Democratic Party Rehabilitation, Part 2

As Vice President, Al Gore presided over the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. The idea was to identify areas of government waste. The idea was to reduce the cost of government by eliminating duplicate efforts, unnecessary regulations and waste. Anyone who has ever dealt with government knows that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit here.

Take pork-barrel projects, add in no-bid contracts and shake with a dash of fraud and it adds up to a big ole glass of outrage. Right now, Democrats have an unprecedented opportunity to become the party of fiscal responsibility.

Let's get this straight. I'm not advocating becoming a Grover Norquist style "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub" free for all. I'm just talking about making sure that the money that is spent is spent fairly. This means no fraud, no sweetheart deals and most of all, no pork.

Here's an example from P.J. O'Rourke in this month's Atlantic:

"It seems that the House Transportation and Infrastructure chairman, Don Young (R-Big Petroleum), would get his state $200 million for a mile-long bridge linking Ketchikan (pop. 7,845) with its airport (six flights a day). A five-minute ferry ride would be avoided."

One of the reasons why John McCain is popular across both parties is his passion for attacking pork-barrel spending, regardless of its source. Needless to say, he hasn't had a lot of support in congress. With Republicans at the levers of every branch of government, guess where all of the money goes.

As a party, we need to stand in uniform opposition to no-bid contracts (especially Halliburton) and revolving-door sweetheart deals.

But most importantly, we need to draw the line on Pork on both sides, whether it is $450,000 for the Johnny Appleseed museum or the same amount for an Alaska statehood celebration. If they want to drill in ANWR, their birthday party is on their own nickel.

We need to make sure that neither the Tom Delay extermination museum nor the Robert Byrd bridge over an area without any water ever see the light of day. (Both of these are, as far as I know, made up.)

Now about the Republican smaller government part. These people haven't suddenly traded in the elephant diet for svelte libertarianism. The real message is that they want to reduce the cost and strength of regulation and throw the savings to the whores in the defense industry.

One of the major tenets of liberalism is the need to protect the commons, which I think of as the environment, public safety and the safety of the planet. I don't think that any reasonable person believes that we shouldn't make more of an effort to protect all three. And no, I don't think that reasonable people believe that we should squander resources because the apocolypse is near.

When you consider the human and monetary cost of prisons and wars, protecting public safety and peace are a good investment.

It's also a good investment to protect the planet. The cost of preventing pollution is far less than the cost of cleanup. The cost of cleanup is less than the human cost of the slow poisoning by toxic waste. The American people know this. From a Yale survey on attitudes about the environment:

And the public wants action as well as talk. Eighty-four percent believe the United States should enact stricter emissions and pollution standards for business and industry. This reflects substantial majorities of Democrats (92%), Independent (90%) and Republicans (68%).

So there you have it. The Democrats, the party of fiscal responsibility.