We’ve made fun of Karl Rove and the Republicans for a couple of chapters, and now I’m about to give one of my classic long-winded lectures. To build on the win in November, there’s a few issues Democrats have to be on top of, and there’s a certain way we’ve got to talk about them.
You’re probably saying, “We’re in, we won. What could you possibly have to say, Carville?” There is always the risk of history repeating itself: we get voted in, we lock up, and it takes too long to get anything done. I’ve been screaming at the Democrats to get it together and get a narrative for so long it doesn’t seem like there could be anything new for me to say on the topic. Stick with me, I do.
The narrative the Democrats are absolutely, indisputably positioned to develop and deliver following 2008 is the Real Deal. Republicans have been quite literally set on destroying the world. (Although now it could be argued they’re more interested in destroying one another.) They’ve set us back years on basic domestic indicators like income and health care and they’ve sunk numerous government agencies. Every time I thought I’d come up with something the Bush administration couldn’t screw up or didn’t have time to screw up with all the other screwing up they were doing, a headline proved me wrong. I expect the revealing headlines and exposés will continue as the housecleaning proceeds. It would test the imagination to try to fathom what dark secrets the Bush administration succeeded in sweeping under the rug in the Department of Justice or shelving in the basement of the Agriculture Building.
There was a story by Eric Lipton in the New York Times in September 2007 that completely confirmed every fear I had about the Bush administration. No, it wasn’t about the economy per se or even about the war in Iraq or some fool thing Bush said. It was about RTVs and imported toys. Consumer product regulation under Bush was at an all-time low. In the 1970s, there were more than 1,000 employees at the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Toward the end of the Bush years, there were about 420. That marked a 12.5 percent drop from 2000, even, by the way.
Cut to Gaithersburg, Maryland, September 2007. One man was responsible for testing every toy reported to be dangerous in the United States. His testing ground was a square foot behind the door in the cramped laboratory to which the Bush administration relegated the dwindling staff of testers. In Los Angeles, one woman working part time was responsible for inspecting the 15 million plus truck-size containers that come in through the port each year.
Remember all those stories about toys and children’s jewelry imported from China that contained lead? Cuts in funding and staff coincided with a surge in imports from China under Bush. Over the past ten years, imports have risen from $62 billion to $246 billion. But in September 2007, only eighty-one employees were inspecting imports nationwide. Bush was actually reducing the number of people looking after product safety as imports from China and other countries with few or no regulations—and no agreement to observe or even consider U.S. safety regulations, I might mention—continued to grow.
Funding cuts decimated the agency, stripping it down to a budget of $62 million. That sounds like a lot, but, in context, it means Bush left only $62 million to regulate an industry topping $1.4 trillion and rising. If the Bush administration had had its way, the safety commission’s budget would be nonexistent.1
Returning to the somewhat bigger picture, there’s the war in Iraq. Bush and his crew of neocons left Obama to end a conflict that is going to affect not only the United States but all international relations for a century to come. Thousands of young American men and women are dead. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed not only in the invasion and civil war but at the hands of overzealous private contractors hired and let loose in Iraq by the U.S. State Department. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent—and more than a few billion lost2—in Iraq.
Obama and the Democrats want to save the world, quite literally. We are the authors of a narrative that is newly urgent, newly relevant, and newly positive. We’re for the Real Deal, for pushing the policies that will meet the needs of our communities in the wake of eight disastrous years of the Bush administration.
Guess what else is new this time? It’s not a narrative just about the things the Republicans have done wrong; it’s about playing up what the Democrats have right. That’s going to mean harnessing the energy and enthusiasm the Obama campaign generated and reminding the American public about Democrats’ leadership on health insurance, an issue the Republicans have handily hung themselves on with last year’s centerstage battle over S-CHIP (the State Children’s Health Insurance Program), not to mention the environment and energy.
We’ve always been on the right side of environmental policy, one of the few policy areas we didn’t somehow manage to hand over to the Republicans along with morality, family values, and security. There hasn’t been a Republican since Nixon who’s been right on the environment.
You can’t escape the headlines and news stories testifying to the fact that the earth is warming. They’re in your face every day. It’s hurricane followed by hurricane followed by hurricane, punctuated by stories about runners dying from heat-related causes during marathons. If you manage to miss the headlines, just walk outside. Check the setting on your air conditioner. It’s plain getting hotter.
Conservatives attempting to deny the onset of global warming attempt to cite how cool it was in 2008 as proof the earth isn’t warming. That’s so easy to refute it’s sad. To go to the Christian Science Monitor, “the only reason that this year seemed so cold is that the rest of this decade has been so hot…. While it’s true that 1998 was the hottest year on record, none of these commenters has mentioned that the next seven hottest years were, in order, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2001, according to Britain’s Met Office.”3
Not convinced? Try Time: “Even though 2008 is cooler than the past several years, it’s still likely to rank as the 10th warmest year since the beginning of climate records in the 1850s.”4
Between global warming and the price of gas, we’re also ready to drive home energy independence. Fossil fuels are finite, environmentally destructive, and now economically untenable. A few people are finally ready to trade in that SUV for a Prius.
Of course, it’s not just policy Obama and the Democrats have to be able to talk about. We have to talk about the Bush administration, too, and it’s necessary to understand exactly what it is that went so wrong. Remind folks of the positive and the good times ahead, but keep the lessons of the last eight years fresh if you want to kept the Democrats in office for forty years.
The searing critique of the Bush administration is that their politics were based in fantasy, not reality. They talked a big game, and they didn’t come through for the American people. In fact, they left the country far worse off than it was before they got into office by every measure I know of. They didn’t even really have a plan, real or unreal, for an occupation in Afghanistan or Iraq. Talk of supply-side economics and tax cuts for the wealthy did not translate into a more robust economy—quite the opposite.
As Bush left, the American people were left with the feeling that government had been engaged in a fantasy—a fantasy in foreign policy, environmental policy, and health care policy, and a fantasy in economic policy—that didn’t involve them. Americans are still experiencing very real problems, problems that are mounting, as a consequence of the Republican’s eight-year sideline trip into the realm of fantasy.
The lesson of 2008 was that Americans are willing to empower a political party that offers achievable, real solutions to problems that are much more evident to the average American than they are to the elites residing in government. So, let’s respond to that, and let’s go out and spank the Republicans again and again.