Americans want pragmatic solutions

America’s Leftward Tilt? 

By DREW WESTEN, NYT

The presidential election is now a close contest, but barring an Electoral College tie, someone is going to win, someone is going to lose, and both sides will have to make sense of it all.

The obvious story line of this election, whoever wins, is that Americans want pragmatic solutions to the relentless distress they have experienced for over a decade, whether that means a more active or a more passive government. They are looking for anyone who can provide a coherent vision of how to fix an economy that is not working for people who work for a living. But rather than a victory for pragmatism, we may well see both the winners and losers take away a very different lesson: that this election was a mandate for another shift to the right.

If Mitt Romney loses, conservatives will no doubt conclude that he just wasn’t conservative enough, that they should have picked someone more appealing to their base. If President Obama loses or squeaks out a victory just four years after President George W. Bush destroyed the economy (which should have discredited conservative economics once and for all), many Democrats are likely to conclude that he tried to move too left too fast when he pushed for a stimulus and health care reform for which Americans were simply not ready, rather than that he simply sold both programs poorly (something he now acknowledges).

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