The Partisan Divide on Issues

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Mondale was an early Democratic adopter of neoliberalism.

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/15/us/mo...-wing.html

https://www.salon.com/2015/03/14/america...from_1984/

Quote: By the time the 1984 cycle began Walter Mondale had already become more of a Jimmy Carter Democrat as Vice President, going from someone more in line with Congressional Democrats and a potential bridge to the member of Carter’s team dispatched to tell Dems what the Administration was doing. Mondale, who still believes his Robert Rubin-flavored deficit pitch was correct on the merits, ran a “new realism” campaign that came down to a noun, a verb and deficits and debt. He went so far as telling people who were more focused on a jobs deficit than a budget deficit that “the only way to get hope” for America was “to get these deficits down.” The Democratic platform underwent a real shift from 1976 and even 1980 under Carter to the bang-up job done in 1984. The convention issue of Congressional Quarterly declared it the “most conservative platform of the last 50 years.” The New Dems should love the national iteration of Mondale. In a number of ways he was their poster candidate.

Robert Rubin, then of Goldman Sachs, worked on the Mondale campaign. It was Rubin’s Wall Street wing that convinced Mondale to say the line that was later portrayed as the height of economic liberalism by the New Dems. This was confirmed by Mondale to Robert Kuttner. At his most visible moment Mondale would embody a caricature of a hair shirt-dispensing neoliberal, giving a speech that wore his deficit obsession as a badge of honor. “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you, I just did.”

> The Wall Street Journal and paragons of Beltway “centrism” David Broder and the New Republic lavished praise on Mondale for this. Note that there is no discretion in whose taxes are going up and the deficit is portrayed as the sum of all economic policy virtue. The latter is a New Dem tick that we see to this day. Voters will mirror elected officials’ stated concern for the budget deficit, especially when leading politicians in both parties constantly talk about it, but voters generally see deficit reduction as shorthand to express their legitimate “I’m falling behind” sentiment. They do not vote on it and definitely don’t monitor CBO reports (note: public opinion of where the deficit is headed does not track with where it is actually headed). Instead they’re rightly focused on good jobs, their income and their overall economic security. No one, except for pundits in DC and big donors on Wall Street, really cares about the deficit.