Self-Helplessness

From IBD:

Posted 3/3/2006
Katrina: Six months after the hurricane, at least two things are clear. One is that Washington can be as much a problem as a solution. The other is that Republicans should have known this.

As the Gulf Coast struggles to rebuild and the blame game rages, we're wondering what Ronald Reagan would have made of all this. Reagan, of course, was a critic of the federal government even as he skillfully led it. One of his core principles was that there was much that Washington did not do well and that other public and private entities closer to the people — and, of course, the people themselves — did much better.

Reagan believed in federalism. So, back then, did his party. And it once was the consensus view, not just a GOP position, that state and local governments were responsible for public order and safety, with Washington as a backstop if things truly got out of hand.

Times have changed. The Hurricane Katrina post-mortems show plenty of incompetence and confusion, but they also reveal a decided shift in expectations. Americans now seem to expect too little from state and local government and too much from the feds.

Partisan bias also has something to do with the constant criticism of the White House. When a videotape released last week seemed to show that President Bush was over-confident about FEMA's abilities — no shock — Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid declared that administration officials "have systematically misled the American people."

We heard no such concern when another tape showed that Louisiana's Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco was clueless about the state of New Orleans' levees several hours after first reports that they had been breached.
But bias isn't the whole story. Democrats wouldn't be so eager to hammer the White House if they didn't think the public would agree. And if they're right, the federal government is now the public's idea of a universal first responder.

The trouble with saying, "Where's FEMA?" whenever disaster strikes is that the demand for consistently quick action on a massive scale is costly and ultimately not realistic. All government has some bureaucratic drag, and the bigger the government, the worse the drag. Sooner or later, the federal government is bound to fall short when so much is demanded of it.

So whose fault is all this? In part, the government is a victim of its own success. FEMA seemed to be handling disasters — smaller ones — quite well until Katrina. But public views also are formed by messages that government sends out through words and deeds. And here the Republicans share some of the blame.

As the party in charge of the White House for the past five years, and of Congress for most of the past 11, the GOP has had plenty of time to sell voters on the value of federalism and self-help. But it has done plenty to reinforce the opposite message — that federal help is on the way for whatever problems we may have.

The Medicare drug benefit, pork-barrel earmarks and the lavish post-Katrina aid (much of which appears to have been wasted) all reinforce this theme. So, in taking their lumps now for their role in the Katrina chaos, Republicans are paying a price for ignoring their principles. We doubt if Reagan would be pleased.