[Politics]

When Hacks* Rule

Every major newspaper has a similar story this morning: "Troubled Year Gets Worse for GOP" (WaPo), "For GOP, DeLay Indictment Adds to a Sea of Trouble," (NY Times), "GOP Loses Powerful Enforcer," (LA Times), "Loss of leader, taint of scandal is a double hit for Bush," (Boston Globe), and so on. Boy, are they right:

• House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is under indictment
• Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is under investigation by the SEC
• Bush is in deep political trouble over Iraq, the fallout from Katrina, and the revelation of rampant cronyism
• Hurricane Abramoff threatens to deal a larger blow to the GOP than Katrina

One of the themes the stories hit is comparing the GOP of 2005 to the Democratic Party of 1994. According to their own hagiography, the GOP stepped into this corrupt breach with shining goodness, bent on restoring ethics. Now newspapers are rehashing that line, describing the current GOP collapse as an ironic turn-around.

Hogwash.

The GOP seized control in 1994 with nothing on their minds but keeping the power. And not just that temporary, fleeting power they achieved then--they wanted a kind of lasting power, the power to reshape the country and to stay in power. The triumphalism following the election underscored it. Conservatives had held both branches of elective government for four years, and now it was time to seize the judiciary. The GOP immediately set out to overturn issues that had rankled for decades as the Social Security "debate" and Terri Schiavo debacle demonstrated.

The notion that the GOP was the party of reform is absurd. The Contract with America, supposedly the instrument of reform, was actually a trojan horse of old conservative ideas gussied upin ethics garb. In fact, you could argue (and I guess I am) that the Contract with America was moment the GOP got wise and quit trying to forward their ideas as policy positions--always a failure with a public that always leans left on safety net issues--and recast them through pure spin. Looking at the Contract now, the issues appear to be the standard Norquist agenda of trashing government. The brilliance of the document is that it was offered as a reform: in order to get people to sign on, Republicans didn't announce that they wanted to get rid of popular programs, they said they wanted to get rid of "waste."

It is the particular genius of the modern Republican Party that they can turn black into white. All that business of trying to craft policies people like is so inefficient:. It's far easier to just lie. The modern Republican Party isn't a party of governance, it's a party of hacks. Spin is drafted in one room while the policies--increasingly just crude profiteering--are drafted in a different room. If the rhetoric about a policy reform actually represents that reform accurately, it's purely accidental.

How else to explain yesterday's spectacle of an indicted politician receiving not a single, even provisional rebuke from his own party? If the GOP were concerned even passingly with governance, it might have occurred to someone to throw out the once-obligatory "while we don't have all the facts, these allegations are disturbing...." Instead, they start spinning invective about the prosecutor (remember when it was the GOP who loved prosecutors?).

The GOP has perfected the art of the spin--they actually can make voters believe black is white, Saddam is Osama, the estate tax will impoverish farmers--but it has forgotten that whole governing piece. The most disturbing thing isn't even that they've forgotten to govern--it's that they don't seem to recognize that they aren't governing. In making their politics all about spin, they've made the fatal error of so many corrupt regimes: now they actually believe their own propaganda.

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*Hack (n) - a political operative; one concerned with the functions of the political machine. (Fourth edition Hog Dictionary, abridged.)