going to bring the deficit to the forefront of the nation's political debate: deficits that are triggering World War II level GDP/debt ratios, no savings from a World War II military demobilization likely, and an improving economy which will allow people to focus on other issues. Hager's thesis is going to be put to the test because if this fiscal situation isn't embarassing for the political elites than nothing is.

If Hager is wrong and Bernstein is right, that it takes fear of not getting re-elected and not just potential embarrassment to create the political will to reign in deficits, I am worried. The political message being sent by American's is that they want balanced budgets but the evidence is not there that they support cutting the necessary programs.

However it is possible that President's take the above graph too seriously. With President's approval ratings double to triple that of Congress it is possible the President could take on Congress on the spending issue. The reason they do not is that I think they are psychologically beaten by the campaign process.

Once in office presidents might be able to get away with cutting popular programs such as Medicare, Social Security or Defense but there is no way possible they could win an election urging these unpopular cuts. After kissing up to every special interest group and constituency during the campaign it is understandable that they might actually come to internalize their pandering. As a result we get tax cuts and increased spending such as health care because they tell themselves that is what the people want.

If we are to see a President attempt this high risk gamble it will most likely happen during a second term. I hope Obama is the first President to get a chance.