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04/27/2005: "Competing on Steroids"

This is a baseball story. There were two teams locked in a vigorous rivalry for over a hundred years. For most of that time it was a one-way rivalry – the perennial underdogs went year after year with seemingly no hope of ever prevailing. In desperation the owner cast about for someone, anyone, who could turn the tide. A hungry new manager was installed with a unique formula for success. Literally a formula. His idea was to leverage a recently discovered substance that phenomenally increased muscle mass and strength. While it had some unfortunate long-term side-effects, he knew his players were so desperate to win that they would do Whatever It Took to accomplish this, hang the consequences. The impact was immediate. Batters started blasting pitches out of the park, and fans responded with delirious joy. Attendance hit all time highs, and soon they had completely turned the tables on their rivals. Enthusiasm reached such a fever pitch that the team was able to present their chemical edge as a source of pride, a badge of old-fashioned American ingenuity. Fans saw achieving the right mix of performance-enhancing drugs as evidence of competitive and even moral superiority. This obviously presented the opposing manager with a difficult conundrum. Should he follow suit in juicing up his players, thus getting back into the game? Or should he stand on principles and likely lose? He ultimately decided that he loved his players and the game - and respected his fans – too much. The team still had enough skill and dedication to remain competitive, even twice winning the Series against its rival. Still, many in baseball – sportswriters and fans alike – loudly proclaimed that he made a foolish choice and pronounced the team to be in disarray. Actually, this isn’t a baseball story – it’s a brief history of American politics since 1980. It is the conundrum faced by Democrats over the two and a half decades since the Republicans first became addicted to political steroids. How better to describe advocacy of irresponsible, unsustainable policies that nevertheless provide an immediate rush of short term energy and strength to delight voters? At this point the GOP brand is permanently linked to massive deficit spending fueled by ever larger tax cuts and spending increases, and to environmental denial that offers accelerated slurping as some kind of solution to the problem of finite quantities of the fossil fuels to which American society is itself hopelessly addicted. What’s the answer? Maybe our baseball analogy can provide some insight. If fans refuse to watch chemical ball for moral reasons, chemical ball will stop. If voters refuse to tolerate political steroids for moral reasons, unsustainable practices will end up “on the dust bin of history” where they belong. And at that point we can start working down the debt.