AMERICANS are not happy with their government right now, and their votes in tomorrow's midterm elections will likely reflect that fact. If you find yourself among those disgruntled masses and you've had enough of everything from botched foreign policy to out-of-control federal spending to scandals that shock the conscience, then I have one simple suggestion as you head to the polls tomorrow: Vote Democrat. On issue after issue, the Republican Party has thoroughly demonstrated its inability to govern this country competently, and tomorrow the voters can finally strip them of their power before they can do any more damage.
Where else can one start but the quagmire that is Iraq? The claims that we would be greeted as liberators belie the extent of the Bush administration's sheer negligence in planning this war. Colossal errors of judgment from sending too few troops to disbanding the Iraqi army have continually marred progress. The Bush administration has so badly mismanaged the reconstruction of Iraqi infrastructure that creating a stable -- much less democratic -- state barely looks possible. And as the country spirals towards civil war, American troops continue to be caught in the crossfire. Through it all, Republicans in Congress have stuck by their president blindly, accusing any who questioned their policies of cutting and running. America doesn't need a body of yes-men; it needs a Congress that will actually pressure Bush to rethink the strategy of his disastrous foreign policy. Americans can get that by electing Democrats.
Were such foreign escapades not enough to demonstrate Republican incompetence, the party's inability to mitigate or manage the devastation of Hurricane Katrina serves as yet another example. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, they folded the Federal Emergency Management Agency into the behemoth Department of Homeland Security, tangling it in a bureaucratic web that left the organization paralyzed when the storm hit. Bush appointed as FEMA's head Michael Brown, a campaign supporter with no substantive disaster response experience, and then famously praised him as "doing a heck of a job" even as residents of ravaged New Orleans died in the streets. Other levels of government may have shared in the responsibility for the Katrina disaster, but at the federal level the response was appalling, and Republicans showed just how feeble all their promises of being the party that could protect the homeland really are.
If incompetence weren't bad enough, the Republicans have supplemented it with healthy doses of fiscal recklessness. Since sweeping to power in 1994 -- partially on promises of trimming the size of government -- Republicans have proven themselves to be anything but fiscally conservative, engineering the fastest growth in government spending since the days of Lyndon Johnson. When Bush bragged earlier this year that his tax cuts were powering the economy and bringing down the federal budget deficit (which still stands at almost $300 billion), conservative commentators went berserk. For example, Veronique de Rugy, a budget analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, observed, "There is no fiscal discipline at all going on. It's utterly shocking for me to hear an administration that claims to be conservative focus exclusively on the deficit, because the deficit is a pretty meaningless measure of the size of government." Beyond all this, perhaps the clearest signal that the Republicans' time is up is what they've done to keep their power. From the beginning, Republican strategists openly admitted that their extraordinary intervention in the case of Terry Schiavo was an attempt to curry favor with conservative Christians ahead of upcoming Supreme Court nomination battles and the midterm elections. More recently, accusations have surfaced that the House Republican leadership knew about Mark Foley's exploits for years without intervening. They deny the allegations, of course, but their story doesn't quite jibe, and it gives an idea of just how desperate they've become to hold onto their power.
Americans have had enough. The failure of the Republican Party to live up not only to their own ideals but also to baseline standards of competence and decency has rendered it truly unfit for leadership. But they won't go anywhere without someone to replace them, and that's why voting for Democratic candidates is so crucial in this election. The Democrats may be uninspiring at best, but give them a chance to prove themselves and the result will be sound public policy. For now, the Republicans have blown their shot, and it's time to show them the door.
A.J. Kornblith's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He also serves as the communications coordinator for the University Democrats, and he can be reached at akornblith@cavalierdaily.com.
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