As a follow-on to Gov. Vilsack’s comments about conservative incompetence in governance, I highly recommend Noam Scheiber’s latest TRB column in The New Republic. Noam presents a general theory of the difference between “normal” cronyism and the sort of extended, exponential cronyism that’s often found in conservative administrations, where you don’t just hire your friends, but your friends are allowed to hire their friends, ad infinitum.Like Tom Vilsack, Noam Scheiber thinks conservative hostility to government’s legitimate purposes has consequences for how competently government is run:

If you happen to think bureaucracies are structurally incapable of improving people’s lives, and if you have contempt for the kinds of people who reside in them, then you have two choices: You can either slash the bureaucracy and refund taxpayer’s money, or you can reconcile yourself to the existence of bureaucracy and run it as a patronage operation.

It’s pretty clear which fork in the road the Bush administration has taken. Yes, they’ve rebated some well-heeled taxpayers’ money, but have actually increased spending at a remarkable pace. But in the end, all those Treasury notes the Chinese are buying are essentially financing a patronage operation of epic proportions.

I’ve written a quick and unhappy reaction to the president’s big speech from New Orleans this evening over at TPMCafe.But in terms of understanding the broader issues being raised by the Katrina disaster, the incompetent response, and the impending recovery, I urge you to read a statement by DLC Chairman and Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack that was posted earlier today.Here are some excerpts:

The failures in our national response to Hurricane Katrina did not simply stem from mistakes, however egregious, of individuals whose replacement with more experienced and competent public servants will take care of the problem in the immediate and distant future. These failures represent the broader failure of an ideology of contempt for the responsibilities of government, and for the sense of community that is fundamental to genuine self-government….We are learning every day that there really is something worse than a big, debt-ridden government that tries to do too much and fails. It’s a big, debt-ridden government that tries to do too little, and succeeds….The devastation and human tragedy of Hurricane Katrina provides a painful but necessary opportunity for us all to rethink our attitude towards our own public institutions and those who serve in them, rejecting the false choice of government as an end in itself and government as a dead end remote from our worthier endeavors.And that’s why current Republican proposals to turn the Gulf Coast into a conservative ideological laboratory with private-school vouchers, wholesale deregulation, and suspension of wage standards on federally financed construction projects must be rejected. A second, ideologically driven abandonment of public responsibility in this region would be intolerable.

Vilsack nicely ties together the past, present and (potentially) future failures of the conservative ideology in addressing America’s most urgent needs. It’s a timely analysis, and warning.

