1 Boring Old Man

Bigger Than Bush
By PAUL KRUGMAN
January 1, 2009

… The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.” Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

So the reign of George W. Bush, the first true Southern Republican president since Reconstruction, was the culmination of a long process. And despite the claims of some on the right that Mr. Bush betrayed conservatism, the truth is that he faithfully carried out both his party’s divisive tactics — long before Sarah Palin, Mr. Bush declared that he visited his ranch to “stay in touch with real Americans” — and its governing philosophy. That’s why the soon-to-be-gone administration’s failure is bigger than Mr. Bush himself: it represents the end of the line for a political strategy that dominated the scene for more than a generation…

Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to…

the left coaster: Open Thread
by Mary

In Paul Krugman’s latest column he notes that one of the reasons the Republicans are in such a deep hole is the Southern Strategy was so successfully used by them until that’s all they had left. I think Krugman makes an important point, but he has missed another aspect of the GOP problem which is they are so ideologically blinded they are unable to face reality. After all, conservative hostility to government is much older than the Southern Strategy. This strategy was just the latest manifestation of their goal to not let anyone get in the way of the rightful winners. Indeed, Thomas Frank found this quote from 1928 — way back before the southern strategy was a gleam in Lee Atwater’s eyes — which expressed the same profound contempt for government as expressed by Grover Norquist and Karl Rove:

A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. if he is an enthusiast – a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world – the black plague is a housepet by comparison.

Many of the failures in the Bush governance were not just because they were practicing racially divisive politics, although they were, but because they couldn’t even see that their pet theories such as abstinence only sex education, business can regulate itself, you don’t need evidence when your gut tells you it’s true, etc, did not do well when exposed to reality. No wonder we are in such deep trouble.

In a previous post [the secret is Sarah…], I argued that it’s not just the South, that it’s rural America in general that responds to the Republican message. I don’t want to be a southern apologist, but I think it’s important to be precise when you’re doing enemy reconnaissance. Krugman relates the Republican strategy to racism, only slightly disguised – the strategy of Lee Atwater. I wouldn’t argue with that as a factor, but it seems to leave out an ingredient that any southerner [or for that matter, any rural person] would be glad to tell you if you simply ask. Government is bad – a bunch of city folks making silly laws. Mary of the left coaster seems closer to the pulse of the message than Krugman to me.

In the John Adams documentary, we were reminded that the Southern representatives to the Continental Congress had to be won over and assured of their State’s Rights. They won an outrageous compromise – slavery – something that should never have been included in the formation of this country. But that wasn’t all. Our federal government is constrained in a lot of areas because of these early fights about State’s Rights. When I was growing up, much of the Southern Politic was about State’s Rights. And it’s a mistake to see that as only racism, though it was certainly in the mix.