The Great Revulsion
By Paul Krugman
04/21/06 "New
York Times" -- -- "I have a vision — maybe just a
hope — of a great revulsion: a moment in which the American
people look at what is happening, realize how their good will
and patriotism have been abused, and put a stop to this drive to
destroy much of what is best in our country."
I wrote those words three years ago in the introduction to my
column collection, "The Great Unraveling." It seemed a remote
prospect at the time: Baghdad had just fallen to U.S. troops,
and President Bush had a 70 percent approval rating.
Now the great revulsion has arrived. The latest Fox News poll
puts Mr. Bush's approval at only 33 percent. According to the
polling firm Survey USA, there are only four states in which
significantly more people approve of Mr. Bush's performance than
disapprove: Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska. If we define red
states as states where the public supports Mr. Bush, Red America
now has a smaller population than New York City.
The proximate causes of Mr. Bush's plunge in the polls are
familiar: the heck of a job he did responding to Katrina, the
prescription drug debacle and, above all, the quagmire in Iraq.
But focusing too much on these proximate causes makes Mr. Bush's
political fall from grace seem like an accident, or the result
of specific missteps. That gets things backward. In fact, Mr.
Bush's temporarily sky-high approval ratings were the
aberration; the public never supported his real policy agenda.
Remember, in 2000 Mr. Bush got within hanging-chad and
felon-purge distance of the White House only by pretending to be
a moderate. In 2004 he ran on fear and smear, plus the pretense
that victory in Iraq was just around the corner. (I've always
thought that the turning point of the 2004 campaign was the
September 2004 visit of the Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, a
figurehead appointed by the Bush administration who rewarded his
sponsors by presenting a falsely optimistic picture of the
situation in Iraq.)
The real test of the conservative agenda came after the 2004
election, when Mr. Bush tried to sell the partial privatization
of Social Security.
Social Security was for economic conservatives what Iraq was for
the neocons, a soft target that they thought would pave the way
for bigger conquests. And there couldn't have been a more
favorable moment for privatization than the winter of 2004-2005:
Mr. Bush loved to assert that he had a "mandate" from the
election; Republicans held solid, disciplined majorities in both
houses of Congress; and many prominent political pundits were in
favor of private accounts.
Yet Mr. Bush's drive on Social Security ran into a solid wall of
public opposition, and collapsed within a few months. And if
Social Security couldn't be partly privatized under those
conditions, the conservative dream of dismantling the welfare
state is nothing but a fantasy.
So what's left of the conservative agenda? Not much.
That's not a prediction for the midterm elections. The Democrats
will almost surely make gains, but the electoral system is
rigged against them. The fewer than eight million residents of
what's left of Red America are represented by eight U.S.
senators; the more than eight million residents of New York City
have to share two senators with the rest of New York State.
Meanwhile, a combination of accident and design has left likely
Democratic voters bunched together — I'm tempted to say
ghettoized — in a minority of Congressional districts, while
likely Republican voters are more widely spread out. As a
result, Democrats would need a landslide in the popular vote —
something like an advantage of 8 to 10 percentage points over
Republicans — to take control of the House of Representatives.
That's a real possibility, given the current polls, but by no
means a certainty.
And there is also, of course, the real prospect that Mr. Bush
will change the subject by bombing Iran.
Still, in the long run it may not matter that much. If the
Democrats do gain control of either house of Congress, and with
it the ability to issue subpoenas, a succession of scandals will
be revealed in the final years of the Bush administration. But
even if the Republicans hang on to their ability to stonewall,
it's hard to see how they can resurrect their agenda.
In retrospect, then, the 2004 election looks like the high-water
mark of a conservative tide that is now receding.
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