40 More Years

How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation

James Carville, Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781416598268
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Every four years Americans hold a presidential election. Somebody wins and somebody loses. That's life. But 2008 was an anomaly. The election of President Barack Obama is about something far bigger than four or even eight years in the White House. Since 2004, Americans have been witnessing and participating in the emergence of a Democratic majority that will last not four but forty years. To understand the emergence of a lasting Democratic majority we'll first have to spend a few moments reviewing the profound and relentless incompetence of the Bush administration -- and the pursuant collapse of the Republican Party. That means looking back at the failure of Republican ideas -- including a wholesale rejection of the myth of conservative superiority on the economy -- and holding our noses long enough to survey the gallery of truly repellent scoundrels, scandals, and screwups that the Republican Party has been responsible for over the last eight years. After completing the unpleasant but edifying task of autopsying the Republican Party, we'll examine the underpinnings of Democratic victories in 2004, 2006, and 2008 -- and make the argument for why Democrats are going to keep winning. (Two words: young people.) In short, the Republicans are going to keep getting spanked again and again for forty more years because we're right and they're wrong, and Americans know it.

CHAPTER 1

Why the Republicans Are Going to Get Spanked Over and Over

The Republicans got spanked in 2008, and they’re going to keep getting spanked.

The explanation is simple:

• They’ve destroyed the myth of conservative competence.
• They’re corrupt.
• They’ve lost the culture war.

The myth of Republican competence and fiscal responsibility is shattered. Trust in the GOP is at a historic low. Less than a quarter of the public trusts Republicans more than Democrats to handle the major issues of our time.¹ Thousands of Americans are still homeless or living in trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi because of the towering blunders of the Bush administration during and following Hurricane Katrina. The invasion of Iraq was, as Martin van Creveld, one of the greatest military historians of our time, said, “the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them.”

It used to be that the Democrats were the urban machine stuffing the ballot boxes, and the Republicans were the suburban party with the reform element. That’s all history. By any fair assessment, the Republican Party isn’t just a little more corrupt than the Democratic Party; it’s a lot more corrupt.

The culture war is over because it didn’t exist to begin with. It was a Republican invention that worked for two cycles, in 2002 and 2004, and now they’ve taken it too far. They’ve ventured into the land of the absurd, into creationism and pretending that the ice caps aren’t melting and the oceans aren’t heating up degree by degree.

Early on, it looked like McCain might spare Americans another descent into the culture war in 2008, then he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. Suddenly his waffling over evolution and creationism was small potatoes. That return to the culture wars of 2002 and 2004 was one of his biggest mistakes.

Americans in general, and the younger generations in particular, have rejected the culture war. This youngest generation of voters that turned out in record numbers in 2008 is historically diverse and quite possibly historically Democratic. They’re for gay marriage and against the Iraq War, and they think the government should do more for people. Strangely enough, they’re also pretty concerned about the environment.

When I ran the title of this chapter by my Republican friends—the most preeminent writers, strategists, and politicians I could find—none of them contradicted me. Republicans are ready to admit that the Republicans are in real trouble. America doesn’t want any more of what the Republicans have to offer, and the Republican Party is in full finger-pointing, backstabbing mode.

In campaigns, there are two slogans: stay the course, and time for a change. Change won in 2006, and it won again in 2008. The American people voted for real shifts in strategy and policy, away from the failed Bush policies and old Rove-style politics and toward a new brand of campaigns and politics. The operative word in the previous sentence, dear reader, is “toward.” In 2008, Americans didn’t just vote against Bush, they voted for Obama and for Democrats across the country.

Breakdown of the Essential Republican Covenant

It’s Carville story time again. This time let’s hear the one about how Republicans made a pact with the American public.

Once upon a time, the Republicans went to voters with a two-part promise. These guys said, “You may not like us, we may be economic royalists, and we may favor corporations and the wealthy too much, but we can offer you two things that the Democrats can’t.” People were listening.

“Voters,” they said, “we’re competent. We start meetings on time, and we’re efficient.” Then they continued, “And, listen, we’re culturally compatible. We own guns and trucks. The Democrats are a bunch of effete east coast elites.”

For a long time voters bought into that. But over the last eight years the Republicans have destroyed both pillars of their success. They’ve exposed themselves as not merely incompetent but completely and utterly deranged.

Breakdown of Competence

Iraq is the greatest and perhaps most immediately obvious proof of Republican incompetence. But there’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to proving how badly the Republicans have hurt Americans in the past eight years.

IRAQ

The real point on Iraq is that, depending on how you calculate it, the war is estimated to cost between $1.5 and $3 trillion. That $3 trillion figure, by the way, comes from Professor Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, who only won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Of course, the cost of the war the Republican Party championed becomes all the more unconscionable in light of the economic crisis they engineered. Lack of oversight, rampant tax cuts, burgeoning budget deficits, failure of regulation, and Republicans’ anything-goes attitude toward fiscal policy are at the core of our current economic problems.

What is absolutely stunning is that the Republicans, after committing the United States to a $3 trillion war, were unwilling to commit a trillion dollars toward a stimulus package to get out of what Alan Greenspan said would be the most wrenching economic crisis since World War II. It’s like the Republicans started a fire, then blocked the roads to keep firefighters from putting out the fire they started.

Americans will be dealing with the consequences of Republicans’ rampant irresponsibility for the foreseeable future, and the Republicans are going to have to pay for what they’ve done. In early 2009 the Republican party faces its ownership of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, totaling $12 billion a month, and the fallout over what is, without a doubt, a Republican-induced recession.

