Katrinatowns and party strategy

[mmcirvin]

Via Kevin Drum:

1. What tomscud was saying about the refugee-camp problems he saw in Jordan happening in America? Well, it's already been going on here with people displaced by Hurricane Charley in Florida. The same mistakes get repeated everywhere.

2. Mark Schmitt is probably right about Karl Rove's role in directing the reconstruction effort:

Ask yourself, what do you think Rove is thinking about right now? My guess: The 2006 election, and specifically, how they can set up a situation in which Democrats vote against or seem to oppose some sort of Gulf Coast reconstruction package.

This is basically how the Bush administration and today's congressional Republicans have carried out every single major operation they've done in the past, so I see no reason to expect any different here.

The essential innovation of the recent Republican Party has been, as Schmitt and others have explained, the realization that it's not to their advantage to represent the broad consensus of the American people through policies with large bipartisan majorities. Any compromise that gets more Democratic votes than are necessary to pass a measure means that the Republican base won't be satisfied, and that the vote can't be spun as a means of demonizing Democrats. If a measure is so defective as to have wide bipartisan support, that means that riders have to be added to make it less attractive to Democrats (and maybe even some centrist Republicans), usually along the lines of relaxed labor protections or tax cuts. The key thing is that everything gets as close as possible to a 50% margin of support without going under. Sometimes, such as right after the September 11th attacks, it's impossible even for this stuff to bring down the vote margin, but they can at least set up future opposition.

I get very depressed reading about this, especially when I think that if Democrats ever really figure this out (which some of them still haven't), they will be strongly tempted to play the same way if they ever get into federal power again, and enact punitively socialistic policies they wouldn't otherwise support just so that they can enrage Republicans as much as possible. It's a realization that corrodes a democratic republic in the long run. The only way out of this is if politicians remember that policies that are objectively stupid and really damage the country will backfire on them personally. (And I do hope that this is still true; we may be seeing signs of it.)

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

How depressing but illuminating. Among the dirtiest political strategies ever. The sad thing is that the Democrats just aren't savvy enough to combat this.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Thing is, since this strategy arises out of simple game theory, it must have come up before during periods of extreme polarization or single-party dominance in American politics. It doesn't last forever.

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

Perhaps. Or perhaps the degree of anti-government sentiment required to think of the strategy had never been reached before. 1980s brought with them a particularly suicidal kind of laissez-faire. Hmm.

[jwgh]

Mike Frank of the Heritage Foundation was on Weekend America this weekend and I found part of the discussion kind of surprising:

Q: What do you think your group, your constitutuency, puts forward as a way to refashion the state, the regulatory state?

A: Well, for example, I mean education, we've advocated for a long time various forms of taking the assistance and making it relate directly to the child. That could be in the form of charter schools, where if a group of teachers wanted to reconstitute a school they don't need to get an official school building built by government contractors. They could for instance lease space in an office building that may be empty.

Q: Are you saying what will come from Katrina is a resurgence of popularity in charter school?

A: Charters, vouchers, child-centered assistance. Given the wide-spread acceptance that the New Orleans school system (if you want to harp on that for a minute) was such a failure for so many of the 80,000 kids in that system, we can certainly do better, and whatever was going on in the last 40 years, all the waves of reform, didn't make much of a difference when two-thirds of the kids are below basic in both math and reading.

That's looking at the hurricane through some pretty specific filters.

[eb-oesch.livejournal.com]

Weighing down otherwise bipartisan legislation with largely irrelevant partisan riders -- isn't that what Reagan complained about in his campaign for the line-item veto? Democratic riders are always sweetness and light, but I think the complaint may have been valid.

Actually sinking bipartisan legislation with partisan riders and then trying to blame the other side for it -- wasn't that Newt Gingrich's failed gambit with the budget stalemate?

I'm half ashamed of not remembering this stuff more clearly, and half ashamed of remembering it at all.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, everyone puts the riders on the budget reconciliation bills to get their favorite pork in, that's gone on for ages and it's omni-partisan. But it's a little different in that the aim is mostly just to pass the legislation. I think of the current strategy as coming out of the Gingrich House.