Carpe Datum

Party of Incompetents

Michael Tomasky wrote a very good commentary on the recent history of our two political parties and their perceptions by the public. Both BuzzFlash and the Media Horse pointed me to this.:

People are used to hearing liberals talk about how evil the administration is, and those who agree already agree while those who don't probably won't be persuaded.

But there's another argument about this administration, and about the Republican Party in general, that needs to be made, because this argument can alter presumptions about the two parties that have existed for at least a generation and can change the way the parties are seen well into the future. And it is this: The Republicans are total incompetents.

Republicans, at least since the 1980 election, have gotten lots of mileage out of billing themselves as the party of competence. They knew how to deal with the Russkies. They understood a budget. They knew how to crack down on the crooks and hoodlums. They understood the bottom line, and they knew what was right for America. The Democrats, meanwhile, were supposedly more interested in their dainty little social-engineering schemes than in success. Lots of people bought all of this, and of course there was a little bit of truth to it -- then. But the labels stuck hard. Democrats still have to take dramatic steps to prove their competence while Republicans are presumed -- by the mainstream media, anyway -- to possess it until they demonstrate otherwise.

Well, guess what? They've demonstrated otherwise. No one -- no one -- can name a single front on which today's Republicans have shown even the simplest competence. They don't know how to manage an economy. They sure don't know how to balance a budget. They have no idea how to create jobs (though they do have a pretty strong sense of how to make them disappear). Their domestic-security measures have consisted of the usual emphasis on show over substance, first stealing a Democratic idea (the Department of Homeland Security) and then underfunding the result in some crucial respects -- a mistake for which I pray we never pay a price. [...]

And now, it turns out, they don't know how to do the one thing they've spent 50 years convincing Americans that they and only they know how to do: fight a war. The war in Afghanistan is hardly won (did you notice the firefight the other day that left 14 dead?). And the war in Iraq is a fiasco that is fast becoming a huge political problem [...]

And, of course, there are wealthy interests who keep the party alive financially and who must be rewarded on all possible fronts. This, actually, is the one service Republicans do perform competently. They make damn sure of that.

When voters recognize that one party knows how to get things done and the other party does not, they tend to gravitate toward the former even if they don't particularly agree with everything it stands for. Lots of people have voted Republican in the last few elections, and certainly in 2000, because even though they weren't nearly as right wing as the zealots now in power, they felt that the Republicans would do a better job of looking after their money and leaving the world a safer place for their kids. Voters surely can see that the Grand Incompetence Party is doing neither of those things. The Democrats just need to drill it into them.

Posted by Observer at August 29, 2003 07:18 AM