Barack Obama has been against the war in Iraq from the start—as have I, by the way—and begins from this eminently sensible and responsible position. Americans can trust the Obama administration to follow through on pushing the Iraqi government to invest in reconstruction rather than leaving that to the United States and its allies, and on withdrawing American troops from Iraq.²

KATRINA

For most of the flooding in New Orleans, to say it was the result of a natural disaster is one of these convenient Washington lies. It was no such thing. It was a man-made disaster. The city was supposed to be protected by levees built by the federal government to withstand a category three hurricane. The hurricane that hit the city of New Orleans was at most a low two and could have been just a category one. As a result of shoddy construction the levees broke and most of a great American city was lost.

In any court of law any jury would have found the federal government negligent and it would be forced to indemnify the people who suffered as a result of its negligence. But that’s another one of these inconvenient topics that shouldn’t be brought up in polite company. It’s more fashionable to mumble something about corrupt local politicians or the culture of incompetence and corruption in Louisiana or whatever other inane crap that flies because New Orleans is a thousand miles away.

If anyone has any doubt of just how bad President Bush was, all they have to do is watch footage of that incurious dolt receiving the briefing that a major American city was about to be lost and not asking a single question. Then, after he was told what was going to happen happened, he actually flew over New Orleans and didn’t land.³

It may be more polite to mumble something about Louisiana’s lack of self-sufficiency or corruption and how we need to look forward and not back. But the truth is, Katrina was a massive failure of the federal government. There’s not a single parliamentary system in this world in which a government that negligent would have survived twenty-four hours without calling an election.

U.S. COAST GUARD

If there were an agency you think Republicans could run, it would be the U.S. Coast Guard. They’re all about security, and the Coast Guard is supposed to be our first line of defense. In December 2006, we found out they not only couldn’t run the Coast Guard, they might have done a better job sinking its ships than any military opposition has so far.

From 2003 to 2006, a $17 billion shipbuilding contract with LockheedMartin and NorthropGrumman ballooned to $24 billion. Plans to update current patrol boats failed spectacularly. The boats these contractors tried to convert actually ended up in worse shape. As if that weren’t enough, the design for a series of new boats proved an utter failure. They didn’t even remember to waterproof the radios they installed. Our Coast Guard cutters were running around with a bunch of radios shorting out constantly until someone figured out that these two private contractors hadn’t thought to install waterproof radios on boats.

Appropriately enough, this whole plan was called “Deepwater.”⁴

More like deep, well, you know. The Bush administration managed to decimate the Coast Guard. My favorite quote on the whole debacle was the New York Times’ editorial: “In Iraq, lax government oversight and incompetence or profiteering by contractors have disabled reconstruction efforts. Now the same disease is undermining our coastal defenses.”⁵

What do Iraq and the Coast Guard have in common? I’ll give you a hint: Bush.

Corruption and Cronyism

Obviously you’ll have Democrats involved on occasion. I’m not denying that Bill Jefferson and Rod Blagojevich had their problems. But corruption is an institution with these Republicans. It’s systemic. They’re out of control.

Think about the Republicans’ major efforts to ding Democrats on corruption. They spent $25.1 million investigating Democrat Mike Espy over Super Bowl tickets, and it ended in his acquittal.⁶

Anyone want to take a guess at how many Reagan administration officials were convicted, indicted, or investigated? I’ll tell you, because unless you’re a history nut, there’s no way you’d ever come up with the number: it’s 138.⁷

The Republican Party is a parade of the corrupt, from Duke Cunningham to Governor Jim Gibbons with his briefcase full of cash and poker chips⁸ to Senator Ted Stevens,⁹ now a convicted felon whose November 2008 “Checkers” speech left all eyes dry. Lest they feel neglected, let’s not forget Tom DeLay, charged with money-laundering and conspiracy, or Jack Abramoff, whose deeds are so notorious he no longer needs an explanation to follow his name. (And when you mention Abramoff, it’s only polite to acknowledge Representative Bob Ney, whose involvement and subsequent investigation as a result of Abramoff’s outing was spectacular.)

Here, courtesy of The Washington Post, are some of the highlights of 2007 and 2008 in corruption for the Republican Party:

August 2007: Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) was arrested during a sex sting in a Minneapolis airport bathroom.*

September 2007: Rep. Jerry Weller (R-IL) announces he won’t run for reelection, just days after the Chicago Tribune raised questions about the lawmaker’s Nicaraguan land deals.

January 2008: Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) announces he will not run for reelection amid an ongoing federal probe into his and his wife’s connections to the Jack Abramoff scandal.

February 2008: Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ) is indicted by a federal grand jury on thirty-five counts, mostly related to federal land exchanges. He had already said he would run for reelection this year, and is now awaiting trial.

April 2008: Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM), who has already announced that he would retire at the end of the year, is admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee for having called the U.S. attorney in New Mexico to ask about the status of a pending corruption investigation.

July 2008: Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) is indicted for allegedly making false statements on his financial disclosure reports regarding gift...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• ALSO BY JAMES CARVILLE
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Why the Republicans Are Going to Get Spanked Over and Over
• 2. TOD on GOP
• 3. Why the Republicans Got Spanked in 2008
• 4. Katrina: The Failures of Republican-Run Government
• 5. The Democrats
• 6. What Happened to Hillary
• 7. A Brief History of Republican Failures: The e-Edition
• 8. Res Judicata: We Argue About Things That Aren’t Arguable
• 9. Just the Facts, Ma’am
• 10. Spike the Ball: Truman-Carville-Bartels vs. Limbaugh-Gingrich-Bush
• 11. Youth Voters
• 12. Accountability, Not Reform
• 13. The Real Deal
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: Why I Moved to New Orleans
• The Story of a Friend Who Survived Hurricane Katrina
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author