The incomparable Krugman points out what many of us in the internet wilderness have said at one time or another :
There’s a powerful political faction in this country that’s determined to draw exactly the wrong lesson from the Katrina debacle — namely, that the government always fails when it attempts to help people in need, so it shouldn’t even try. “I don’t want the people who ran the Katrina cleanup to manage our health care system,” says Mitt Romney, as if the Bush administration’s practice of appointing incompetent cronies to key positions and refusing to hold them accountable no matter how badly they perform — did I mention that Mr. Chertoff still has his job? — were the way government always works.
And I’m not sure that faction is losing the argument. The thing about conservative governance is that it can succeed by failing: when conservative politicians mess up, they foster a cynicism about government that may actually help their cause.
The Democratic candidates can’t win, or can’t govern once they win, unless they push back against this sort of thing. By definition, you can’t push back with timidity. The Republicans have handed the Democrats a perfect opportunity to be the party of optimism and old fashioned American can-doism. How hard could it be to fashion a message around the concept of rebuilding, or better yet, taking back America. At this point, if we aggressively offer hope against a message that implicitly denies the possibility of improvement through sound governance, we can’t lose.
When Dukakis ran for president he started his convention speech with the claim that the election was about competence, not ideology. The message didn’t work then, largely because of the way it was packaged. But packaged right, particularly after eight years of monumental incompetence, it can’t lose. We should be prepared to deliver the steak, but sell the sizzle. Dukakis was all steak.
But this implies an ambitious agenda, not the sort of incrementalism Democrats have pushed in the recent past. We don’t need, for example, to hear about tinkering with the drug benefit; we need to talk about Universal Health Care. How about, for another example, being aggressively in favor of tolerance and human rights, instead of soft pedalling our support for those values. Those things can sell, if packaged right. People are tired of hate. Given the choice they will vote for someone who gives them hope over someone who will tell them that the decline they see all around them is a permanent feature of the American scene.
