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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 1, 2006)
PAGE 10 WHY CONSERVATIVES CAN’T GOVERN without federal assistance at all, only to have their drugs subsi dized once again at a later point. Caught between the market and the state, Republicans picked the worst features of each. No single human being could have designed a program as unwieldy as this one. It took the combined efforts of every faction in today’s conservative move ment to produce a public policy so removed from common sense. The failure of the Bush administration to plan for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion was just one more, albeit the most serious consequence of the conservative ambivalence toward government. Neoconservatives were all for ambitious adventures abroad, and, in the aftermath of September 11, they won the President’s support. But they never captured his pocketbook, which was tenaciously guarded by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Neocons wanted the Republican Party to live in the shadow of Henry 'Scoop' Jackson. Rumsfeld insisted tha, military adventures be funded in the spirit of Robert A. Taft. So long as conservatives denigrate government while relying on government to achieve their objectives, Rumsfeld’s vision of how to fight wars is the only kind of conservative foreign policy one can have. His low-balling of troop estimates in Iraq was the foreign policy equivalent of libertarian politics: relying on government while refusing to pay for it. His hostility toward Iraqi reconstruction resonated with those skeptical of rebuilding New Orleans. His disdain for Colin Powell’s State Department mirrored Joe McCarthy’s for Dean Acheson's. Only a tried-and- true conservative could ever have come up with the idea of turn ing the management of Iraqi police forces over to private firms to the extent tha, Rumsfeld did, with catastrophic results for the Iraqis themselves. SUE AM Y (FROM 'THE ECONOMIST') FROM PAGE 9 But as we know now, the conservative anti-federal government impulse did not go away. Barry Goldwater, the last conservative purist in America, paid a huge political price for his frank disdain of government; abolishing mandatory Social Security and the Tennessee Valley Authority was not the way to win votes among the elderly in the South. In the 1970s, the conservative impulse went under ground, incubating in a string of new think tanks funded by conservative philanthropists and sympathetic corporations. Although some of those who followed in Golcjwater's footsteps — Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and then Bush — professed to share his distaste for government, none stood in the way of its growth. When given the opportunity, they shied away from enacting the think-tank talk of washing government down the bathroom drain Although Ronald Reagan, a convert to anti-federal government conservatism, won the White House in 1980 by feeding on public disgust with the excesses of liberalism, what ever plans he may have had to roll back the federal government were blocked by a Democratic Congress and public opinion. (Remember, for instance, the drubbing the GOP took in 1982 when it tried to axe Social Security benefits.) Newt Gingrich and his revolutionaries rode a similar wave in 1994, but their plans were at least partially stymied by Bill Clinton’s control of the White House and, again,, by public opinion (the GOP lost seats in 1998). With the election (?) of George W. Bush in 2000, anti government conservatism won control of both elected branches. This was something new. Conservatives had no, held both Congress and the White House for a full term since 1932, before the creation of big government as we know it. For the first time in U S. history, conservatives had total control of the agencies of superpower government. FEMA, MEDICARE & IRAQ If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good a, showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government — indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt and unfair government — is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are no, likely to do it very well. Three examples —FEMA, Medicare, and Iraq — should be sufficient to make this point. Because liberals have historically welcomed government while conservatives have resisted it, it should not be a surprise tha, the Federal Emergency Manage ment Agency worked so well under Bill Clinton and so poorly under Bush I and II. True to a long tradition of disinterested public management, Clinton, in the wake of Hurricane Andrew, appointed James Lee Wit, to head FEMA Witt refocused FEMA away from civil defense efforts to increasingly predictable natural disasters, fought for greater federal funding, achieved cabinet status for his agency, and worked closely with state and local officials. For all the efforts by the Republicans to attack their enemies, no one has ever pu, a dent in Witt's reputation. Government under him was as good as government gets Upon assuming office, George W. Bush turned to former Texas campaign aide Joe Albaugh to run FEMA then shifted it into the new Department of Homeland Security (whose creation he had opposed). Albaugh, and his hand-picked successor Michael Brown, like so many Bush appointees, were afflicted Bikes & B eyo n d 1089 MARINE DR. ASTORIA, OREGON with what we might call “learned incompetence.” They did no, fail merely out of ignorance and inexperience. Their ineptness was active rather than passive, the end result of a deliberate determination to prove that the federal government simply should no, be in the business of disaster management. “Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management," Albaugh testified before a Senate appropriations subcommittee in May 2001. “Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond wha, is an appropriate level.” There was the conservative dilemma in a nutshell: a man put in charge of a mission in which he did not believe. Long before Katrina destroyed New Orleans, Albaugh and Brown were busy destroying FEMA: privatizing many of the agency's programs, shifting attention away from disaster management, and shedding no tears as scores of agency staff left in dismay. Human beings cannot prevent natural disasters, but they can prevent man-made ones. Not the Bush administra tion. Its ideological hostility toward government all but guaran teed that the physical damage inflicted by a hurricane would be exacerbated by the human damage caused by incompetence. The question of whether Medicare reform will prove politically fruitful for Republicans is still open. But the question of whether i, has proven to be an administrative nightmare is no,. There were two paths open to Republicans if they had been interested in creating an administratively coherent system of paying for the prescription drugs of the elderly. One was giving the elderly nothing and insist that every person assume the full cos, of his or her medication. The other was to have government assume responsibility for the costs of those drugs. I, is significant that in America’s recent debates over prescription drugs, no one, no, even the Cato Institute, argued tha, government should simply not be in the business at all. As a society, we accept — indeed, we celebrate — the fact