Will FEBAR Bring Down the House?

By Stirling Newberry
t r u t h o u t Perspective

Saturday 10 September 2005

With Friday's news that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Director Michael Brown had been relieved of managing the storm clean-up, a bit of reality settled in to Washington. Brown, you probably know, is a man who couldn't manage a horse breeder's association, and yet who was waved through hearings by an eager Joe Lieberman. It was an admission that New Orleans had been Federal Emergencied Beyond All Recognition. But this action does not stop the growing scandal. According to Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post, five of the top FEMA officials "came to their posts with virtually no experience handling disasters," and the "ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the September 11, 2001, attacks."

The Katrina catastrophe and the failure of response - FEBAR - have primed the pump of a deep well, that of liberal and Democratic anger. It isn't just that traffic on liberal blogs has spiked. It isn't just that the images have been so shocking, the reality of a nation unprepared for disaster so outrageous. It is that it cuts in sharp relief how out of power the Democrats are, and what that really means.

The final outrage may have been the formation of a "bipartisan committee" without telling the Democratic leadership of either house, without assuring equal representation, and without giving bipartisan subpoenas power. Publicly and privately, Democratic office holders exploded. When Scott McClellan went through an entire press conference saying that "we shouldn't play the blame game" and the press did not challenge him, it was a sharp, stiff shock to the systems of more than a few representatives who at long last realized what, exactly, Rove's Republic meant to them.

The reality that the public has to understand is that there are three poles of politics in America.There are two philosophies of national government - a liberal one and a reactionary one - and then there is a localist Americanism. For a very long time, this third pole felt that it was allied with the reactionary theory to restrain the liberal one. Even if nominally a member of the Democratic Party, the laissez-faire, small government, free market, low taxes vision of America could have been ripped from the Democratic Party's platform of 1928, or even 1932, before FDR had transfigured the party.

It created a national economy that taxed money where it piled up in cities, and pumped it out to the country side. This "pork-u-pump" kept rural areas afloat, slowed the bleeding of people into the cities, and gave them buying power to purchase manufactured goods, which allowed cities and a vast industrial machine to slowly bloom, and then, after the end of World War II, to boom. A representative's job, as much as he had one, was to work this pump: cut taxes on his constituents, and "bring home the bacon."

This means that many Democratic Congressmen, while they weren't happy not having the perks of the majority, were safe in their jobs as long as they could, from time to time, score a few laws and snarf down some pork now and again. Many of them were as devoted to the idea of "cut taxes, raise defense spending and pretend to balance the budget" as their counterparts across the aisle were. Many, coming up from state political machines, were happy to have the Federal government stay out of investigating local corruption and local ways of doing business. No applause please, just throw money.

However, they also expected that, eventually, the Republicans would trip up, and they would swing back into power. Some were aggressive about planning for this day, running a bitter civil war under the radar inside the Democratic Party, but this was only a fraction of the "go along to get along" consensus in the Democratic Party's upper echelons. Over and over again it was assumed that someday the economy would be bad enough, the scandals rank enough, and the electorate restive enough to have a change in power. Just focus on winning a few seats, and one day it would work out. This strategy was roughly like trying to draw an inside straight on every hand of poker.

What has exacerbated this sector of the Democratic officeholder class, and the people who work for them, is not that the country is marching in a reactionary direction. As the filibuster deal showed, they were quite happy, make that eager, to confirm a judge who called the New Deal unconstitutional. It has not sunk into their minds that this means the end of their existence and the end of their usefulness. They don't connect, in their own minds, the pork-u-pump to the New Deal. It has existed, it exists in every developed nation, why not in this one? And they were positively antipathetic to the idea of the Federal government's imposing standards and checking results in any effective manner. The result is that when catastrophe came, no one was there to bar the door.

Because most Democratic office holders lacked any larger vision than bringing home the bacon, being out of power was galling, but not worth taking large risks to change. Most were not angry about the direction of policy. Instead, what angers them now is their growing perception that the great game of politics, the ability to investigate the other party and raise a fuss - the ability to engage in "oversight," which is the bread and butter of moving an ambitious career upwards or making a mere politician into an untouchable institution - has been taken away.