With so much else going on, I’ve neglected to blog about the gubernatorial race–one of two in this off-year–in Virginia, featuring Democrat Tim Kaine and a Republican with the unfortunate surname of (Jerry) Kilgore.The race is now heating up and heading into the home stretch. And the dynamics are very interesting. Virginia is a state with a small but significant built-in Republican advantage in statewide races. Yet incumbent, term-limited Democratic Governor Mark Warner is extremely popular, and George W. Bush’s approval ratings here have dropped well below 50 percent.Both gubernatorial candidates have notable strengths and weaknesses. Lt. Gov. Kaine is a former Richmond mayor and one-time civil rights lawyer–not the best biography for a statewide candidate in Virginia. Moreover, he’s a “seamless garment” Catholic who opposes both abortion and the death penalty, though he’s repeatedly pledged to enforce existing laws on both topics. Kaine is also very smart, very disciplined, and has pretty much run circles around Jerry Kilgore on the few occasions when the Republican has agreed to debate. He’s come up with a credible proposal for holding down property taxes (skyrocketing in the D.C. suburbs of northern Virginia), and is now accentuating a plan for universal access to pre-K education. And most of all, Kaine will benefit from support from Warner, who is expected to expend some serious political capital on his preferred successor down the stretch.Kilgore is firmly aligned with the anti-tax, Christian Right faction of the Virginia GOP, which has seen better days, but is still capable of delivering a virtually uncontested nomination. His main strength (other than a pretty-boy appearance and an ability to cheerfully perform every inane campaign stunt in the books) is his base in southwest Virginia, a normally Republican region that Warner carried in 2001. The wild card in the race is independent Russell Potts, a renegade Republican state senator from the Shenandoah Valley who supported Warner’s budget and tax deal, and is basically running to Kaine’s left on taxes and abortion. Despite intensive efforts by the Washington Post editorial page to hype his candidacy (the Post is strangely angry at Kaine for not supporting another major tax increase to deal with traffic congestion), Potts doesn’t seem to be catching on. The two major candidates are evenly matched financially, and in terms of national support. A poll by the Post released last weekend confirmed the conventional wisdom of the race by showing Kilgore up over Kaine by a small but statistically significant 4 percent (7 percent among likely voters), with Potts getting about 5 percent, and 9 percent still undecided. Nearly half of voters indicated their preferences were fluid, and name ID for both candidates was surprisingly low, given their recent ubiquity. The regional breakdown of the poll showed Kilgore with big leads in the three most conservative regions of the state–Southside, the Valley, and Southwest Virginia–and Kaine ahead in Central Virginia and Hampton Roads. If there was a surprise in the poll, it was that Kilgore is running nearly even with Kaine in Northern Virginia, mainly due to big margins in the exurbs. This showing may be attributable to Kilgore’s noisily abrasive exploitation of an immigration controversy in the area, where local officials approved a publicly financed gathering site for day laborers, often new immigrants from Central America. Aside from the usual conservative line about immigration enforcement, Kilgore has luridly suggested links between Hispanic gangs and al Qaeda. No kidding.The same poll showed Warner is the most popular politician in the state, and also showed heavy support for Kaine’s pre-K proposal.To the extent that Kilgore’s lead depends on a generic Republican advantage in the Commonwealth, the recent troubles of the Bush administration, and the likelihood that late-deciding voters may treat the election as in part a national referendum, are potentially bad news for this most generic of GOP conservatives. There’s also a statewide-televised candidate debate on tap in early October, which could accentuate Kaine’s verbal and intellectual advantage.The crucial X-factor in this race may well be Mark Warner. It’s no secret he is considering a presidential race in 2008. And while potential presidential primary voters won’t care about what happens in the contest to succeed him in Virginia, Warner’s already formidable insider reputation for political skill would definitely be enhanced if he succeeds in helping Kaine pull off a come-from-behind victory. Whatever happens, people outside Virginia are likely to view this election in the context of national politics; with Jon Corzine now almost certain to romp in the other off-year gubernatorial election in New Jersey, Virginia’s contest will determine whether Democrats achieve a portentous sweep or an ambiguous split.For those of us who live in the Commonwealth, the stakes are higher: will we continue Warner’s remarkable record of accomplishment, or go back to the days when GOP governors seemed determined to make Virginia a laboratory for bad, mean-spirited and deficit-ridden government? For me, of course, this is really personal. As a resident of Virginia, I just don’t want to spend the next four years explaining that I am neither biologically or politically related to Jerry Kilgore. Please help me, my fellow citizens.

