Look What the Tide Brought Back

Since losing the White House, the Democrats have complained wildly about a war that most of them voted for, about deficits caused by tax cuts passed with many of their votes and about overspending, including pork that they probably would have wanted more of. Until New Orleans, they hadn't spent much wind talking about the classic mission of 20th-century big government -- fighting poverty. So are the Democrats now the party of small government? Well, not really.

David Wessel, in a terrific piece in the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 8, made his own declaration: "The era of small government is over. Sept. 11 challenged it. Katrina killed it." He added: "Despite a conservative Republican president with a Republican majority in the Congress, small government has been more principle than practice lately. President Bush has presided over the nationalization of airport security screeners, the creation of the sprawling Homeland Security bureaucracy, the largest expansion of Medicare since Lyndon Johnson signed it into law and a 20 percent increase in all federal spending, adjusted for inflation, even before the cost of responding to Hurricane Katrina." Not to mention, say, the unparalleled federal expansion into education of No Child Left Behind just a decade after Republican orthodoxy was to abolish the Department of Education. So can we stop referring to the Republicans as the party that wants government off our backs?

Now that big government is back in, sort of, will the Democrats abandon their newfound fiscal prudishness? And how will Democrats get voters to trust them more with the "big government" issues du jour -- civil protection, national defense and domestic security? Will Democrats run in 2006 as better rescuers? They can -- and have -- argued that Bush's (and indeed Reagan's) visible disdain for bureaucracy and government has sapped federal competence. But as a recovering television producer, I sure wouldn't want to have to cut that into a 30-second spot.

In a piece exhorting the Democrats to go for the GOP jugular on Katrina (yes, more blame game, please), John Dickerson of the online magazine Slate approvingly quotes a nameless strategist who said they need to show "that we can be the daddy party." How helpful.

The Republican dilemma is more immediate and concrete. And it goes well beyond their embarrassment and frustration at the federal response to Katrina.

First off, the Bush agenda is now drowning in its own toxic soup. The administration's plans for Social Security and private accounts, the cornerstone of the "ownership" agenda, were barely bobbing afloat in choppy waters before Katrina was even a glimmer in a weather forecaster's eye. Now key items on Congress's fall docket are kaput. Republicans planned to try to extend the 15 percent tax rate on dividends and capital gains. That has been put off for the time being, as has legislation to make cuts in the estate tax permanent.

For many Republican theoreticians, tax cuts are not only stimulants for the economy, they're built-in shackles to government growth. So now there are no new shackles in the hopper, there's a war to finance, a natural disaster that has cost $62 billion already and a country with an apparently increased desire for competently delivered basic protective services. Hmm. Sounds like big government. But remember, Republicans, Ronald Reagan said government was the problem, not the solution.

For Republicans like Oklahoma's Sen. Tom Coburn, government as the solution is a big problem -- and one of those "internal contradictions." Coburn has joined with Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain to try to enact some immediate, deep spending cuts to offset the Katrina expenditures. "The president could exercise leadership by insisting that we set priorities and offset the cost of Katrina relief by making changes elsewhere," he told John Fund of the Wall Street Journal. "Sadly, we don't have that leadership."

In that same article, Fund reminded Bush that FDR financed World War II by cutting other spending by 20 percent from 1942 to 1944, slashing some of his own favorite programs. And, he argues, Harry Truman slashed non-military spending by 28 percent in 1950 to pay for the war in Korea. Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation makes a very similar argument in a column called "Hurricane of Entitlements" on the National Review Online.

Small-government conservatives have been complaining about Bush's spending habits for a while. One of their house organs, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, published a piece by a Cato Institute scholar, Chris Edwards, last Feb. 2 that said, "fiscal conservatives are fed up . . . Clearly, the White House believes that big spending is good politics." The headline, of course, was "The Era of Big Government."

The post-Katrina administration is getting it from other conservative flanks too. George Will is the guardian of the classic conservative view that the human power to fix is vastly overrated. He warned the administration not to take its nation building down to sodden New Orleans, and not for fiscal reasons but because he thinks the administration demonstrated civic hubris on a global level in Iraq.

Voters have tended to escape blame in post-Katrina analysis, but I've had a harder time being charitable. I've come to think "the voters" see the government like a pharmaceutical company. They feel entitled to cheap if not free access to products and services, they want everything to be risk-free, and they want compensation if something goes wrong. Politicians of both parties have been perfectly willing to pretend the world can work that way (witness the Katrina blame game). But it can't.

There is a strong temptation to look forward and say that perhaps after 9/11 and Katrina, the focus of what we want from government will be competence, at least enough to ensure that people won't die of thirst on the flooded streets of a major American city. You can see the appeal now of a 21st-century version of Herbert Hoover who, after feeding Europe and leading flood relief in six states, was elected in 1928 as the rescuer, the engineer, the man of action.

Competent, hard-working government is easy to promise, but it's hard for voters to believe in. It's hardly the stuff of modern strategy and campaign ads. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are prepared to be honest about how they really intend to run and finance big government. And as "eras" come and go, that honesty deficit remains constant.

Author's e-mail: grain@cbsnews.com

Dick Meyer is editorial director of CBSNews.com, where he writes the "Against the Grain" column.