Obamanomics: What's the Big Idea?

David Ignatius wants to know Obama's Big Economic Idea:

[W]ill Obama's domestic economic agenda also be exciting and visionary? Will it connect with the country's yearning for fundamental change? That's a much harder question, and it goes to one of the trickiest problems for Obama: Can a candidate who has gathered such a broad tent of supporters also find the intellectual spark that could make him a transformational president? What will he stand for, other than the generic idea of change? What's the cutting edge here?

The Reagan presidency was potent because it was powered by new ideas; the same could be said of the Clinton presidency. But if there is to be an Obama revolution, what will be its transforming economic vision? A program that is centered on "fixing the Bush mess" may be necessary, but it won't energize the country...

When you ask senior members of Obama's team how they would use this opportunity to reshape domestic policy, you get the same well-considered answers. They will focus on health care, energy policy and tax reform...The trick for Obama will be to make this agenda sound like creating something new and inspiring, rather than just fixing what's broken.

I can see Ignatius' point. It's not that universal health care and energy policy reform aren't god ideas - they are. It's not even that they aren't big, important ideas - they are. It's that there isn't yet an overarching framework to these ideas - a coherent economic policy paradigm to replace to conservative paradigm we've been operating under for most of the last three decades.

We need that Big Idea, because the Republicans have one. Their Big Idea is "Let business do its thing without government interference." And with the simplicity and unity of that Big Idea, the Republicans have taught people how to think about economic policy. There's a whole generation of people out there whose main idea about economics is "government = bad."

That paradigm has had some positive effects, but also some real negative consequences for our economy. We've had a hard time implementing environmental and safety regulations. We've racked up a huge national debt. And, most seriously, we've neglected public investment in important areas like infrastructure, research, and education. We've let business do its thing, but there are some things businesses just won't do.

So if I were Obama, my Big Economic Idea would be "investment." Investment provides government with an important role, in which it complements businesses instead of suppressing them. It also contributes to the sense of national cooperation that Democrats (and Obama in particular) have long wanted to re-create. And investment stresses the importance of future generations, something that the Republicans have succeeded in getting Americans to neglect. Bill Clinton was moving in this direction with his "give people the tools to help themselves" idea, but he was swimming against the tide.

Thanks to the abject failure of Bush's policies, that conservative tide has receded, and Democrats have an unprecedented opportunity to change the terms of the economic policy debate. Obama needs to jump on that opportunity.