Over at TAPPED yesterday, Garance Franke-Ruta asked a compelling question: how, exactly, can we really expect to hold Bush and his minions accountable for their serial acts of misgoverment? And over at TPMCafe, Mark Schmitt responded by making a strong argument that today’s Republicans escape accountability because, well, they don’t really give a damn what anybody thinks about them other than on general election days.Maybe I’m just consumed with anger at the administration and its congressional allies right now, but I think Mark’s basically right. Most of these people have no concept of “accountability”–in terms of short-term performance, long-range consequences, the judgment of history, or even public opinion. Their only benchmark is progress towards their own ideological goals, which are “starving the beast,” destroying the very possibility of meaningful bipartisanship, radicalizing permanent institutions like the judiciary, the military and the corporate sector, and keeping Americans afraid of the world and each other. That’s why they’ve relied so heavily on abuse of power; it’s the only way to perpetuate their power without compromise or accountability. And that’s why they are so uninhibited by most considerations of truth or decency. In fact, I would argue that their most important tactical consideration has been to destroy the possibility of accountability by short-circuiting all the signals whereby a healthy society normally judges its leaders. Any source of objective measurement has been systematically discredited as inherently ideological: scientists are secularist fanatics; the media are elitist liberals; the judiciary is full of anti-Christian activists; the opposition party is anti-American. We’ve all had much fun with the conservative characterization of “liberals” as “reality-based,” but it’s no laughing matter: the essence of Rovism is to eliminate any zone of rational persuasion and force Americans to pick sides in an identity politics of real and perceived privileges under imaginary assault. Years ago, a friend of mine from Alabama observed that what bugged her about Republicans as people is that they had the subtelty and sensitivity of hammerhead sharks. So the question is: how do you fight a hammerhead shark, particularly a wounded hammerhead shark? Clearly, you can’t go very far negotiating or reasoning with this kind of beast; you just become chum. But I don’t put a lot of stock in the reigning opinion of so many Democratic bloggers that the answer is to become sharks ourselves. I’ve always opposed the idea that Democrats can win a selfishness competition with the GOP, offering our government benefits versus their tax cuts; they’ll win every time if voters are asked to conduct a personal cost-benefit analysis of what they think they are “getting” for their tax dollars. Nor do I believe, in the end, we can out hate them or out thug them; even if that course was not morally repugnant, it’s politically self-defeating; the ultimate sell-out to Republican values.So if we do not happily cooperate with the GOP in reducing all politics to our team versus their team, and our “truth” versus their “truth,” to what higher standard can we appeal? And that gets back to the problem of accountability in an age with few uncontested facts and no credible referees to keep a score card.Our task can be summed up as this: we have to rebuild accountability, brick by brick. That requires relentlessly putting forth a message that reminds Americans of their real and tangible interests, individual and collective, and then measuring GOP governance, and GOP candidates, accordingly. This effort will naturally involve presenting Democratic alternatives to meet the accountability standards we propose, which means dealing aggressively with entrenched (if generally false) negative stereotypes about our own party. And ultimately, the “accountability moment” will indeed have to happen at election time, or sufficiently in advance of election time to convince Republicans they are at risk not only of losing seats, or losing power, but losing a political argument with epochal consequences, just as they did during the Great Depression. The good news is that the whole Republican identity politics game is a house of cards based on the perception that Bush and the GOP are competent stewards of a threatened status quo ante of moral certainty, economic growth, and American power. Iraq and Katrina–and perhaps the impending cascade of ethical disasters–could damage those perceptions and greatly aid a Democratic effort to remind Americans of what their government should actually stand for.

As you may have heard, in his very brief opening statement for his confirmation hearings as Chief Justice of the United States, John Roberts regaled the Senate Judiciary Committee with a baseball analogy to explain his basic judicial philosophy:

Judges and justices are servants of the law, not the other way around. Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.

The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules.But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire….I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability. And I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.

My first reaction to this homespun wisdom from the extremely sophisticated habitue of Washington society, with an impeccable High Tory background to boot, is that he’s being coached by the ultimate Homespun High Tory, George Will, just as Will once coached Roberts’ boss and idol, Ronald Reagan, in communications skills prior to a presidential debate.My second reaction echoed that of Armando on the Daily Kos site, who made this acute observation:

It is an interesting analogy Judge Roberts draws. And it seems to me to be an excellent argument for why Judge Roberts must answer the questions put to him by the Senate. As any baseball fan knows, umpires are not uniform in the delineation of the strike zone. Some are “hitters” umpires. Some are “pitchers” umpires. Some call the high strike. Some call the outside pitch.And when it comes to the Supreme Court of the United States, it is important that we know what Judge Roberts’ “strike zone” is. His record, the part that was not concealed by the Bush Administration, gives many of us pause regarding Judge Roberts’ “strike zone.” His stated antipathy for the right to privacy, for voting rights measures, for discrimination remedies, etc., demands followup. What does your “rulebook” say about these things Judge Roberts?

But why stop there? Maybe the Judiciary Committee should conduct the whole hearing in baseball metaphors.Worried about Roberts’ disposition towards Roe v. Wade? Maybe he should get this question:

SEN. FEINSTEIN: Judge Roberts, it’s safe to say the American League’s Designated Hitter rule, adopted in the same year that the Supreme Court announced Roe v. Wade, overturned a rule of play that stretched back to the beginnings of baseball. The DH still upsets a very large number of people who view it as a violation of the sacred canons of the game.We only have one Supreme Court, not one for each “league,” not one for pro-choice and pro-life Americans. Do you think as an “umpire” you should have the power to overturn a precedent of more than thirty years, and change the rules? Would you call out every designated hitter?

