Yesterday, Aug. 26, was a day that should live in political infamy for this administration. On that date a U.S. soldier was killed in a roadside bombing, becoming the 139th GI death since May 1. More soldiers have now been killed since the "end" of the war than during it. And, by the way, this soldier's death was the 71st since our fearless leader taunted the Iraqis with his now-famous phrase, "Bring 'em on."
I could make this into another column about this administration's mendacity; Lord knows there's fodder aplenty. But that point has been made. People are used to hearing liberals talk about how evil the administration is, and those who agree already agree while those who don't probably won't be persuaded.
But there's another argument about this administration, and about the Republican Party in general, that needs to be made, because this argument can alter presumptions about the two parties that have existed for at least a generation and can change the way the parties are seen well into the future. And it is this: The Republicans are total incompetents.
Republicans, at least since the 1980 election, have gotten lots of mileage out of billing themselves as the party of competence. They knew how to deal with the Russkies. They understood a budget. They knew how to crack down on the crooks and hoodlums. They understood the bottom line, and they knew what was right for America. The Democrats, meanwhile, were supposedly more interested in their dainty little social-engineering schemes than in success. Lots of people bought all of this, and of course there was a little bit of truth to it -- then. But the labels stuck hard. Democrats still have to take dramatic steps to prove their competence while Republicans are presumed -- by the mainstream media, anyway -- to possess it until they demonstrate otherwise.
Well, guess what? They've demonstrated otherwise. No one -- no one -- can name a single front on which today's Republicans have shown even the simplest competence. They don't know how to manage an economy. They sure don't know how to balance a budget. They have no idea how to create jobs (though they do have a pretty strong sense of how to make them disappear). Their domestic-security measures have consisted of the usual emphasis on show over substance, first stealing a Democratic idea (the Department of Homeland Security) and then underfunding the result in some crucial respects -- a mistake for which I pray we never pay a price.
They don't understand the Bill of Rights, and their shills in the media obviously don't understand the relationship between the First Amendment and trademark law, as Blah-Blah O'Reilly's laughable lawsuit against the great Al Franken shows. They've done nothing to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink, and have, if anything, done damage to those resources. They've done nothing for the minorities Mr. Compassionate Conservative was supposedly courting in 2000, his speeches to the NAACP and the like transcribed by a tremulous media.
And now, it turns out, they don't know how to do the one thing they've spent 50 years convincing Americans that they and only they know how to do: fight a war. The war in Afghanistan is hardly won (did you notice the firefight the other day that left 14 dead?). And the war in Iraq is a fiasco that is fast becoming a huge political problem, worrying middle-of-the-road voters (who have figured out now that maybe alienating the rest of the world wasn't such a great idea after all) and exposing ideological fissures on the right (go read William Kristol and Robert Kagan's editorial in the current Weekly Standard, where they call for more troop strength and take several amusing implicit swipes as Donald Rumsfeld).
The Republicans don't know how to run a country. The party has become so inflamed by its ideological ardor that it no longer has the basic ability to do what a political party in a democracy does: advocate a view of the world, yes, but balance interests and constituencies in such a way as to show at least some regard for the common good. In Dwight Eisenhower's GOP, or Richard Nixon's (Watergate aside, of course), or even Ronald Reagan's and certainly Bush Senior's, there was always a sense that the Republicans, however conservative they may have been at heart, understood and respected the limits of putting ideology above all else.
To today's Republican Party there is no common good. Instead, there is a severe ideology that recognizes only what's good for the party, not for the nation. This conflation of party with state ought to sound familiar, and, indeed, today's GOP is dramatically like the Soviet Communist Party in this respect. Writing for TAP Online yesterday, Jason Vest quoted an administration official as having remarked that American soldiers would be greeted with a "deluge" of "rose water and flowers" in Iraq. This sounds like nothing so much as the party apparatchiks who praised the "liberation" of Finland in 1940.
And, of course, there are wealthy interests who keep the party alive financially and who must be rewarded on all possible fronts. This, actually, is the one service Republicans do perform competently. They make damn sure of that.
Believe me, I have nothing against calling them dangerous and evil and so on. But the Democrats, who have been showing quite a bit of gumption lately, could do worse than to start bandying about the "I" word. After all, they have a track record of overseeing a vast economic expansion, creating 21 million jobs, increasing every investor's portfolio, and having left office with the United States liked and admired around the world instead of hated. (By the way, we are no longer, I suspect, feared.)
When voters recognize that one party knows how to get things done and the other party does not, they tend to gravitate toward the former even if they don't particularly agree with everything it stands for. Lots of people have voted Republican in the last few elections, and certainly in 2000, because even though they weren't nearly as right wing as the zealots now in power, they felt that the Republicans would do a better job of looking after their money and leaving the world a safer place for their kids. Voters surely can see that the Grand Incompetence Party is doing neither of those things. The Democrats just need to drill it into them.
Michael Tomasky will become executive editor of the Prospect in September. His columns appear on Wednesdays at TAP Online.
