Lessons For Obama From Silent Cal
Frugal, laconic Calvin Coolidge instinctively applied his conservative principles. The result was just what we need today: low debt and rising prosperity.
By Charles C. Johnson
When President Obama demanded in September that
"millionaires and billionaires" "pay their fair share," he
laid a claim to justice, albeit justice wrongly understood. America's tax code
is unjust, he argued--not because everyone doesn't pay the same rate, but
because the "rich" don't pay enough in federal taxes. Dropping his
g's, stomping his feet, seducing crowds, he was in full campaign mode. "If
you love me, then you gotta help me pass this bill," he told a swooning
crowd. The campaigner-in-chief was back, still wanting to "spread the
wealth around," insisting that taxes must be raised. It was all about
"living within our means."
But if Obama is serious about living within our means,
he would do well to study President Calvin Coolidge--the last Republican
president to pay down the debt while simultaneously growing the economy.
There's never been a better time than now for a return to the Coolidge
perspective. Often wrongly dismissed as a "do-nothing" executive by
New Deal activists, Coolidge showed what true conservatism could produce. He
brought Washington's fiscal house into order. He balanced budgets, cut
spending, slashed taxes, and helped expand the economy to produce prosperity.
In other words, exactly what we need today.
Unfortunately, Obama's philosophy of government
couldn't be further from Coolidge's. "The wisest and soundest method of
solving our tax problem is through economy [spending restraints],"
Coolidge said in his inaugural address in 1925. His concept of our republic
differed markedly from Obama's. "The collection of any taxes which are not
absolutely required," he argued, "which do not beyond reasonable
doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny.
Under this Republic the rewards of industry belong to those who earn them.
Americans, he reminded us, "are politically free people and must be an
economically free people." But with President Obama, America has become
less economically free, falling in the indexes of economic freedom.
This is chiefly because of the climate of economic
uncertainty his policies create. In 2009, President Obama rightly opposed
raising taxes in the jaws of a recession. Now, confusingly, he insists on
raising them despite the economy's continuing contraction. Obviously he hasn't
learned that taxes can't solve Washington's fiscal woes, because to tax is to
destroy the dynamic sources of our prosperity.
Coolidge knew this well, counseling his fellow
citizens against the class warfare underlying Obama's economic philosophy:
"We cannot finance the country, we cannot improve social conditions,
through any system of injustice, even if we attempt to inflict it upon the
rich. Those who suffer the most harm will be the poor." And the poor have
suffered dearly under President Obama: The number of Americans living in
poverty increased again in 2010, rising for the fourth year in a row. Now, one
in six Americans lives below the poverty line.
Americans instinctively dislike class warfare,
Coolidge argued, because they "believe in prosperity. It is absurd to
suppose that [Americans are] envious of those who are already prosperous."
Prudence and the lessons of history, Coolidge believed, told us "the wise
and correct course" was "not to destroy those who have already
secured success but to create conditions under which everyone will have a
better chance to be successful."
COOLIDGE'S APPROACH really was one of seeking the proper
balance. Government and business each "ought to be sovereign in its own
sphere," he told the Chamber of Commerce of New York State in November
1925. "When government comes unduly under the influence of business, the
tendency is to develop an administration which closes the door of opportunity;
becomes narrow and selfish in its outlook, and results in an oligarchy."
On the other hand, "[w]hen government enters the field of business with
its great resources, it has a tendency to extravagance and inefficiency, but,
having the power to crush all competitors, likewise closes the door of
opportunity and results in monopoly."
With his belief in big government, Obama insists that
he remains focused on creating jobs. Coolidge however, knew that government
could not "create jobs" directly. Job creation was the province of
private enterprise. "If business can be let alone and assured of
reasonable freedom from governmental interference and increased taxes,"
the retired Coolidge later wrote during the Depression as a columnist,
"that will do more than all kinds of legislation to relieve depression.…It
will be the part of wisdom to give business a free hand to supply its own
remedies."
Coolidge achieved as much as he did because he
believed so deeply in "economy," meaning frugality. He ranked it
third, after only "order and liberty," as "one of the highest
essentials of a free government." He put it simply: "I favor the
policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save
people." A dollar saved was a dollar the people could spend themselves, on
their own betterment.
Unlike other politicians who espoused a phony fiscal
conservatism even then, Coolidge worked to make his principles policy. And he
believed wholeheartedly in budgets, confessing a "sort of obsession"
to make the numbers come out right. "I regard a good budget as among the
noblest monuments of virtue," he proclaimed in 1924. Compare that with
President Obama's last budget, a monument to profligacy that failed to attract
a single vote in the Senate.
