Arthur Laffer has stopped watching the morning news. Instead, every day he watches a documentary film called "The Kingdom of the Blue Whale," about the breeding and calving habits of the world's largest mammal. It is narrated by the actor Tom Selleck, and it explores the lives and songs of a species that rebounded after being hunted to near extinction in the mid-20th century. "It's a wonderful story," Laffer says, "of positive outcome."
He is no longer certain that the presidential election will end the same way. Laffer, a conservative economics legend and former adviser to President Ronald Reagan, began this campaign cycle convinced that political and economic trends were converging on a Reagan-style sweep for the Republican Party. As recently as July, he issued a detailed report on those trends, concluding "the essential characteristics of the narrative for the Trump campaign and the Reagan campaign of 1980 are surprisingly similar, which would point to a Trump landslide."
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The campaign since then, he conceded, "sure isn't the one I expected." He added, "So I have no idea how this all turns out tomorrow."
In a phone interview on Monday, Laffer said the whole premise of his analysis has been undermined by a Republican nominee, Donald Trump, who lost focus on what Laffer calls the economic failings of President Barack Obama and, by extension, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
"He's not running on economics," Laffer said. He said Trump had allowed Democrats to focus the race on a host of side issues surrounding Trump. He lamented that the GOP nominee had expressed so much of his policy message around restrictions on international trade; Laffer believes liberalising trade, along with cutting taxes, is a key to delivering income growth for workers across America."It just baffles me," he said. "Everyone's worse off when protectionism takes place."
Laffer said the campaign now reminded him not of 1980, when Reagan beat President Jimmy Carter, but of 1972, when President Richard Nixon succeeded in making the election a referendum on a flawed opponent, Democratic Senator George McGovern. "When the incumbent can turn the issue to the challenger, all bets are off," Laffer said. "And that is what exactly appears to be happening now."
"I think Trump played into it," he said. "You know, Trump has an ego. He's somewhat narcissistic, as everyone knows. He responded to Hillary by defending himself, when he is not the issue at all. Once it gets into all this mudslinging, the substance disappears."
In contrast, he said, "Reagan's ego on this wasn't excessive. And we were able to keep it on economics the whole time, and just cleaned 'em" in the final vote.
That shift in focus in why Laffer has abandoned the news in favour of blue whales. He has not, however, abandoned his optimism for a wave of pro-growth policies that could unleash increased prosperity across the country. He described Clinton as less ideological than Obama and predicted that, in the face of a Republican-controlled Congress, "she could do good policies."
If she did not, he added, the economy would likely sour, and she would face a reckoning from voters. That big Republican wave, Laffer said, would break in the 2018 midterms, just a couple of years late.
Washington Post