The role of government

I've often joined the mainstream chorus calling for Obama to put forth his philosophy (not that they noticed me joining, of course). Here's part of what I mean. When Clinton ran in 1992 and 1996, he espoused a philosophy of the role of government in the economy - "giving people the tools to help themselves." In fact, he repeated it ad nauseam. But that repetition did something very important; it provided a clear alternative to the 80's Republican idea of "government should do absolutely nothing, except for law enforcement and national defense." Clinton was espousing an alternative idea - that government should invest in human capital. He didn't use the economist's term, but people got the message.

Obama now needs to do something similar. Only now, our most pressing need isn't human capital, but physical capital - specifically, roads, bridges, broadband...and most of all, power grids. Consider this post from Matt Yglesias:

One thing most people don’t realize is that the most immediate impediment to commercially viable wind power has nothing to do with wind power technology. Rather, the problem is that the electrical grid doesn’t have enough capacity to transmit the power from where the wind is to where electricity gets used. And this isn’t a technological problem either. As Matthew Wald writes in The New York Times “unlike answers to many of the nation’s energy problems, improvements to the grid would require no new technology.”

Exactly. The bottleneck in alternative energy isn't always technology - in this case, it's just infrastructure. Since no company is willing to build the whole infrastructure on its own, the government needs to step in and do it. (In economics-ese, this means the government needs to provide a nonrival production input).

So Obama needs to say something about this. Not in the sense of "I plan to do X and Y and Z," but in the sense of "We need government to build public works." Because our country has suffered because of public works.

And the good thing about this philosophy is that the Republicans can't co-opt it, because they're going to stick to their mantra of government should do absolutely nothing, except for law enforcement and national defense." Which means that by picking up the banner of public works - - "nation-building for our own nation," you might call it - Obama can draw clear differences with McCain simply by giving voice to this idea. For all the flak he took for not mentioning McCain by name, Mark Warner did a good job outlining a Democratic approach to the economy in very appealing terms.