[Mb-civic] The Great RevulsionBy PAUL KRUGMAN

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 21, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Great Revulsion
By PAUL KRUGMAN

"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.