(Adapted from a post today at Needlenose.)
Last night, Josh Marshall sounded the alarm about Shrubya's apparent intent to rebuild his political capital by flooding the hurricane-damaged Gulf Coast region with money. It's also clear what Rove/Bush's cynical strategy is -- as with the war against Iraq, the Bushites see the Katrina recovery as a purpose above questioning. Besides, how can Democrats possibly argue against federal spending?
But wait a second. Are they daring us to use the populist, anti-big government rhetoric they spent decades promoting to the level of conventional wisdom? All I can say is: Go ahead. Make my day!
After all, we're armed now with undeniable examples of their incompetence. Try these talking points on for size:
-- Do you trust this federal government, which has spent $200 billion in Iraq, was bragging up until a week before hurricane Katrina about how much it was spending on homeland security and emergency response, to spend this money wisely?
-- Do you think we're getting a good return for our money in Iraq? Do you think we're getting a good return on that energy bill they passed? (Seen the price of gas lately?)
The fact is, there hasn't been a cause or a crisis in the past four years that this federal government hasn't turned into a welfare bill for their campaign contributors. So there's every reason to think that if they're left to their own devices, the Bushites will come up with a rebuilding plan that leaves the ordinary people of Mississippi and Louisiana abandoned a second time.
It's not that Democrats are opposed to the national government playing a major role -- the problem is this federal government, which thinks the highest use of the public treasury is to give their campaign contributors the key to the vault. Democrats believe in using the government's powers to help ordinary people ... but we saw in the Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center how this federal government responds to ordinary people in need.
So, rather than oppose the spending, we should insist on oversight and open accounting so that the recovery program answers to the people it's supposed to help -- just as the government must answer to them for its failure to provide help immediately after the hurricane.
I'm not expert enough to outline exactly what forms of oversight will be sufficient to keep the post-Katrina rebuilding from becoming a giant corporate pig trough, but since the Democratic Leadership Council has called loudly and repeatedly for Democrats to adopt this sort of message, perhaps this should be their mission. It's time to give that "reform agenda" some teeth. It's time for a genuine Democratic populism.