Matt's buried a lot of big important points in this tiny little paragraph:
Positioning itself as the party of dogmatic tax-cutting has brought the GOP certain advantages. The big disadvantage is that it's left the field open for Democrats to be the defenders of spending more money on popular programs like Social Security or the military. In that vein, the "bigger Army" gambit is hardly a novel one for the post–September 11 Democrats. It was a plank of John Kerry's presidential campaigns, and it's one of Harry Reid's agenda items. The trouble is that despite this it hasn't become an issue the Democrats are clearly identified with.
I'm a bit unsure about this. Certainly the GOP is increasingly in a corner as American faith in government slowly restores itself (which, despite the best efforts of the Bush administration, it appears intent on doing), but they've dealt with that through their new affection for incoherence, aka "big government conservatism". More to the point, the right's enthusiasm for tax slashing hasn't ever tempered their public taste for military expansion. Whenever anyone pounds out those ten word assessments that supposedly define the modern GOP, tax cuts and larger armed forces are continually found cohabiting in the description. So it'd be nice if Democrats hit hard on expanding the military, but once such a move gains public acceptance, the right will latch on without the slightest ripple of cognitive dissonance.
It used to be, at least with Reagan, that the military was the only place where increased government spending wasn't some sort of heresy. But with Bush's ascension, I think the days where politicians battled over the worth and value of government programs are over. The right may sneak some poison pills into their new programs (Social Security being a great example) but publicly they've been reduced to desperate guarantees that their priorities do indeed represent massive increases in the welfare state. And so we get No Child Left Behind, we get the Medicare drug benefit, we get promises of a safer, more secure, higher-performing Social Security system. The difference, in this brave new world of state spending, is that Democrats do it better, more efficiently, with less tax breaks to industry and an emphasis on the elimination of risk. Republicans half-heartedly put forth programs that end up being mashes of corporate giveaways, progressive ends, and market mechanisms, but argue as if they've spent years considering this latest expansion of the government.
As an outcome, it's an unexpected one. Reagan and Clinton seemed to represent an agreement against big government, yet their heir seems to have forged a new bipartisan consensus in favor of the state. Strange. In any case, I'm not sure the space really exists for Democrats to reject Republicans as government-hating tax cutters, the last few years have offered too many examples to the contrary. Nor am I confident we can nail them on some philosophical connection to a small military, they too obviously fetishize the armed forces. The closest we can come, and Matt seems to be implying this, is that we can focus on their tax cutting as proof they can't be trusted with the government because they don't pay for what they pass. Now that the groundwork for new government programs has been laid -- by the right, no less! -- we can make the case that we do big government better. Because, you know what? We do.
