Is the G.O.P. going the way of L.B.J.?

[rodeodance]

This is an interesting article---and i think there is some truth here---'a conservatives contempt of its actual functioning." My take is that they put so much effort into changing policies that they had no time to actually govern---if by governing -that means actually caring for the people.


........Mr. Rove married a liberal’s faith in the potential of government to a conservative’s contempt for its actual functioning. This was the contradiction at the heart of “compassionate conservatism,” and it helps explain the tension between the president’s fine words about, say, helping those hurt by Hurricane Katrina, and his actions............

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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A ‘Great Society’ Conservative
By JOSHUA GREEN
Is the G.O.P. going the way of L.B.J.?
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/opinion/14green.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print

August 14, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
A ‘Great Society’ Conservative
By JOSHUA GREEN

Washington

THERE is a paradox at the heart of Karl Rove’s tenure in the White House, and it is a key to understanding why he failed to remake American politics, despite ambitious plans to do so. In seeking to establish a lasting conservative majority, Mr. Rove violated one of the central tenets of modern conservative ideology: the idea that government cannot effectively refashion American society.

For decades, conservatives have inveighed against what they consider to be the hubris of liberals — the belief that regulations, laws and bureaucrats can contend with deep cultural forces. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York senator and a chastened veteran of the Great Society, liked to warn about government overreach by citing Rossi’s Law, so named for the sociologist Peter Rossi, who had declared that “the expected value for any measured effect of a social program is zero.”

Conservatives believe the Great Society programs that liberals pushed in the 1960s demonstrated that government engineering doesn’t work. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty failed, this critique goes, because liberals simply didn’t understand the limits of government’s power to transform culture.

Whether or not one accepts Rossi’s Law, there can be little dispute that Mr. Rove pursued his vision of a new political order with the activist zeal of a 1960s Great Society liberal. From the outset of the Bush administration, Mr. Rove aimed to create a “permanent majority” for Republicans, just as Franklin Roosevelt did for Democrats in the 1930s, and as William McKinley and his campaign manager Mark Hanna — Mr. Rove’s hero — did for Republicans in the 1890s.

[madrchsod]

1. government did change society

what karl did`t understand that the majority of americans are very happy they those governmental programs his minority would love to take away. factors well beyond his control woke the people of this country up and that is why karl will be remembered as the man who lost the war