Why Washington Is Failing

By: Charles Wheelan, Ph.D.

The Naked Economist

There tend to be two kinds of people in policy circles, wonks and hacks. Bruce Reed, a former staffer for Bill Clinton, pointed out this distinction in an essay many years ago. It still strikes me as an important point if one is to understand Washington.
The wonks are the idea folks. They come up with policies that might actually work. The hacks are the political junkies. They come up with ideas that people might actually vote for.
Any government needs both wonks and hacks in order to function. Washington seems to have neither at the moment, which may explain our floundering state of governance.

The policy wonks, or just "wonks," are the more academic types. They tend to have a deep substantive knowledge of the subjects on which they work. They prefer elegant policy solutions that are likely to be effective and are supported by data or analysis, regardless of the relevant politics. Wonks support things like a carbon tax or congestion pricing because these policies address basic market failures. (If you don't know what a market failure is, you're not a wonk.)

I am admittedly a policy wonk. I have a Ph.D. in public policy. I have supported both a carbon tax and congestion pricing in this column. When I go to lunch with colleagues, we sometimes talk about rural health care delivery or the No Child Left Behind Act -- for fun, like other people talk about sports or video games. Many of us were hung from fence posts by our underwear when we were young.

Wonks are often oblivious to political realities, or even dismissive of them. When I ran for Congress, armed with my wonkish ideas, I came in fifth and earned a whopping seven percent of the vote.

That is why the world needs political hacks, or just "hacks." The hacks can read the political tea leaves and get stuff passed in a democratic system. James Baker was the political genius behind Ronald Reagan. Lyndon Johnson may have been a lousy president, but he was one heck of a Senate majority leader. You don't have to like these guys. You do have to respect their legislative accomplishments.

The problem with the hacks is that they don't usually care whether the stuff they get passed will actually work or not. A political "win" is when your side wins a vote, which makes you more popular with voters, which makes it possible to win more votes. Whether or not all this activity actually does any social good -- fixes schools or improves health outcomes or trims the budget -- is purely incidental. To the hacks, democracy is like horse racing; the point is to win.

The Reason We Need Them

In a business context, the wonks and the hacks are like the engineers and the marketing folks. The engineers are necessary to design a product that works. But if you let the engineers go crazy, you end up with a product that is too complex, or too expensive, or too unattractive (but with lots of features), or completely out of touch with what customers want, can afford, or are capable of using.

That is why you have a marketing staff, who can sell stuff. They listen to customers. They dress up the product nicely. They tell the engineers to stop adding features that only their geeky friends can figure out. Still, you don't want to turn your business exclusively over to the marketing folks, or you will likely be left with all packaging and no product.

So a successful business strikes a balance -- it listens to what consumers want, it engineers a product that meets their needs, and it packages it as elegantly as possible.

Our government needs both wonks and hacks for exactly the same reason. They strike a balance that enables us to govern. Neither term is as pejorative as it sounds. Ronald Reagan was a hack, and he had a remarkably adept political touch. The results were terrific when he used his political acumen to sell tax reform in 1986 (which flattened and simplified the tax code in a revenue-neutral way and should not be confused with the large Reagan tax cuts a few years before that).

Of course, Ronald Reagan did not spend a lot of time reading treatises on tax policy. The details of the 1986 tax reform were ironed out by wonks like former Senator Bill Bradley. And before that, academic economists of all ideological stripes -- the super-wonks -- had been advocating a flatter, simpler tax code for decades.

Some individuals have the rare capacity to be both wonk and hack. This was Bruce Reed's point about Bill Clinton, who had a deep grasp of policy minutiae and great political instincts. Clinton was at his best when he did things like getting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed. That was a huge substantive accomplishment (supported by the wonks) and quite a political feat, too, given the opposition from some powerful groups in his own party, such as organized labor.

Newt Gingrich is another guy who could do both wonk and hack. Gingrich's Contract with America laid the intellectual groundwork for major policy changes like welfare reform. It was also a political masterstroke.

It doesn't matter what you think about Clinton or Gingrich. The reality is that they've both had enormous influence in their respective parties, and they are remarkable political survivors.

Bad Engineers, Lousy Marketing

Which brings us to the Obama administration. On paper, this administration looks like a perfect blend of wonk and hack. President Obama is a former law professor at the University of Chicago, and it doesn't get much wonkier than that. Meanwhile, he's got the notorious Rahm Emanuel, a hack's hack, as his chief of staff, and political guru David Axelrod reading the political tea leaves. This should be the governing dream team.

So far, it's not. Remarkably, the Obama administration and its Democratic allies seem to be failing on both the substance and the politics, the health care "victory" notwithstanding. The bills they have been pushing, from the stimulus to health care, are not what policy wonks would recommend. Nobody who is serious about health care policy would have drafted a bill anything like the one that President Obama just signed.

The administration must be doing the hack part right, given its success in getting a health care bill passed, right? I'm not so sure. The administration passed a health care bill, but it did not necessarily sell America on health care reform.

It's true that Obama succeeded where every Democratic president since Truman has failed. He held his fractious party together in a way that Bill Clinton could not. But the health care bill was all muscle, not political finesse. Obama did not slowly win over independents to his plan. Most Americans still don't know exactly what this reform will do, nor do they fully understand the true failings of the system that it was meant to address. (The problem with the U.S. health care system is not greedy insurance companies.)

At his peak, Ronald Reagan was so popular that he could call Democratic members of Congress and ask for their vote. Remember the "Reagan Democrats"? I don't hear anyone talking about "Obama Republicans" right now. The political climate that the Obama health care victory has created does not feel like a popular president slowly broadening his base. Instead, it feels like the Clinton presidency during the impeachment, or the Bush presidency during the Iraq War. The two parties are just digging deeper in their own trenches, and the Obama administration is not building many bridges.

The Republicans appear to have the "hack" thing down. They stole away the Democrats' veto-proof majority in the Senate, and they're expecting big gains in the midterm elections. Of course, that's only because it's easier to be an effective hack if you are the minority party, when good politics consists primarily of throwing rocks at the party in power (e.g. the Democrats during the George W. Bush administration).

But where are the Republican wonks? There is no intellectual center of gravity in the party right now. Conservatives outside of Washington (such as George W. Bush's former economic adviser Greg Mankiw, now back at Harvard) know that the U.S. needs to raise the price of carbon-based fuels, but the Republicans in Congress (with an exception or two) have been unwilling to touch that idea.

Conservatives outside of Washington recognize that the U.S. health care system is unsustainable. They don't like the Obama plan, but they know that we have to do something to rein in costs. The Republicans in Congress never presented a credible, intellectually honest alternative. They are still pretending that tort reform and interstate competition among insurance companies will fix everything. It won't.

What we need now is more wonks in both parties to design policies that will really address our social challenges. And we need more hacks to explain those policies to the American people and persuade them to make the requisite adjustments and sacrifices.

Instead, what we have at the moment is the equivalent of a company with no good engineers and a lousy marketing team. We're producing low-quality products that no one wants to buy. That is not a recipe for long-term success, in business or politics.