Look What the Tide Brought Back

Looking at the pre-Katrina political theory floating out there with the rest of the storm's flotsam and jetsam, it's clear that when it comes to the role of the government -- big, federal, blow-the-wad government complete with presidential bells and whistles -- both political parties now face what earnest, horn-rimmed students used to call "internal contradictions."

Here's the nut of those contradictions: Recently, Democrats have been talking like the party of small government even though they really believe in the functions and mission of big government. Meanwhile, Republicans, who have long professed not to believe in many of the missions and functions of big government, have been expanding the government substantially.

In his prime time address to the nation on Thursday, President Bush tried to wire together both these tangled strains of American political thought into a single life raft. On the one hand, he said, "The system, at every level of government, was not well coordinated and was overwhelmed" while, on the other hand, promising to lead "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen." So the government -- the very same government that so many Republicans since Ronald Reagan have mocked and denigrated, and which, Bush says, bungled Katrina -- became in a single speech both the solution and the problem.

If Hurricane Katrina revealed fatal, knowable and manmade flaws in New Orleans' basic geography, it has done much the same for Americans' collective view of government's basic mission along with its size, scope and finances. And if Katrina forced open gushing cracks in the city's levees, it has also pried open oozing fissures in the political parties' governing philosophies, or at least how the parties peddle those philosophies.

In the post-Clinton era, Democrats have acted like Taft Republicans of the 1950s, fighting for balanced budgets at home and against active idealism abroad, and combining it all with an allergy to charisma that the incurably dull Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft would have envied. Post-Clinton Republicans have acted like a caricature of 1970s Democrats -- fiscally reckless, hooked on pork, big spending and cronyism, and committed to idealistic do-goodism abroad.

In the end, both the parties and the voters are responsible for an affliction the country now suffers: We seem to feel we have a right to much more from government than we care to pay for; this essentially moral failing has a name in the economic world -- it's called a deficit.

The massive spending necessary to deal with Katrina will of course exacerbate this deficit, fiscal and moral. More fundamentally, Katrina, combined with 9/11, seems to have rekindled the notion that government's basic mission is to protect stuff -- people, property, commerce and daily life. If the politicians come to believe (through polling) that Americans don't believe government is doing enough to protect them, they will throw money and more crisis czars at the problem. They've already started. It will be expensive and it will not be pay as you go.

How are partisan theoreticians processing this?

On the liberal side, an exemplary manifesto is E. J. Dionne Jr.'s recent column in The Washington Post that declared flatly, "The Bush Era is over." Liberal blogs and Web sites like HuffingtonPost.com ran this as a banner headline.

But it's somewhat hard to see why the Bush era is dead even if he's in some deep and dirty water. He's got three years left and solid GOP majorities in Congress. Is there something larger afoot? Dionne thinks so. "The source of Bush's political success was his claim that he could protect Americans," he wrote. "Leadership, strength and security were Bush's calling cards. Over the past two weeks, they were lost in the surging waters of New Orleans." At least the Democrats hope so.

Democrats still have the problem of answering this: Give us a hint of what the Democratic era is, please. You'll recall this was a problem in November of 2000 and 2004.

Speaking of the ends of eras, 10 years ago in January, William Jefferson Clinton declared in his State of the Union Address, "The era of big government is over." That was a big headline in those days, coming from a Democrat. He was promptly reelected and nearly impeached during a feckless second term that didn't do much big or small. Except cut the deficits.