Karl Rove is back in the game telling Bush what to do about Hurricane Katrina

Bush Repackaged
The White House hopes to repair the president’s image by throwing money at the hurricane zone. Progressives need to come up with an alternative vision ahead of the ’06 election.





WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 2:17 p.m. ET Sept. 16, 2005
Sept. 16, 2005 - You can tell that Karl Rove is back in the game after a bout with kidney stones that landed him in the hospital during the height of Hurricane Katrina. Rove’s absence explains in part President Bush’s curious aloofness in the face of looming disaster. Returning to the Gulf Coast on Thursday for a fourth visit, Bush is trying to make up for the lapses that tarnished his image as a leader and to repackage himself as a visionary for the next phase, a rebuilding effort that will dwarf Iraq´s reconstruction and likely make Halliburton even richer.





To hear Bush talk, we’re about to witness a Republican utopia in the hurricane zone. Children will go to school with vouchers. Wages will be lowered and regulations waived to accommodate the big contractors. The entire area will become a free-enterprise zone. And the GOP, under the guise of economic revival, will impose one of its favorite ideas, the flat tax. It’s reminiscent of the Jim Carrey movie “The Truman Show,” where Carrey lives in a picture-perfect town--except it turns out all the residents are actors. In Bush’s version, everybody’s a Republican.

There are Democrats on Capitol Hill trying to put out alternative visions and progressive think tanks churning out position papers, but they are powerless in a government controlled top to bottom by the GOP. A cacophony of voices on the left can’t compete with a presidential primetime address, and it’s the nature of an opposition party that there is no unity of command. Democrats are up against a coordinated, energetic effort on the right to implement policies conservative theorists have been hoping to put into place for a long time. The rebuilding effort is ideologically motivated and influenced by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that fueled the Reagan presidency. The proposals in a report titled “Tragedy to Triumph” are premised on the belief that corporations freed from labor unions, environmental restrictions and onerous taxes will reap huge profits and those profits will grow the pie for everybody--and at least create some crumbs for the masses.

This is a pivotal moment in politics with a president severely compromised and the country poised to embrace a contrary view of government that rejects the Darwinian capitalism of the Reagan-Bush era. If ever there was a time for the progressive community to step forward and offer ideas, it is now, however hard it is to penetrate the Rove message machine and its many allies in the media. The White House, in order to repair Bush’s image, is doing what Republicans used to accuse Democrats of doing--throwing money at the problem. The Katrina recovery is on track to cost more than the war in Iraq, but the ideologues on Capitol Hill are content to balloon the deficit and see no need to trim pet projects elsewhere to pay for Katrina. Majority leader Tom DeLay had the gall to boast of an “ongoing victory” under 11 years of Republican control, but he may have to eat those words next November. The ’06 election will be a referendum on Republican governance, and in the wake of the Katrina debacle, the GOP has lost its aura of competence. If they can’t get hurricane relief right, how can they keep us safe from terrorists?

The latest Pew Research Center poll has Republicans trailing Democrats 52 percent to 40 percent among registered voters, with Democrats favored on most major issues. Even on terrorism, consistently the GOP’s strength, the party’s advantage has narrowed. The ’06 midterm election will give the public a chance to vent its anger at the party in control, but it’s not enough for Democrats to stand aside and wait for the GOP to implode. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, offers an earnest set of guidelines to a responsible recovery of the Gulf Coast. Among them are dropping the repeal of the estate tax and curbing the special-interest favors for members known as “earmarks” while expanding low-income housing, improving mass transit and raising the minimum wage. These are chestnuts long advocated by the left and unlikely to gain traction in the GOP-dominated political climate. When Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi stands up and proposes a Marshall Plan for the gulf states, as she did on Thursday, she reminds voters how bankrupt her party is when it comes to new ideas.

There is already a lot of money flowing to the gulf region, and people with close ties to the White House could be among those who benefit. The gold rush is on. Progressives better make a case for reinvigorating government before Bush and his pals dismantle what’s left of the New Deal.


[link to msnbc.msn.com]