tha, older people can live longer and better lives thanks to radically improved medical technology as well as awe-inspiring advances in pharmacology. A political party tha, consigned to death any one who could not afford to participate in this medical revolution would die an early death itself. But Republicans were as unwilling to design a sensible program as they were unable to eliminate the existing one. To prove their faith in the market, they gave people choices, when what they wanted was predictability. To pay off the pharmaceuti cal industry, they refused to allow government to negotiate drug prices downward, thereby vastly inflating the program’s costs. To make sure government agencies didn't administer the benefit, they lured in insurance companies with massive subsidies and imposed almost no rules on what benefits they could and could not offer. The lack of rules led to a frustrating chaos of choices. And the extra costs had to be made up by carving out a so-called “donut hole" in which the elderly, after having drug purchases subsidized up to a certain point, would suddenly find themselves WHERE ARE WE? There are 14 characteristics of rightist authoritarian governments of the 20,h century that have been identified, including those of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Suharto’s Indonesia, and several Latin American regimes. Here are those characteristics: 1. Powerful and continuing nationalism. 2. Disdain for the recognition of human rights. 3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. 4. Supremacy of the military. 5. Rampant sexism, including opposition to abortion and persecution of homosexuals. 6 Controlled mass media 7. Obsession with national security. 8 Religion and government intertwined 9 Corporate power protected 10 Labor power suppressed 11. Disdain for intellectuals and the arts. 12 Obsession with crime and punishment. 13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. 14 Fraudulent elections. Now, in this 21st century, here in these United States, where are we? - D O N W R IG H T Don Wright is a singer and writer who lives in Astoria While it is difficult to label someone who plans a war an isolationist, Rumsfeld’s hostility toward America’s historic allies represented a contemporary version of unilateralism, which has always been isolationism’s firs, cousin. The neoconservatives wanted to draft hugely expensive undertakings onto a party with an isolationist past. The Secretary of Defense wanted to draft on to the same political party a distant war, but with the promise of being cheap and avoiding the loss of American lives. It is not difficult to conclude which one would win in today’s conservative environment. For Pat Buchanan to blame the neocons for the failure in Iraq ignores the fact that the man most responsible for the failure, Donald Rumsfeld, has more in common with Buchanan than he does with Bill Kristol. (One prominent neoconservative, however, Paul Wolfowitz, did sign on enthusiastically to Rums feld’s agenda.) Iraq failed for the same reasons that all conserv ative public policy efforts fail. Refusing to acknowledge the importance of government while relying on it to achieve your objectives causes the same kind of chaos in foreign policy that i, does in matters close to home. K STREET & THE GINGRICH REVOLUTION One of the favorite myths of contemporary conservative dissidents is that the K Street machine, instead of being the irreplaceable tynchpln o f conservative power, was somehow a betrayal of its ideals.This fable is captured by Matthew Continetti, a Weekly Standard reporter, in ‘The K Street Gang’, a conserva tive “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." In Continetti's telling, once upon a time — let’s make it 1994 — conservatives were idealistic revolutionaries. Gingrich and his cohorts were “optimistic, progressive, and overwhelm ingly confident in the idea tha, you could run the federal govern ment like a large corporation.” Alas, however, Gingrich was unable to persuade Republican colleagues to vote for Robert Walker of Pennsylvania as majority whip. Texas's Tom DeLay won the post instead, and DeLay was a man “who viewed government as a business — one that would maximize the advantages of business so that business would then donate to their war chests.” In this account, Gingrich and DeLay are not par, of the same Republican revolution; indeed, one of them, DeLay, is a counterrevolutionary, Stalin to Gingrich’s Trotsky. (Yes, Contin etti makes that comparison.) The 1994 whip election, Continetti argues, became a struggle “between those who viewed power as a means to the end of limiting government and those who viewed power as an end in itself.” DeLay's victory was therefore the beginning of Gingrich’s downfall. Continetti's tale is utterly implausible. To accept it, you have to believe that Gingrich was unaware of the extent to which DeLay was working behind his back to undermine him. You also have to explain away why many Republicans in Congress who voted for Gingrich for one position were also quite happy to vote for DeLay for another; surely they believed tha, both men had roughly similar views on how their party should conduct itself in office. Finally, you have to view Gingrich’s attacks on K Street in the wake of DeLay’s downfall as a continuation of his idealism, rather than positioning for a possible Presidential race, a vie?w tha, only the most naive would hold. The fact is that Gingrich and DeLay, although they detested each other, were products of the same aggressive conservatism tha, swept the Republicans into power in the firs, place. Far from representing two radically different forms of conservatism, they are best viewed as the good cop/bad cop dynamic of what was until recently a remarkably unified move ment — one man providing the policy vision, the other adept at getting particular policies enacted. The K Street project was not the product of DeLay's wily machinations, sure to fall from prominence along with DeLay’s fall from power. (Now tha, DeLay is no longer the majority leader, Republicans are no, engaged in any serious effort to demolish the project; their current leader, John Boehner, a former ally of Gingrich, understands full well its importance.) The seeds of the K Street project were planted even before Gingrich assumed his position of majority leader, and the result will flower so long as conservative Republicans practice the kinds of politics they do. Political parties expend the time and grueling energy to control government for different reasons. Liberals, while enjoying the perquisites of office, also want to be in a position to use government to solve problems. Bu, conservatives have different motives for wanting power. One is to prevent liberals from doing so; if government cannot be made to disappear, a, leas, i, can be prevented from doing any good. The other is to build a political machine in which business and the Republican Party can exchange mutual favors; business will lavish cash on politicians (called campaign contributions) while politicians will throw the money back a, business (called public policy). Conservatism will always attract its share of young idealists. And young idealists will always be disillusioned by the sheer amount of corruption tha, people like Gingrich and DeLay generate. If yesterday’s %
