Hogwash

Our last guest-post of the week comes from a writer I met from his insightful comments here at The Big Con: "Batoccio," of the blog Vagabond Scholar. Yes: you, too, can become a Big Con blogger! Just join the fray in the comments. I've been taking the week off from blogging and will be back on Monday with bells on.
 —Rick Perlstein

As the primary season approaches, the hogwash (to use a polite term) has been flying thicker than usual, and some prime hogwash was flung at the latest Republican presidential candidates' debate.

Talking Points Memo has an entertaining video counting the number of times Hillary Clinton was invoked, primarily as some sort of socialist bogeywoman who will raise your taxes, demolish your health care, and destroy all that is Good and Right in America. That dynamic deserves discussion, but Digby, News Hounds and others have already covered it well. I wanted to focus instead on a carefully crafted quip delivered as a quick crowd-pleaser that embodies a key element of "Big Con" hogwash.

The exchange comes two minutes in:

Q: Governor Romney, we have an e-mail question from Kendrick, from Oakland, California, who says, "The health care plan you left in Massachusetts, which required people to get their own insurance, amounts to HillaryCare..."

[…]

Romney: Well, lemme tell you something about our plan. It's different than Hillary Clinton's, in a lot of important ways. But one thing that I'm happy about is that Republicans are talking about health care. This isn't a Democrat issue, it's a Republican issue. For Democrats, they want to have government take it over. And I don't want the guys who did the cleanup at Katrina taking responsibility for health care in this country.

Well, that's an easy one to fix. Vote all Republicans out of office.

This is obviously a planned line of defense by Romney, one he's used since at least September. It's telling he uses the McCarthy-Gingrich-Bush trick of saying "Democrat" instead of "Democratic," but that's a garnish. He makes the bizarre claim that health care isn't a Democratic issue, which seems to be an implication that government-funded health care isn't real health care, surely news to all those benefiting from Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP and veterans' hospitals (not to mention the citizens of Canada, Britain and France). However, the biggest hogwash is Romney trying to foist the disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina off of George W. Bush and his incompetent administration and onto government as an entity. Given the context of health care, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, it seems Romney's also implying that the Democrats, or at least Democratic policies, are to blame. Wow.

It's been covered many times before, but FEMA was a model agency, praised by Democrats and Republicans alike, when run by James Lee Witt under Clinton. The key difference was management and competence, in sharp contrast with Bush, Chertoff and Mike Brown. The local governments did make mistakes as well. Romney also hedges a bit by saying "cleanup," but given the Bush administration's crucial role in both the initial response and the ongoing recovery, it's moot. What's not moot is their poor performance. As the saying goes, conservatives claim that government doesn't work, and then set out to prove it. Romney tries to sell the first part of that saying while shifting culpability. He's not blaming Bush's management here, and he's not blaming the front-line workers (which would be pretty crass). Such a tortured reading would still mean Romney was being strikingly dishonest and indirect in his criticism, but he's clearly blaming the overall concept of government aid, and (a bit more indirectly) he's blaming the Democrats. It's really quite brazen, attempting to sell his own party's ineptitude as a reason he should be elected. But after all, the poker bluff is a signature conservative move, and both Bush and Giuliani have campaigned on their most shameful failures.

Romney's assertion fits perfectly into a general conservative strategy of prejudicial "framing" based on deceptive oversimplification. The popular conservative line is that tax cuts are the solution to everything and higher taxes are always bad, even for the richest Americans (who have grown even richer under Bush). Rather than reforming the Department of Education, why not eliminate it altogether? And government itself is always bad, something to be strangled in a bathtub. Of course, the conservative dichotomy of "large" versus "small" government is a distraction, since the real issue, as Bill Scher puts it, is good versus bad government. Is the government effective? Is it efficient? Is it representative and responsive?

In this one debate response, Romney manages to avoid blaming Bush, attack Democrats, perpetrate some Hurricane Katrina revisionism and voice a central tenet of the "Big Con." That's mighty efficient hogwash. He's hardly the first Republican to play revisionist or apologist on Katrina, even if he's avoided the more extreme hyperbole. (My personal favorite is still Charles Krauthammer, who back in September 2005 asserted that those who held Bush responsible were akin to those who in past eras burned witches and Jews.) Like Mike Huckabee, Romney's avoided blaming Bush, but he also chose to go on the attack, however unsoundly. And what is his actual position for the future? Romney's website doesn't list a position on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and his official release for the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina wisely avoids blaming "the government." Is he for reforming FEMA, eliminating it, or something else? Did he support all the conservative pet projects opportunistically pushed forward in the wake of Katrina?

Finally, what exactly is his pitch? Romney has been advertising his "executive experience" in his bid for president, yet in at least this case, he claims "government" doesn't work. If it inherently doesn't work, and management isn't the real issue, then how does he propose to deal with natural disasters? Private enterprise doesn't have the resources to deal with such events, nor does it necessarily have the inclination. More to the point, if Bush's mismanagement wasn't a factor in Katrina, and better management can't fix the problem, why exactly should anyone vote for Romney? Destroying and undermining public institutions seems to be the name of the game, without offering anything sound to take their place.

It's worth noting that Romney's line was a distraction in the form of an attack, and that his hogwash could be easily challenged by a sharp Democratic rival, or a reporter if so inclined. And while blasting "the government" might play with his base, how will it play with the general electorate? Democrats continue to be more trusted on health care. Meanwhile, the Bush administration's disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina didn't just hurt Bush's approval ratings at the time. His handling of the recovery continued to be a key factor (along with Iraq) in his declining popularity months later. He still receives poor marks for it, and events such as the current Southern California wildfires bring it up all over again. For that matter, the firefighters so deservedly praised on television right now are public servants, another example of government working for the collective good. It's a system so sensible we tend to take it for granted. The personal courage of firefighters shouldn't be underestimated, since it's an extremely dangerous job. But our current system is a far cry from the days when the firefighters were a private business, responding only to those who paid their monthly fee and letting other people's homes burn.

Ironically, Romney may have the best record of all the GOP candidates on health care, but as he's often done, he's sort of running against his own record. He also faces the same dilemma as his fellow Republicans — what the base wants to hear isn't what's wanted by the nation as a whole. The New Republic's Norm Scheiber wrote, "There are obvious tactical reasons for Romney to run as a conservative. But sometimes you can't help wishing he'd run more authentically—as the moderate technocrat he is at heart."

Perhaps, but while Romney tried to shift culpability for Katrina (and take credit for health care), it's a little harder for him to disavow the positions he himself has chosen to take in public. Perhaps on the campaign trail, Romney will continue to argue opposite positions for different audiences in subsequent weeks. Perhaps, as Matthew Yglesias suggests, Romney's major reversals are "liberating," allowing him to "feel free to pander and flip-flop on everything all the time." His bigger immediate problem is wooing those conservatives who feel that the more they see him, the less they like him. One would hope such dislike is based on substance rather than shallow concerns, but receiving consistently shallow answers from a candidate certainly makes for a substantive concern.

Bad policies hurt the country, but sometimes enough hogwash and bull excrement can also hurt a campaign.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future