http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7206305/The great Republican role-reversal gambit-No spending opportunity left behind
With his campaign to re-make Social Security, President Bush is forcing Democrats to defend their own turn, and perhaps distracting them from more urgent fiscal problems.
ANALYSIS
By Howard Fineman MSNBC contributor
Updated: 1:11 p.m. ET March 16, 2005WASHINGTON - Here’s a quick quiz on political labels for you junkies out there. Of the two major political parties, which one is spending money like water, creating new welfare entitlements, rapidly expanding the power of the federal government and launching idealistic wars of liberation around the globe?
For 60 years – from the dawn of the New Deal in 1933 to the advent of Hillary Healthcare in 1993 – the answer was the Democratic Party. But 1993 also was the year George W. Bush launched his national career (by running for governor of Texas). Now, 12 years later, we see the result: the Republicans are the party of deficit spending, entitlement expansion, Washington aggrandizement and Wilsonian crusades. They are presiding over the most vigorous enlargement of federal power and military involvement abroad since Lyndon Johnson unfurled the Great Society and plunged headlong into Vietnam.
Maybe there’s a big-government growth hormone in the artesian wells of Texas. Or maybe, as the writer Flannery O’Connor said, everything that rises must converge: meaning that every American governing party ultimately operates the same way to amplify its own political reach.
The corollary is that every party in eclipse operates the same way, too: crying havoc about deficits, threatening to shove sticks into the spinning spokes of government, waving the flag of states rights and attacking the ethics of leaders on the other side. That’s what Newt Gingrich’s GOP did when Bill Clinton was in power – and that is what Democrats are doing now. It didn’t really work for the GOP in the ‘90s, and I’m not sure it is going to work for the Democrats now because, to oversimplify only slightly, the GOP may not be conservatives anymore, but Democrats have lost their identity altogether.
<snip>
But step back for a minute and consider the breathtaking scope of what Bush and his ruling party have wrought. The Leave No Child Behind Act is a bold assertion of federal power in what had (except for racial matters) been one of the last domains of local control, elementary and secondary education. The president’s recently enacted “tort reform,” a pet item of his for years, in essence preempts state courts from acting on many civil law suits, forcing them to be tried in federal courts. His energy proposals, yet to be enacted, do essentially the same thing, preempting the authority of state utility commissions. The Patriot Act, which Bush wants to expand, drains away much of the independent power of local and state police in the name of national coordination.