Concerned about Roberts’ views on civil rights? Okay:

SEN. KENNEDY: Judge Roberts, a few years before the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision–a decision your mentor, the late Chief Justice Rehnquist, deplored in at least one memo–a man named Branch Rickey unilaterally and arrogantly violated a baseball tradition going back to well beyond the date of the “separate but equal” doctine of the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson, by employing Jackie Robinson as a major league baseball player. Should an umpire in 1947 have refused to “bend the rules” and responded by calling Robinson out every time he came to bat? And if not, should today’s umpires interpret the rules to counteract all those years of “judicial arrogance” by changing the strike zone to handicap minority players who hit or pitch?

See how this works?

There’s even a nice analogy on all those economic issues where Roberts is almost a sure vote for protecting property rights against the predations of labor and Big Government:

SEN. SCHUMER: Judge Roberts, shortly after the Great Society years, baseball’s economics were revolutionized by a series of court decisions that culminated in the elimination of baseball’s “reserve clause,” which made free agency possible. As you know, to this day, baseball owners–or at least those who are not pursuing free agents–argue that this decision destroyed baseball’s balance of power and led to today’s high salaries and ticket prices.

Would you, as an umpire dedicated to the greater welfare of the game, try to reimpose the “reserve clause”? And if so, how would you do it without abandoning your role as a mere dark-robed arbiter of the rules as they stand?

Maybe Roberts should have tried football as a metaphor.

While most of us have been otherwise preoccupied, there have been two significant developments on the redistricting reform front, one positive, one negative.The good news is that the package of Ohio ballot initiatives, bearing the rubric of “Reform Ohio Now,” has been certified as having received the requisite petitions to appear on the November 2005 general election ballot in the Buckeye State. One of these, as you may know, creates an entirely new redistricting system under independent auspices and sets out criteria placing a premium on competitiveness (one leading GOP opponent in the state predicts it could cost his party, which had previously carried out an egregious gerrymander, up to six U.S. House seats). Republicans will continue to fight the initiatives in court, and are already raising money to beat them in November, but at the moment, RON’s future looks bright.The bad news is in Florida, where one of that state’s three political reform initiatives has been ruled off the ballot by a state court on grounds that its text exceeded the state’s 100-word limit by six words. The disqualified initiative was the one that set out criteria for redistricting; another still viable initiative creates an independent redistricting commission, and still another requires immediate redistricting prior to the 2008 elections. Since, IMHO, redistricting criteria are the key to successful redistricting reform, the Florida development was a serious though hardly fatal setback. Still, it looks like Ohio will provide the earliest and perhaps the best testing ground for reform.

I profoundly wish we could all suspend politics and simply concentrate on the relief efforts along the Gulf Coast, but given the administration’s focus on political damage control, that’s impossible. Moreover, as the DLC pointed out yesterday, the administration must admit its mistakes or continue them.It’s beginning to look like they may not have much choice. The administration’s aggressive political strategy over the last week–alternating from rationalizations to blame-shifting to claims that the president has now saved the day–is failing dismally. Even the most fool-proof Rovian tactic–filling the air with noise and creating an atmosphere of polarization so foul that people give up trying to “understand” and view events through a strictly partisan prism–is failing, as more and more rank-and-file Republicans, and even conservative opinion-leaders, find the damning facts uncontestable. The single biggest symbol of this development is today’s Robert Novak column. The Prince of Darkness, Washington’s most reliable barometer of the conservative zeitgeist, barbecued the administration for both its handling of Katrina, and its ham-handed political response, which clearly has Republican Congressmen fearing for their re-elections. Novak goes out of his way to quote Rep. Chris Shays–hardly one of the Prince’s favorites, but a guy whose fate in 2006 could have a large bearing on the future control of Congress–as directly comparing the Bush White House to Nixon’s in its “sense of arrogance” and its belief that “loyalty and never admitting a mistake matter more than the truth.” Novak generally knows what he’s doing, and the Nixon analogy was a big shot across the bow of the White House to remind its occupants that GOP loyalty has its limits. Those of you old enough to remember Watergate, and those who have read about it, are probably aware there was a palpable turning point in 1974 when many Republicans abandoned Nixon out of outrage or political expedience. No, I am not suggesting that Bush is in the kind of peril that engulfed Nixon, but still, given the enormous partisan loyalty he has commanded in the past, wholesale GOP defections on a fundamental question of leadership, competence and honesty, are a danger sign to Bush of unprecedented magnitude.

