Tim F over at Balloon Juice brings up something I've been meaning to blog about for some time now. First his take, then mine:
A piece by Kevin Drum reminds me of what will probably be the enduring lesson of the Bush years – people who don’t believe in government do a crappy job when they try to run it. You can look practically anywhere in government today and find the same story – managing the occupation of Iraq, science, women’s health, disaster management. Officials in environmental and corporate oversight always seem to have long histories as lobbyists and short to nonexistent experience in management. Nominating Harriet Miers to The Supreme Court is about the most clear-cut and undeniable show of contempt for government institutions imaginable. They simply don’t care enough about the job, even initiatives that they like, to make sure that it gets done right.
Kevin reminds us that for decades the VA hospital network served as the poster boy for conservative arguments that government managed health care doesn’t work. Then, in the 90’s, that changed. The Clinton administration set out to prove the skeptics wrong. Rather than throwing money at the problem they simply cleaned up its management, as documented in this Washington Monthly story. By the Clinton-Bush handoff in 2001 the VA had become a model organization.The lesson here is fairly simple. People who use our present circumstances to argue that government can’t manage its way out of a paper bag are either fooling you or fooling themselves. Of course government breaks down when it’s run by people who don’t care to do the job right. Contrary to the bill of goods that ideological partisans want to sell you, that is far from an argument that government shouldn’t take the lead in fixing problems. Rather it is a rock-solid case for putting people in charge who care about doing the job right and have a decent sense of how to go about it.
If we elect people to positions of power who do not believe government a legitimate vehicle for solving collective problems, we should not be surprised when they use government in ways that makes our collective problems worse.
Having used a criticism of government to take control of government, they find themselves in positions of power that nevertheless compel them to make government act. But believing such actions destined to fail, in the best case their actions are half-hearted attempts lacking conviction, and in the worst are ill conceived xxx designed either to serve ends unrelated to the problem at hand or to demonstrate the futility of government action itself.
Or to put it another way: If your ideology posits that government action only makes problems worse, it shouldn't surprise anyone when government under your control does just that.
Assuming that people can be made to see this, somewhere in there is a theme that could drive on hell of a political realignment.
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