The public, however, does not have the luxury or the time while the powers that be in Washington tussle politely, and sometimes less than politely, behind closed doors in the capitol building. With every passing day, billions bleed out from the treasury, and more young Americans bleed to death in the hardened streets of Baghdad and by the side of desolate highways in the desert. And the signs of a growing sense of urgency are visible as tremors in the polls. Normally a disaster allows a President to look presidential and providential. There is a sense of putting party aside and getting the job done, and with it comes a bounce in the polls. Bush's was so soft and small that people barely felt it.

However, no reading of the polls shows any direction; the Democratic leadership is as unpopular as the Republican leadership, individual incumbents of both parties are facing low approval numbers, and as yet no candidate has emerged for the Presidency who offers a vision that has "caught fire" with the public.

For those who read history, this is not an uncommon pattern: before America is willing to adopt a wholesale change, it often simply screams in frustration, sending a group of people to Washington who will "do something" about the problems. The problems that need to be investigated are piling up. While it is doubtful Americans are yet ready to hear the truth about 9/11, namely that the same people who couldn't read a weather report could not read an intelligence report, they are ready to hear the truth about how the reconstruction and occupation of Iraq is a carnival of corruption, and they are certainly willing to hear the truth about how George W. Bush managed to lose New Orleans, the site of the last invasion of the continental United Sates.

If you want a measure of whether the public is willing to seek dramatic change, then cast your eyes on Ohio, where a previously unknown Paul Hackett is being urged to run for the Senate seat held by Mike DeWine, a senator who last crossed the national radar for having a "Washingtonienne" in his employ, and who belongs to a state party that only wishes its scandals were limited to sex. Hackett and a band of young political operatives made an astounding run at a heavily Republican congressional district in an August special election. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is urging him to seek statewide office, and there is already a scramble of opposition research on the part of the Republicans.

DeWine represents a kind of seat that the Republicans must hold to maintain power: the northern and midwestern moderate. States that are voting against cities, without realizing what, exactly, they are voting in favor of. The Republicans have seven senators from such states, two from Maine, two from Ohio, one each from Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Minnesota. While the two from Maine seem safe, three of the other five are up for re-election this year. Chaffee of Rhode Island is 2006's second most embattled incumbent, right behind Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

The Hackett race in Ohio gives Democrats another reason to hope: his race represented a 10 point shift from the last competitive race in the district. A swing of 10 points was not enough to give the Democrats the district, but a shift of 10 points nationally would represent a landslide shift in the House, with Republican outposts outside the south snapping like twigs.

Just after the election, one Republican strategist was quietly gloating to me of a "filibuster-proof majority." He believed that Nelson of Florida would fall, and that, with Dayton of Minnesota retiring, that left only three seats between George Bush and replacing the aging Justice Stevens with someone in the mold of Priscilla Owens. The House seemed ripe for an increased majority. "The budget is a governing document, and people are going to want to be inside, not outside, the building when it is written."

Which is why Newt Gingrich has openly fretted about the government's having "the ability to deliver" as being more important than "values." FEBAR strikes at the heart of the Republican Party's air of being composed of tough, business-like, can-do "Vulcans," sagely making decisions based on reason, rationality and cost-benefit analysis. Instead, Michael Brown's failures and the revelations that his resume was far too thin for the job reveal a Republican Party that simply cannot get the job done, the way it still does not have power fully restored to Baghdad, or a clear plan for rebuilding the World Trade Center. If the record of urban renewal is any indication, years from now we will still hear about how "the levee system has been a harder task to rebuild than we expected."

Americans were patient when inflation was low, housing values were up, and everyone expected that there would be a big rebound in the jobs market. These features are coming to an end: gasoline spiked to over $3 a gallon after Katrina, housing values are beginning to wobble in key markets, and a "great month" for hiring under Bush is what Clinton averaged per month in his eight years of being President. The appearance of incompetence and impropriety becomes a sign that those in power don't have matters in hand.

So that is why people in both parties are starting to ask, "Will FEBAR bring down the house?"



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Stirling Newberry is an internet business and strategy consultant, with experience in international telecom, consumer marketing, e-commerce and forensic database analysis. He has acted as an advisor to Democratic political campaigns and organizations and is the co-founder, along with Christopher Lydon, Jay Rosen and Matt Stoller, of BopNews, as well as the military affairs editor of The Agonist.
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