Plead the First

Lance Mannion nicely sums up the Republican Modus Operandi (via Science and Politics):

It’s another old song from the Republican repertoire. The poor are poor because of their own bad character, goes the chorus, of course, but the verse is like this: Liberal government programs encourage, foster, and make virtues out of the vices that keep the poor poor. You know, because not letting their children starve, not leaving them to attend rotten schools, not letting the old and young die of treatable diseases, not forcing them to live in squalid housing, all that just makes them lazy and dependent and (shhhh) shiftless.

At this point, a good small-government conservative who knows his hymn book will sing out that after all these years of Liberal social programs, poor children still go hungry, their schools are still rotten, the young and old still have no reliable medical care, and their homes are often squalid, no better than shacks in some places, lost amid noxious slums in others …

The argument depends on ignoring the fact that over the last 40 years the Republicans have either run the government or had a strong enough hand in the running of it that they have been able to thwart, sabotage, stymie, underfund, pervert, or plain mismanage just about every meaningful large-scale “Liberal” big goverment social program …

If the Goverment is a car setting out to give every one a ride to work, then for 40 years the Republicans have been puncturing the tires, pouring sand in the gas tank, stealing the distributer cap, and, whenever they can get their hands on the wheel, driving it straight into the nearest ditch and then, pointing to the wreckage as the tow truck backs up to it, saying, See, this proves that people were meant to walk.

And they do this so that they don’t have to chip in on gas.

In the article, Lance quotes Matt Yglesias:

This is the basic dilemma the right faces. It’s committed to the view that the government shouldn’t help poor people. But things happen from time to time that make it politically imperative to do something to help poor people. And if the government responded to those circumstances in ways that were efficient and effective, that would generate more political momentum for further poor-helping measures. Thus, the right finds itself forced to implement policies it knows to be ineffective.

The Katrina aftermath is providing us with an opportunity to view this in action. From the LA Times:

As President Bush tackles the monumental task of easing the social problems wrought by Katrina, he is proving deeply reluctant to use some of the big-government tools at his disposal, apparently out of fear of permanently enlarging programs that he opposes or has sought to cut.

Instead of depending on long-running programs for such services as housing and healthcare, the president has generally tried to create new, one-shot efforts that the administration apparently hopes will more easily disappear after the crisis passes. That has meant relying on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has run virtually all of the recovery effort.

The LA Times article talks about how the administration is working to “derail” a bipartisan proposal to expand Medicaid to provide healthcare for storm victims, instead seeking to implement a narrower plan to avoid “covering certain groups of evacuees”. The White House is also pushing for government-built trailer parks to house evacuees rather than providing financial aid to help with rent for existing housing. Trailer parks would concentrate the poor in one area — a very bad idea, as even some Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, admit. In short, the Bush administration seems to be pushing for inefficient, inadequate solutions rather than using or strengthening existing programs that are already in place for these purposes.

The hurricanes may be over for now, but we need to keep an eye on the car wreck that the White House may be bringing to Louisiana.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.