Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Robert Farely points out the fundamental contradiction in Republican governance:
The Republicans have managed a nifty trick over the last twenty-fiveyears. They have worked ceaselessly to make government less effective,while at the same time deriving political benefit from inadequategovernment.
It is a nifty trick, but it's starting to run out of steam. Even in the 2000 election, the GOP had started to tone down it's anti-government rhetoric; essentially, he promised the public the same government as the Clinton Era, only smaller and with a bigger tax cut . Yes, in the debates, he railed against the specter of big government medicine, but not with the vitriol of Reagan in the late 1980s. By 2004, Bush had stopped using the word "bureaucrat" and started talking about all the "hard work" of the government employees in Iraq.
That said, this is a point Democrats ought to make more forcefully: there's no reason for a party that doesn't trust government to be responsible for it. And it's their job to point out that "don't trust government" now means "don't trust the Republican Party".
