The Democratic candidates remind me of the Nixon-era TV series “The Mod Squad”: One white, one black, one blonde.
And really, that’s all I know about the show and about all I know about the candidates. What are the differences among them? Obama is eloquent and elegant. Hillary is earnest. Edwards is TV-actor cute and shouts more than the others–not that that ended up counting for much.
And like the TV show, the Democrats’ Mod Squad is based on a lot of ideas that seemed cool in the early ’70s — energy independence, groovy kinds of alternative energy, national health insurance, fine-tuning the economy, higher taxes, cheap money, interest rate freezes, corporation-bashing, and ending the war but not any time soon.
So instead of a bridge to the 21st century, the Democrats this year are offering us a bridge to the post-Woodstock era.
But the good news is that while the early ’70s were marked by plenty of policy disasters—Nixon’s wage and price controls, Ford’s “Whip Inflation Now” buttons, Carter’s “turn down your thermostats”—those things did make more people aware that the old regulatory policies had dramatically slowed down economic growth. As the ’70s went on and turned into the early ’80s, good things actually started to happen. Transportation, energy, finance, and telecommunications were deregulated. Capital gains and then income tax rates were reduced. Both large corporations and large unions were on the decline. CNN, Microsoft, and Apple were founded. Blacks, women, and gay people moved into the mainstream of society. After Watergate and Vietnam, Congress curbed some of the powers of the presidency.
Maybe the Mod Squad will once again be a precursor of better times to come.
