The headline for a New York Times piece by Peter Baker this week used the metaphor of a split screen, contrasting President Obama’s State of the Union address with the messages conveyed in last night’s South Carolina debate between the Republicans who seeking to replace him.

We are decidedly the most powerful nation in the world, or we have nearly fumbled our chance to be so.  We have a surging economy with millions of new jobs, or we are making our way back excruciatingly slowly to where we were in 2008, and only after throwing trillions of dollars onto our piles of debt. We have better health-care coverage and have saved the system with electronic medical records, or our doctors all complain that they spend 90 percent of their patient time (with the few lucky people they still are willing to see) clicking through seven computer screens to prescribe Tylenol. Wall Street runs the country and is ruining it, or the political class is running the country and ruining it.

Take your pick of visions. These are the landscapes in the parties’ parallel universes. As we move into election season, they will provide a lot of interesting discussion, and much more noise.

With the January calendar still allowing a first this or that in 2016, I would like to add these considerations of public schizophrenia to those proffered:

Is the United States a country which is great, or used to be, or can be, because of its government or because of the character of its people?  Because of its rules, or because of the people who live by them – or don’t?  Are we a better country if the federal government decides most everything about how our nation operates, or is it a better county if the states and local governments can figure out much of how to referee the activities of the work-a-day world?

How many people understand the difference between national and federal these days?  I can tell you that many CEOs have learned the difference, as regulations spew out of the Federal Register.

Ten or so years ago I was privileged to sit in an audience in the National Press Club in Washington to listen to a presentation by the legendary Alex Kozinski, who until 2014 served as chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was introduced by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and stepped to his side to rip the cover off of a large presentation board on an easel with some writing on it.

Upon inspection, it appeared to be a colorful version of the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution – the Bill of Rights.  Some of them were huge and written in international orange and hot pink. Some were barely discernable by even those seated in the front rows.  He said that’s how the US Supreme Court actually sees them.

Kozinski’s point was that the first, fourth and fifth amendments get a lot of attention at SCOTUS, but cases were not being brought under the Tenth Amendment.  There had been only two or three within the last couple of decades, at that time.

Today, largely because of the partisan and ideological agenda of the current administration, there is surging interest in rebuilding the federalism structure that served us well for hundreds of years.  As Ronald Reagan often reminded us and the current crop of GOP presidential candidates are emphasizing, the powers not enumerated in the Constitution are reserved to the states and the people.  The states have shown the way to reform and innovation for years, and people are starting to recognize the difference between state and federal regulation.

There are many manifestations of this new split-screen federal/state vision, which has worked its way into the edge of the right-track/wrong-track polling.  As Gov. Chris Christie mentioned in the Charleston debate, since Mr. Obama has been in the White House, the number of states run by Republican governors has increased from 19 to 31. That can’t be purely attributable to gerrymandering (state borders haven’t changed, after all). It must mean that voters are becoming more concerned about fiscal management.  How else do you explain new Republican governors in Maryland, Illinois and Massachusetts?  How else do you explain General Electric’s move of its corporate headquarters to the latter from Connecticut?

Delegations from many states have met three times in the last two years, specifically to discuss an Article V constitutional convention to address restoring the eroded authority of states.  A large number of them are suing or otherwise resisting the federal government on health care, land management, the administration’s Clean Power Plan or the Waters of the United States regulation.

My friend Ken Ivory, a state legislator in Utah, was on the front page of the New York Times this week as the founder and energy behind the American Lands Council, an organization formed to petition the federal government to return unallocated federal lands in the western states to those states, as was done in the East a century and a half ago. Because the federal government owns up to 90 percent of the unallocated land in some states, it is supposed to be making payments in lieu of taxes that the states are unable to levy to support school districts and other state services funded by property taxes.

Unfortunately, when sequestration went into effect, one of the first things cut was these payments to states.  The federal government loses money on every acre of land that it holds, and has locked up enough resources from any recreational, mineral resource, timber harvest or other use to have attracted increasingly negative attention from residents of western states.

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee fired off a letter earlier this week to 20 politically diverse states who are contesting EPA overreach over one issue or another.  After identifying the purpose of the request for information, the letter ends:

Accordingly, the Committee respectfully requests your feedback on the state resources and efforts necessary to comply with EPA regulatory actions, and whether the current regulatory framework between EPA and the states upholds the principle of cooperative federalism.

It has been a long time coming, but the long-ignored side of the split federal/state screen is beginning to sputter some images, and could generate a strong signal during the upcoming presidential sweepstakes.

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