February 3, 2006
Tim Kaine, Keep Talking
By Froma
Harrop
Tim Kaine, you did
well. I know that a lot of liberals wanted you to drop a 100-megaton
bomb on an ailing foe. But you understood what the Democratic
response to President Bush's State of the Union Address had to
be. You knew that you were talking to the nation at large, not
Democratic partisans yearning to unload.
That's why you, Tim
Kaine, were elected governor of Virginia, a generally Republican
state. Mark Warner, the Democratic governor before you, had the
same good sense, and that's why he could be the party's most promising
candidate for 2008. But this was not Warner's night. It was yours.
You spoke to America
not from a corrupted chamber of Washington, but from the Governor's
Mansion in Richmond. The blazing hearth and polished brass were
comforting touches. You look like a businessman. Indeed, you could
pass for a Bush administration official, except that you're competent.
And competence was
the theme of your response. Your two magic words were "service"
and "results." You said in a nice low-key way that Virginia
was focusing on "service, competent management and results."
The federal government should likewise "focus on service,"
and, "It's about measuring what we do in terms of real results
for real people." Toward the end, you talked about replacing
"a culture of partisanship and cronyism with an ethic of
service and results." We get the picture, and it's a picture
that Democrats should be painting.
The big rap against
the Bush administration is that it has delivered lousy service
and poor results -- all at maximum expense. Exactly what have
average Americans gotten out of these five years? They've "enjoyed"
small tax cuts that their grandchildren will pay for. The big
tax breaks have gone to the richest few, and the way things are
going, the working stiffs' grandchildren will be paying for those,
too. Under Republican rule, the money that many middle-class workers
sweat for is now being taxed at higher rates than investment income.
New Orleans spent
several days underwater before the federal government could find
its way into the city. In the preceding 48 hours, weather maps
had shown a hurricane of Category 3 or higher force hurtling toward
Louisiana. The Bush administration snoozed through all those colorful
pictures. A just-issued Government Accountability Office report
confirms the general impression that no one was in charge of the
federal reaction to the Katrina disaster. How the Department of
Homeland Security would respond to an out-of-the-blue terrorist
attack is too painful to contemplate.
Senior citizens and
their pharmacists, meanwhile, are hard pressed to get a human
being on the Medicare hotline to explain the devilishly complex
drug benefit. Exploding budget deficits are giving most everyone
the creeps. And even the staunchest supporters of the war in Iraq
are appalled at the utter lack of planning for it back in Washington.
Whether the issue
is budgeting, foreign policy or social programs, the Bush administration
has shown itself hot on ideology and lazy in follow-through. The
public is exhausted. So when a manager like Tim Kaine gets up
and offers quiet competence, the message is music.
Democratic partisans
itching for a brawl should note that Kaine, in his subtle way,
also did a masterful job of portraying liberal values. "Our
faith and values teach us that there is no higher calling than
serving others," he said in a direct reference to Coretta
Scott King -- but an indirect reference to the every-man-for-himself
culture of the Bush era.
"As Americans,
we do great things when we work together," he later said.
"Some of our leaders in Washington seem to have forgotten
that."
Kaine's most effectively
cutting remark followed his laundry list of bad Bush policy on
everything from the environment to energy to immigration: "Our
communities are left to deal with the challenges and consequences
of those failures without a reliable partner." Note how the
indictment is made more powerful by its understatement.
Unreliability, failure
and unpreparedness all add up to incompetence. Democrats must
appreciate that this charge against the status quo is the one
that most Americans already agree with.
Tim Kaine, keep talking
the way you're talking. You are making the Democratic Party sound
like it wants to win elections.
Copyright
2006 Creators Syndicate
