Win by Failing

A constant theme of the Tea Party speakers, including the candidates Trump, Cruz, Carson, Huckabee, and Santorum is that government is both incompetent and evil, both foolish and knavish.   

The two charges are somewhat contradictory since a genuine fool would be incompetent at doing evil and therefore be harmless, but it can be done.  Obamacare implementation, the vetting of immigrants, widespread overstaying of visas, background check failures on guns, health care at the VA.   There are plenty of places to point to where government has failed.

Regulating agencies, especially the Environmental Protection Administration, are routinely criticized.   The EPA is referred to with a sneer.  Crowds boo at the name.

The Republican brand--though not necessarily practice--is the party of limited government.   It serves the political purpose to point out failures.   Hillary and Sanders, meanwhile, are selling the opposite idea: Obamacare is a success that can be improved, background checks work but can work better, etc.

"Government failed you"

Government failures prove the point of Republicans.   

So what happens politically when Republicans run the government and make decisions that turn out to be catastrophic?   They sort of win.   The current big news story is the failure of Governor Rick Snyder and his appointed City Manager for Flint, Michigan.  They thought to save money by changing the water source for Flint, then did not adjust the acidity of the water, causing lead to leach from water pipes into the water.  They ignored the problem, then denied it long enough that Flint children now have dangerously elevated lead in their blood.

Rick Snyder is doing good damage control, offering a full apology.   But he includes the the failure government at all levels, including federal, and the basic theme in conservative news sources is, "See!  Government is incompetent!"   Fox and Friends this morning put it this way: Flint had a  "Ritz Carlton" expensive system so to cut costs managers callously moved to something cheaper but dangerous", a one-two punch of foolishness and knavery.  The Fox and Friends team presented this as another example of incompetent government.

Here is a video of the governor.  I consider this a good apology:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2016/jan/20/we-failed-people-of-flint-over-contaminated-water-says-michigan-governor-video

Meanwhile, the EPA is now asserting that Michigan officials ignored and resisted their warnings, although the June 2015 warning by Miguel Del Toral, an EPA employee, were at first discounted by EPA officials who apologized to Michigan for his warnings, saying that Del Toral's warnings were from a "rogue employee."    The EPA is now reversing course, saying that they did in fact give warnings, saying they tried to "repeatedly and urgently communicate the steps the state needed to take to properly treat its water, those necessary actions were not taken as quickly as they should have been."  

Now everyone agrees the EPA should have been on the job, doing its job well and aggressively.   In hindsight.

Republican candidates on the stump criticize Obamacare problems.   They present these as evidence of the essential flaw of government, that it is foolish and knavish, not that some of the implementation problems are caused by political gridlock which forbids legislative drafting errors to be repaired.  The worse government works, the better, proving a political point.    

President Obama played the same game during the government shutdown two years ago, closing national parks and cemeteries, stopping people from visiting graves at Arlington, making the pain of the shutdown visible to citizens and media.   Several Republican candidates at the Tea Party Convention cited and condemned this.   Obama won that battle.  Government shutdowns were unpopular.

The battle lines have been drawn, especially since at this moment Hillary is positioning herself as a continuation of Obama.     Democrats are the party of government, ideally good government.   Republicans are the party that wants little or no government, and stopping the EPA is a sure thing applause line.

The problem, of course, is that everyone wants safe drinking water.