Saturday night and blogging...am I a loser, or what? Wandered by Skippy and found this link to a dKos diary on a town meeting that Rep Lamar Smith of Texas held the other day. Interesting reading.
Then go take a look at the Ignatius piece over in the Post. He talks about Newties latest theories on governance and where his party needs to go next. Reading that diary and then rereading Ignatius, I get a sense of something that seems pretty true on its face. Perhaps the politics of "values" has past, at least for this moment. People are always going to have some attachment trying to impose their values on others either because they can or they think they have some divine right to be busybodies...it's just human nature.
But all of a sudden we've hit this sort of weird peak. People have been getting bombarded for so long with the concept of performance; corporate performace (work harder!), personal performance (home/life/relationships), familial performance (soccer mom/dad), school (right one/SAT/Med/Law) and it goes on and on. We all go to work and have meet performance expectations, sometimes monthly or half-yearly or certainly yearly. But strangely no one does seem to apply these standards to politicians. Elections occur, and they don't get judged on anything but their ability to perform like trained seals at fundraisers: perform well, get enough cash-stuffed fish to run a campaign until you have so much electoral momentum cycle-to-cycle that it's not even a chore anymore, no one runs against you. Performance is only due for the corporate masters who toss the fish, and sometimes their orders are "do nothing".
They are then assigned to some amorphous mass of "officialdom/elected" and given money and perks and time and left to do what they will. Perhaps they're measured by pork per square mile of their district or state, or some other strange relativistic metric that exists in a hand-out they're given when they get their official induction into elected officialdom, I don't know.
Perhaps it's time to start to see if we can begin to push our Democratic Elected Bozos to play in the Performance Politics elimination tournament, because the Flying Spaghetti Monster knows, they're sure as hell not doing anything right now.
I think Performance Politics means being willing to be responsible for things that go wrong, and not being afraid to speak the truth to power. Lieberman now says that perhaps he "should have looked at Michael Brown more closely". Really Holy Joe, ya think? That 42 minute hearing between recess and lunch was quite strenuous. Maybe Performance Politics means that's the Holy Joe's swan song. He didn't perform in a critical role because it was too much work. Sorry Joe, You're Gone.
If Democrats buy into this and build it into a message, a coherent believable one, one that every Democratic elected official pledges to live by and live up to, and we share our visions for repairing the damage that the 1600 Crew hath wrought, perhaps there's hope. But you know, it's going to require courage, moral and political . It's going to take some time, many of the old guard aren't going to give up their fat salaries and perks and the power they've got just on the off-chance that this will work. And it will only work if the people who stand up to represent us believe that accountability is more important than re-election, that Performance means that every day is another day to move the country ahead, that government is not an ATM for the richest and least needy, but rather a source of insipiration for the world and a resource for the neediest among us.
Good Performance means that when the least among us can contribute to everyone else, then we are all stronger for it. I think that there are a room full of folks in Texas who might support that message no matter who's selling it. But it should be a Democrat, because I have a feeling that "performance" as Gingrich defines it, means that those who are able to perform the most with the least effort should be able to reap the biggest rewards, which sounds suspiciously like Bush-o-Nomics and Cronyism repackaged and rebranded with a big sign that says that most marketable word of all "FREE!" until you read the fine print and realize that you just sold your family into servitude, donated your real estate to CheneyBurton and are scheduled to have a kidney removed next week for donation to some Cornerite who's in incipient renal failure. Newt's Performance-based Ownership society: no matter how well you perform, they still own you.
posted by Jo Fish on 09.10.05 at 11:01 PM
Comments:
One more item to add to a good rant...
The federal disaster response plan hinges on transportation and communication, but National Guard officials in Louisiana and Mississippi had no contingency plan if they were disrupted; they had only one satellite phone for the entire Mississippi coast, because the others were in Iraq.
The Ignatious article was disappointing on a lot of levels. But this bothers me the most:
"When the Democrats focus all their criticism on the GOP-led federal government and ignore the appalling lapses of Democratic administrations in New Orleans and Louisiana, they lose credibility."
It is not at all clear to me that Mayor Nagin fell down on the job here. Ignatious is playing judge, jury and executioner on Nagin and Blanco. I understand that this is the working Republican talking point, but this casual assumption that it is so grounded in reality as to not even be worth discussing is just to facilitate GOP spin.
Half of the blogsophere has reported that despite national reports, themselves fed by Republican operatives, Nagin did in fact implement his emergency plan. Again despite early GOP lies we have graphic evidence that Blanco did in fact declare a state of emergency.
Nagin got his people to two evacuation points. He had exactly zero executive power to get transportation from outside the city and zero authority to simply bus people and dump them in other jurisdictions. That responsibility was FEMAs, and they dropped the ball. In the case of the Convention Center they were not even aware they were holding the ball prior to dropping it. From what I have seen Mayor Nagin did the best he could given the resources he had. Maybe others can make a case against him, but for Ignatious to simply conclude his performance was "appalling" is close to disgusting.
Blanco is a little different. All sides agree that she resisted turning over total control over the Louisiana Guard and local police to FEMA. Which suggests to me that she read Michael Brown and found him wanting.
I am sure the after action report will find plenty of room for improvement at all levels, but every specific super boneheaded decision I can recall was made by FEMA. (With one exception: the Mayor and Police Chief of Gretna are evil people indeed. Firing machine guns over the heads of people who just wanted to get out of NO is inexcusable).
Blame shifting is natural. For journalists just to accept it is laziness or worse.
"This isn't about ideology. It's about competence." --Michael Dukakis, shortly before going down in flames before George Bush the 1st.
In other words, that dog won't hunt.
posted by: bean on 09.12.05 at 12:33 PM [permalink]
Nope, Nagin bears chief responsibility for this fiasco. No one can forget the image of those hundreds of flooded school buses a mere 1.2 miles from the Super Dome. And forget the blather about Nagin not having the authority to evacuate. He wanted to--but to do it in relative luxury.
"Two days after the levees broke, Nagin told a New Orleans radio station that he wanted Greyhound Bus Lines to send their entire fleet rather than launch an evacuation in public school buses.
'One of the briefings we had they were talking about getting, you know, public school bus drivers to come down here and bus people out of here,' Nagin said.
'I'm like - you've got to be kidding me. This is a natural disaster. Get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans.' "
posted by: bean on 09.12.05 at 12:48 PM [permalink]
Well, since this was a NATIONAL disaster, and since the NATIONAL government controls more resources and has the juristiction, it was the NATIONAL leader's ultimate responsibilty. The buck for this fiasco rest with George Walker Bush... who showed damn little leadership when it was needed most. Scientists have been telling us for years to prepare for this. It is true that many people were in denial that it was going to be as bad as it turned out, it is the aftermath that concerns me. And though I can forgive Bush for not being in the White House situation room before the catastrophy occured, I will not forgive him for his poor response to the aftermath.