Like a lot of Republicans, Sen. Rick Santorum of PA provided an initial response to the horrors of New Orleans last week that basically blamed the victims:

In a weekend interview with WTAE-TV about the victims of Hurricane Katrina, Santorum said: “You have people who don’t heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.”

And like a lot of Republicans, Santorum is now furiously back-tracking, arguing that he was only talking about people with the means to leave New Orleans who refused to go.In the back-tracking race, Santorum is competing with House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who drew fire for dealing with the New Orleans catastrophe by suggesting the city is not worth rebuilding. Now the ol’ wrestling coach is claiming he was only talking about how, not whether to rebuild New Orleans.It’s increasingly clear, as others have observed, that Katrina, and especially its impact on New Orleans, have provided something of a national Rorschach Test. Some people initially reacted with horror, concern and even guilt towards the victims; others immediately blamed them for leaving themslves in harm’s way and then behaving in a disorderly manner to survive. These reactions have not completely broken along partisan or ideological lines, but they have broken that way often enough to suggest that polarization is now affecting our basic sense of community.To put it baldly, the kind of people most affected by Katrina cannot count on the party running the federal government for anything other than the level of assistance dictated by public opionion. If Rick Santorum or Denny Hastert suddenly become serious advocates for serious relief aimed the affected populations, it will probably be because they failed that first Rorschach test, and are trying to compensate for it. Democrats have a clear responsibility, and a clear opportunity, to show they do indeed get it, and can do better in times of national crisis–the first time.

As a follow-up to his administration’s not-so-subtle efforts to blame state and local officials in Louisiana for the incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans, the President announced today that he would lead an investigation into “what went wrong and why” on the federal end. This astonishing news raises several interesting questions:1) Does this mean Bush is now going to admit his administration did screw things up, contributing to an avoidable loss of life and untold damage to New Orleans and its people? 2) If so, doesn’t it sorta kinda violate the idea of objective investigations for the chief executive of the erring enterprise to head up the probe?3) Is Bush open to the idea that maybe his friend “Brownie,” whom he praised after the worst screw-ups as having done a “heck of a job,” actually did not do a “heck of a job” after all? 4) And how’s about the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security, the organization that employed and directed ol’ Brownie?5) While Bush hunts high and low for incompetents in his administration, will he leave the most likely suspects in charge of the relief and recovery effort in the Gulf Coast? Is ol’ Brownie, dismissed not long ago from his crushing responsibilities as a show horse enforcement official, the indispensable man in the operation? And insofar as Bush himself raised concerns about the implications of the botched recovery for homeland security, does he really want to keep DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff in overall direction of the massive project? This whole thing is incredibly bizarre. The president who has never, ever, in more than four years, admitted a single mistake, and never fired anyone for anything other than the sin of admitting mistakes, is going to investigate his own administration for mistakes that he has yet to admit other than at the highest level of abstraction. Maybe that’s the whole idea: he’ll find someone who admitted a mistake, and blame the mistakes he won’t admit on them. Talking heads will roll.

With everything else going on this weekend, some may have forgotten that today commemorates the contributions of working Americans and the labor movement that represents them.This has obviously been a tough year for the labor movement, what with a sluggish economy, sky-rocketing health care and energy costs, never-ending pressure on jobs and wages from offshoring, continued corporate efforts to even further skew the balance of power between employers and employees–and of course, the split in the AFL-CIO.But interestingly enough, Americans seem to be appreciating the importance of unions, to themselves and to the country, as much as or more than ever. Check out this handy compilation of public opinion research data from Ruy Teixeira’s site. And let’s all work to make a better Labor Day possible next year.