"No" to More Government

The nation needs a president who'll say 'no'

By Guest Columnist

November 17, 2009, 7:30AM

As House Democrats accuse the Republicans, fresh off a nearly unanimous party-line vote against the health care bill, of being the "Party of No," perhaps President Barack Obama should take a cue from a predecessor. Trying to reach famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith by phone one day, Lyndon Johnson ran into a roadblock -- Galbraith's housekeeper. "Mr. President, I work for him, not you," she unabashedly told the leader of the free world. "He told me not to wake him up."

LBJ's response? "Tell that woman I want her here at the White House," he later told Galbraith, impressed. "She knows how to say 'no.'"

Forty-some years later, there is a parallel: Our country needs leaders who understand that saying no isn't a liability but the essence of political leadership.

Consider the responsiveness of the federal government to our daily lives. Being earnest, the Obama administration has a strategy for nearly any worry you might have. Health care? A deep expansion of government authority. Urban decay? A new White House Office of Urban Affairs. Community service opportunities? A new Web site, serve.gov.

Of course, governments must say yes to many things, including rigorous economic strategies, national security, foreign policy and myriad other issues. But the list of imaginable social or individual ills is long. Should the federal government draw the line anywhere?

It should. The Wal-Mart philosophy of government -- whatever you might demand, the government has shelf space for -- blurs the line between federal, state, local and individual responsibilities. To be sure, expanding rural tourism, house weatherization and community gardening are worthy objectives, But having federal strategies for each implies that the federal government is primarily, even solely, responsible for achieving those outcomes.

What's more, the political is necessarily financial. In the dialect of English unique to Washington, D.C., use of the word "support" is understood to mean that you approve funding an objective with government money. Consequently, if you endorse the overall aim but do not want to put taxpayer money behind it, you are accused of opposing the outcome itself: a perilous implication for any elected official.

So what is at the core of conservatives' objection to the health care bill? Surely, part of it relates to expansion of the federal deficit. But the deeper question is: If we could afford it, would the health care bill then be good policy? Conservatives' unease with the legislation is based not solely on fiscal concerns, but on an instinctive discomfort with designating health care as a fundamental right, rather than, at least in part, an individual responsibility.

This failure to distinguish between rights and responsibilities is arguably at the core of a larger trend within government: responding to every dormant woe, never saying no, and thus wantonly fueling the growth of the federal deficit.

Imagine a politician who, when asked about her strategy to promote community gardening, replied: "Nothing. That's not the government's responsibility, it's yours -- or at least, your local government's." While this answer may be correct, it is politically risky. In an age where Clintonian empathy or an Obamapedic mastery of policy options is a requirement for achieving national office, few officials will tell voters that they do not, in fact, have a right to federal dollars for house weatherization.

John F. Kennedy famously said, "To govern is to choose." Indeed, without the ability to choose, the ability to govern is greatly diminished. Once we designate something as a right, it becomes impossible not to choose it as a policy and therefore budgetary priority. Thus the paradox: As we demand more, our rights expand and government gets bigger, we syncopate the range of budgetary and policy choices available to our leaders, constricting their ability to govern effectively. This dynamic is clear in both California and Oregon, where repeated ballot measures, some of which modified each state's Constitution, result in annual budgets that are partly predetermined, giving state legislatures less room to maneuver.

The decay of the Soviet Union proved that a country's strength is determined not by how much government does for its people, but how much its people do for themselves. As our citizenry, with a government attentive to its every need, steels itself for robust growth in health care oversight, rural tourism and community gardening, our political leadership should contemplate which demands precisely remain to which -- as a matter of principle, not practicality -- government will say No.

John Horton served in the White House Drug Policy Office from 2002 through 2007. He is currently an Oregon small business owner.