Obama prefers to ramp up the rhetoric, demonizing
"fat cats" and "millionaires and billionaires." In one of
his two books about himself, he described his time in corporate America as a
period "behind enemy lines." Coolidge, by contrast, once remarked
that business capital is "the chief material minister to the general
character of all mankind." He famously believed that "the chief
business of America is business," but business and the wealth it produced
were only a means, not an end.
By leaving business alone, Coolidge oversaw one of the
lowest unemployment rates in American history. By keeping businesses free from
excessive taxes, he protected consumers from having to pay for them with higher
prices. "High taxes mean high prices," Coolidge maintained. But he
also added a moral dimension: "I am opposed to extremely high rates,
because they produce little or no revenue, because they are bad for the
country, and finally, because they are wrong."
"Debt reduction is tax reduction," as he
often put it. The corollary was also true. Tax reduction was debt reduction.
"I want taxes to be less," he said, "that the people may have
more." By lowering taxes, Coolidge actually produced humanitarian results.
Here, even progressives might find something to admire. Those making less than
$5,000 a year paid 15.4 percent of total income taxes in 1920, but only .4
percent in 1929. Those who earned more than $100,000 paid 65.2 percent, up from
29.9 percent over that same period. Coolidge got more revenue, too. The
economic expansion led to a 28 percent increase in the proportion of the budget
paid by federal income taxes. By 1927, 98 percent of Americans paid no income
tax at all.
THESE SUCCESSES were possible not only because of
Coolidge's grounding in common-sense economics and his belief in limited
government, but because he surrounded himself with men of accomplishment, not
agenda. There were major businessmen and real statesmen in his cabinet. Among
them was Andrew Mellon, his (and Harding's and Hoover's) Treasury Secretary. A
financial wizard, Mellon had such genius and force of personality that it was
said "three Presidents served under him." Another of Coolidge's
outstanding appointees was Vice President Charles Dawes, who had been the
nation's first director of the Bureau of the Budget in the Harding
administration. Dawes, who had devised a plan to restore post-World War I
Germany and stabilize its economy, would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in
1925.
Like many conservatives today, Coolidge was popular
with the man in the street but unpopular in the Ivory Tower and in Washington.
Then as now, the educated class harbored contempt for the philosophic
underpinnings of our republic and for those who most seriously defended them.
When attacks on Coolidge's philosophy failed, his critics simply got personal.
Socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of Teddy Roosevelt, scorned
Coolidge as having been "weaned on a pickle." He was the butt of
jokes and vicious rumors. Coolidge "slept more than any other President,
whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored," wrote
H. L. Mencken in 1933. When told of Coolidge's death, Dorothy Parker, the
popular satirist, is said to have quipped, "How could they tell?"
More recently, author William L. Shirer recalled
"the incredible smugness and emptiness of the Calvin Coolidge era."
He was not alone in such cheap shots. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. castigated Coolidge for being too beholden to business and pictured
him as a boorish philistine.
To today's left, Coolidge was a bogeyman. The
Huffington Post quoted an unnamed Washington Democrat who sought to tie the Tea
Party to Coolidge. Mike Lux, a left-wing political consultant, linked him to
the Paul Ryan budget: "[Republicans] want to take us back to the era of
Calvin Coolidge, when the advances of the last 80 years simply didn't
exist," Lux wrote on the Huffington Post.
On the other hand, many on the right long for a return
to Coolidge's principles. Peggy Noonan, among others, saw Coolidge in Governor
Mitch Daniels of Indiana. George Will calls him "the last president with a
proper sense of his office's constitutional proportions." Richard Land of
the Southern Baptist Convention, who served as the honorary co-chair of Rick
Perry's recent prayer event, predicted a President Perry "would be the
most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge."
Predictably, what Land hopes for, Andrew Romano of
Newsweek fears. "Perry…would do more to limit the power of federal
government -- or at least attempt to do more--than any president since Calvin
Coolidge," Romano warned after reading an interview Perry did with his
magazine last fall. But if Perry wants to claim the Coolidge mantle, he won't
be alone. Sarah Palin's book America by Heart brims with favorable references
to the 30th president. And Michele Bachmann extolled Coolidge's economic
policies on the House floor in 2009.
Unlike George W. Bush, Coolidge believed that
sometimes the government can't do much at all to mend the people's woes. In
fact, the trick often is to do nothing, which is what Coolidge did by vetoing a
farm subsidy bill--the McNary-Haugen bill--in 1927 and again in 1928.
