The Katrina Revolution

John Pohoretz re: "On what issue or issues (if any!) have you changed your mind in the last 10 years- and why?":

I learned one key political lesson from the calamitous confrontation in the fall of 1995 [when Republicans in the House of Representatives shut down the government], which is this: There is a huge divide in this country between people who follow politics closely, either as an avocation or a career, and the vast majority of Americans who don't. Following the seismic 1994 elections in which Republicans won 52 new seats and control of the House of Representatives for the first time in four decades--and in which the Senate went Republican as well--political people were sure that the balance of power in Washington had shifted decisively to Capitol Hill. The leading political figure in Washington was no longer the president, Bill Clinton. It was the new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich was one of those political people, as were all the people around him and all the people in the Washington press corps. But what he and I and everybody but Bill Clinton seemed to realize was this: In 1992, Bill Clinton had received 45 million votes across America. In 1994, Newt Gingrich had received 119,000 votes in a single district in Georgia. Though Clinton had taken only 43 percent of the vote in that election, and was not a particularly strong president, in direct person-to-person combat against Newt Gingrich he had an incomparably stronger hand to play.

Presidents always do, because that's how the Constitution was structured. Just as the Founders intended, representatives in the House speak for local interests in Washington, while senators speak for state interests. The idea that executive power could be exercised from Capitol Hill was the great delusion that gripped Washington following the 1994 elections. It was hubristic and immodest, and Republican politicians had their hats handed to them in ways that reverberate still. (Seen government spending numbers lately?)

Gloomy, but if Bush's response to Katrina means anything, all too true.

Gingrich turned out to have been no more faithful in his marriage than Clinton was in his. At least, Republicans gave him the boot, so there's still some virtue left in the GOP, but he's back running for 2008. Bush, at least, is not a sex addict, but he doesn't seem to realize that Christianity is NOT the gospel of welfare spending and rebuilding Sodom after God destroys it. Embarrassed by the press's blaming of the mess on him, he finally seems to have lost his nerve. He should have stood up to them and accepted responsibility only for not making all the governors and mayors of major cities take a an emergency response competency test and bypassing the ones who would perform like Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin. He'd never have actually done that, but providing cover for them by pouring all the decreases in the deficit down a rat hole.

What happens if the Big One hits California next year or we have another hurricane season like this one? FDR did his work too well when he designed Social Security to be a program that makes everybody a dependent of the federal government to some degree. Despite what Conservatives and Libertarians tell you, that is now the rule of politics. You can cut taxes, but you'll never cut entitlements, unless you encourage more suicides among the elderly. Dystopia indeed.

You can rail against government pork all you want, but Republicans are no more immune from its logic than anybody else is. I don't believe libertarians will be either, if they ever get elected, because they'll never get re-elected without drinking the Koolaid.

Stephen Moore supports my point.

Yeah, I'm depressed. We've been corrupted more deeply than I had hoped. So much for the Reagan Revolution.