Better in their words…

Another “simple reality” to help put Democratic party talk/walk into perspective.
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Judging from their numerous appearances on our TV screens, Michael Bloomberg and Barack Obama have come through Hurricane Sandy just fine.  [Which the press would not have suffered George Bush…] The same cannot be said for their brand of governing. Of all the vulnerabilities exposed by this storm, the biggest hit may have been to Blue State Liberalism.

The damage goes well past the obvious embarrassments. Those include Mayor Bloomberg’s initial insistence that a yuppie marathon in Manhattan proceed—requiring a massive police and sanitation presence, as well as power sources—even as citizens on Staten Island were pleading for disaster relief. The embarrassments surely ought also to include Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign vow that his election would slow the rise of the oceans.

The silliness of those episodes speaks to a serious point about the great vulnerability of 21st-century American liberalism: an inability to set the priorities necessary for good government. As a result, government grows both bigger and less capable, especially for people who do not have the resources to fund other options. As Walter Russell Mead argued recently on his blog at The American Interest, our biggest cities represent a “colossal failure of blue social policy to create sustainable lower middle class prosperity.”

Mr. Mead was writing in reference to the hell that our inner cities have become for many African-Americans. But the failure is larger than that, because so many of the government agencies that citizens depend on have morphed into jobs programs, where pensions take priority over performance. Compare, for example, the response of Verizon—which within 24 hours of Sandy’s landfall had 95% of its cell service up and running in affected areas—with the glaring lack of hard information from the government for people shivering in cold homes without power.

In their own ways, Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama embody the obsessions of modern liberalism. Each holds an advanced Ivy League degree. Each believes he would make better choices for others than they could make for themselves. Each has consequently eschewed the gradual and the modest—the unglamorous improvements that might have better prepared, say, Staten Island, for a dangerous storm. These leaders prefer instead the shiny and large, whether it is Mr. Bloomberg’s huge and costly 2nd Avenue subway project or Mr. Obama’s $860 billion federal stimulus.

By liberalism’s own measures, the results have hardly been impressive. For all the talk about infrastructure, it never seems to get the repairs or upgrades it needs. For all the talk about public education, it is precisely the people whose interests liberals supposedly protect—racial minorities and the poor—who suffer most from a failing public-school system. And for all the talk about how the GOP wants to deny Granny her federal entitlements, it is the conservative Republican in the national race, Rep. Paul Ryan, who actually has put forward a highly workable plan that would keep Social Security and Medicare alive for coming generations.

Meanwhile, what do we get from blue-state liberalism? In New York we get a mayor who makes war on Big Gulp sodas while proving himself inept at basic government functions such as clearing snow. At the national level, we get a president who vows to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy even though some might not be without power if regulators in Washington and New York hadn’t been making the environment so hostile to new investment.

Hence too the modern unvirtuous circle, where intervention at the federal level encourages waste and grandiosity at the local level. These subsidies distort priorities, which helps explain why California votes to spend money it doesn’t have for a high-speed rail it can’t afford.

Chapman University fellow in urban futures Joel Kotkin spends a great deal of time looking at which communities deliver and which do not, and he says it need not be a partisan issue. He cites Sioux Falls, S.D., which has a Democratic mayor in a sea of Republicans—and a fine new water-development system. Or Galveston, Texas, which maintains a huge seawall to avoid the kind of hurricane damage that killed 6,000 people back in 1900. Much of the nation’s best new infrastructure, he says—roads, bridges, airports, ports—has been built in “red” cities on the Gulf Coast and Great Plains with bipartisan support.

By contrast, he is astounded by the kind of liberalism he sees in his adopted state of California and his native New York, where a mayor who jets down to his mansion in Bermuda on weekends tells working- and middle-class New Yorkers that they really shouldn’t be driving to work or living in single-family homes. “In many ways,” Mr. Kotkin says, “liberalism is increasingly big brother meets blue nose.”

The irony is that modern American liberalism has become a movement grounded less in practical politics than a sort of religious fervor—and often requiring the same strong faith in the face of disappointment and failure. The difference, of course, is that while religions often promise to deliver in the next world, government is supposed to do it in this one.

Write to MainStreet@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared November 6, 2012, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Sandy and the Failures of Blue-Statism.

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