"Farmers have never made much money. I don't believe we can do much about
it," he explained. Coolidge's was a government of limits because he
recognized there are limits to what government can do. "It is much more
important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones," he rightly noted.
COOLIDGE'S VIEW OF government couldn't be more
different from President Obama's. He believed in the "right of the
individual to possess, enjoy, and control the dollar which he earns."
Liberty "would be…a mockery unless it secured to the individual the
rewards of his own effort and industry." President Obama doesn't believe
in such a right. "I do think at a certain point you've made enough
money," he preached. "We don't want to stop [entrepreneurs] from
fulfilling their responsibility to help grow our economy."
Coolidge would never have said such a thing, because
he understood what Obama does not, that personality matters a lot to policy.
And he was a master of what one admirer called "brilliant flashes of
silence." "No man ever listened himself out of a job," Coolidge
noted on one occasion. Another time he declared, "I don't recall any candidate
for president that ever injured himself very much by not talking." And
then there was this: "They can't hang you for what you don't say."
He was, in fact, a painfully shy man. When it came to
his political thought, he was seeped in the classics--he translated Dante on
his honeymoon--and the Founding Fathers. He genuinely believed in the
Declaration of Independence's teaching that all men were created equal, and he
fought for it not only by keeping government limited, but by working to
criminalize lynching and by extending the promise of citizenship to every
Native American.
The last president to write most of his own speeches,
Coolidge spoke so eloquently on so many subjects that it is a shame that few
people read him today. Indeed, "Silent Cal" authored three
collections of speeches and an autobiography. He wrote a daily,
post-presidential syndicated column that numbered more than 300 pieces. He gave
well over 500 press conferences during his five and half years as president.
All of these well-attended chats were on background; Coolidge would let the
press quote a serious administration official, but never him directly.
"The words of the President have an enormous weight and ought not to be
used indiscriminately," he counseled in his Autobiography.
Obama, by comparison, uses words so indiscriminately
that it seems hardly a day goes by when he doesn't deliver a major speech.
These are described as major because, in Obama's view, nothing he does is
minor. His favorite word is "unprecedented," which he uses most about
himself. Obama has suggested in some remarks that he fancies himself a new
Lincoln, a political messiah, another "tall, gangly, self-made Springfield
lawyer." Invoking Lincoln when he announced for president, Obama called on
his fellow Americans to "gather…to transform a nation." The question
is toward what ends that transformation is intended.
For Obama, Lincoln is personal, but for Coolidge,
Lincoln was political. Coolidge, too, was thought to be Lincoln's
"heir," because he spoke so frequently of Lincoln's political
thought, often reverently. He argued that Lincoln was a great man because he
"made the same appeal to his countrymen which all great men have made…it
came not from his belief in their weakness but in their strength."
Lincoln's "great achievement consisted in bringing the different elements
of his country into a more truly moral relationship."
But Coolidge, unlike Obama, never gave the impression
he was the chosen one. He believed that it was the people who decided who was
great. Obama, on the other hand, compared himself to Moses. Electing him would
be the "moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet
began to heal," he said during his campaign.
COOLIDGE KNEW WELL the danger of letting politics go
to the head. "Nine-tenths of [the visitors to the White House] want
something they ought not to have," he held. He had a simple solution for
dealing with these visitors: "If you keep dead-still they will run down in
three or four minutes." President Obama, who fetes Andy Stern of the SEIU
and other union leaders, gives such importunate visitors everything they want.
He was also determined to avoid being taken in by
flatterers. "It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of
self-delusion," he reflected. "They are surrounded by
worshippers….They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation,
which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of
becoming arrogant or careless." President Obama is rightly denounced for
being both, and it has something to do with the self-delusion fostered by the
adulation he has received during his presidency, his 2008 campaign, and long
before.
Conservatives should work toward nothing less than
what Harding and Coolidge vowed in 1920--"a return to normalcy," by
which they meant a turn away from "things …go[ing] to hell in a
handbasket," as they had during the Wilson years. What Harding promised,
Coolidge delivered. On the eve of the 2008 election, Obama promised to "fundamentally
transform" America. He delivered, too, but with "hope and
change" that have left us with a changed credit rating. The task now is to
return to normalcy once more, before it's too late.
It won't be easy. But as Coolidge wrote: "It is a
great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country,
for him to know that he is not a great man. We draw our Presidents from the
people. I came from them. I wish to be one of them again." In 1928 he
announced "I do not choose to run," eschewed a likely election
victory, and retired to Northampton, Massachusetts. Come 2012, we will have a
chance to help Obama resemble Coolidge and quietly return to private life.
