Angry voters feel country heading in wrong direction

Voters are angry. According to Rasmussen Reports, roughly two-thirds of Americans feel the country is headed in the “wrong direction.”

But that’s such a vague phrase. What’s it mean? What would be the “right direction”?

On at least one important issue, unemployment, we have a hard number that shows what Americans considered the right direction during the last presidential campaign.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney set the marker himself.

In the May 23, 2012 issue of The Hill, Romney vowed: If elected, he would bring unemployment down to 6 percent by the end of his first term.

In other words, by the end of 2016. Unemployment was, at that time, at 8.1 percent, having dropped from its peak of 10 percent.

The Hill, a publication that specializes in politics, was skeptical. “The 6 percent prediction,” staff writer Jonathan Easley wrote, “is a bold claim that Romney will surely be held to by Democrats if he’s elected.”

In the article, Romney said President Obama was nice but inept. The president, he said, “is simply not up to the task of helping guide an economy.”

Fast forward to 2015. Romney’s “bold claim” has been achieved, by President Obama.

And then some. The unemployment rate has fallen to 5 percent.

Even more startling, we reached that level more than a year before Romney promised to bring unemployment down to 6 percent.

Sounds like the right direction.

But imagine if Romney had won the election and that his “bold claim” had come true: Unemployment was now at 6 percent.

Would Republicans be raging at Romney’s incompetent handling of the economy?

Of course not. They’d be crowing like the morning rooster about how Romney had set America on the right path.

It would be like Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign of 1984 all over again.

And if Romney had achieved a 5 percent unemployment rate a year earlier than he promised? He’d be unstoppable.

This isn’t to trivialize the issue. We still have problems with people being underemployed and with stagnant wages.

It’s to point out that our country’s mood is as dependent on our perception as it is on reality. As Hamlet said, “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Let’s look at another seemingly intractable problem: the out-of-control growth of the federal government.

As House Speaker Paul Ryan said last week, “More bureaucracy means less opportunity.”

We simply have to prune the size of the federal bureaucracy.

Let’s say we could go back to the number of federal employees we had a generation ago, when the great bureaucracy-buster Ronald Reagan was in office.

You may say I’m a dreamer and perhaps the only one, but there’s good reason to believe that cutting the number of government bureaucrats can be done.

And that’s because: It already has been.

As of 2014, we had just under 4.2 million federal employees. In 1988, at the end of Reagan’s second term, we had nearly 5.3 million federal employees. (Reagan actually added about 300,000 federal employees.)

Even in raw numbers that’s a huge drop.

It’s even more impressive when you consider how much the population has grown. In 1988, the U.S. population was about 245 million. We’re now at about 315 million.

We can take that back even further. In 1962, we had 5.35 million government employees, at a time when the population was well under 200 million - only about 186 million.

Talk about a bloated bureaucracy!

Government spending has gone up, and it is a problem. But it’s largely because of spending on Social Security and Medicare, not on some mythical, ever-increasing army of bureaucrats.

The main candidate stoking and benefitting from voter anger, of course, is Donald Trump, whose appeal is as mystifying as it is embarrassing.

Americans often complain about the “nanny state.” And so they’re flocking to Trump, who’s offering a “Sugar Daddy state.”

Under Trump, absolutely everything is going to be awesome - healthcare, the economy, our military, foreign affairs, you name it - for one very good reason: Donald Trump himself is so awesome.

Why bother holding an election. Who needs democracy when you’ve got the Donald?

Voter anger isn’t all bad. It gets people to the polls. But if they’re angry enough to vote for Trump, we’ll be heading in the wrong direction.


Don Flood is a former newspaper editor living near Lewes. He can be reached at floodpolitics@gmail.com.