[NYTr] The Dark Arts and the Bush Dynasty

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Counterpunch - Nov 20, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/farago11202007.html

The Dark Arts and the Bush Dynasty

A Visit to the Hogwarts Academy for Ideologically Pure Republicans

By ALAN FARAGO

The Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for ideologically pure
Republicans is open for a new entering class. The task before teachers
and students is dire. The key has been lost to untangle what they mean.
Indeed it is mysterious as the vanishing bees. Their man in the White
House has made a mess of Republican values: fiscal conservatism,
limited government, dominance of laissez faire, free market orthodoxies.

If you listen closely, you can hear the inner sanctums reverberate with
recriminations. Karl Rove, phoning in to Fox News his rear-guard
attacks on Hillary, now spends equal time in the faculty club of
Hogwarts, explaining to aggrieved teachers the loss and alienation of
conservatives from fortress Republican.

To the extent that current national Republican office holders are
viewed favorably, it is only when they retreat from the elixir now gone
stale: the patriarchal "I know better than you" that created a top /
down management structure in government-and formed in the grim
aftermath of a magically stolen presidential election, the promise of a
permanent Republican majority in Congress and the White House.

It must be a frustration for Jeb down in Miami, where weather is
particularly fine, that the national stage is so obscured by a magical
fog of their own making.

The Rovian/Norquist dark arts worked far better in Tallahassee than
nationally. If it were up to Jeb, the Hogwarts academy for
ideologically pure Republicans would relocate to Coral Gables where the
mainstream media has been tamed to a docile cat and no comparable feats
of wizardry have emerged from Democrats in a very, very long time.

Florida, with its fragmented media markets and vast homeland of
segregated diaspora, was an easy place to craft messages of a calm and
beneficent leader, Jeb!, to do what's best for Florida-whether it was
handing out bags of ice after hurricanes, or, clearing regulatory
thickets for his key constituency-Florida's developers-to overbuild the
state to the bursting point.

(How Florida became the epicenter of the housing bust and world-wide
credit crisis enfolding the nation's largest financial institutions is
a dark art revealed at eyeonmiami.blogspot.com archives: under 'housing
crash'.)

Jeb was a micromanager in the Governor's Tower, huddled over his
computer at all hours day and night. His lieutenants were required to
toe the line with unswerving obedience that forms the operating
principle of the W. White House. Under such terms of enrollment at
Hogwart's School of ideologically pure Republicans, a loyal political
elite insulated from criticism took control of federal bureaucracies
through political appointments, ensuring that all would march off the
cliff at the same time with respect to the war, the environment,
education, and health care.

What a frustration it must be to the Rove/Norquist faculty at Hogwarts
that W. made such a hash of opportunity. Not like the other Bush, the
one from Florida-who organized campaign contributions from the Growth
Machine straight as lines of cocaine on a glass table-and could have
done so much better if only he had been elected president.

It will be at least another four years until the mid-term elections
following the election, next fall, of a Democratic president. Until
then, the dark arts will have to be practiced as a matter of
re-educating and recruiting disciples.

It will take someone new, to help. Someone like Marco Rubio, Miami
Republican and House Speaker.

In Florida, the Hogwart's ire has turned on Jeb's successor, Republican
Governor Charlie Crist.

Crist, a charismati Republican, was elected with the full support of
the faithful. He moved quickly, with an ever-ready smile, away from
Jeb's legacy.

Jeb governed as a divider, as a leader who knew better than voters how
beating the beast of government (or in Norquist's words, shrinking it
to the size it could be drowned in a bathtub) required skill and
cunning.

Charlie Crist set out instantly to reach across the bitterness that Jeb
was unafraid to summon. He made friends with Sierra Club. In other
words, Crist as apostate is undoing much of the ideological purity Jeb
sought to instill in two terms as governor.

Early in his administration, Crist made a clear break with past state
energy policy when he signaled, without equivocation, that he would
align Florida's energy future along the road paved by a Bush family
nemesis, California Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger.

Crist was careful. He made a deliberate statement to insiders by
retaining key Bush political allies in environmental agencies, like
Fish and Wildlife Commission chairman Rodney Barreto-a land speculator,
developer and a powerful lobbyist/enforcer in Florida's largest county
and Jeb's hometown, Miami-Dade. Crist also signaled his intent by
making sure that appointments to the state's water management district
boards would allow big agricultural and development interests to
maintain numerical majorities.

Crist moved deliberately and with enthusiasm because of genuine alarm
and concern about the costs of global warming to Floridians and
economic growth.

Antipathy to global warming is, of course, a signal theme of the
Republican Hogwarts and one which Jeb used, also, to herd big campaign
donors from the Growth Machine and the fossil fuel lobby into the
Rovian/Norquist corral.

A few weeks ago, while Crist was on a trade mission to Brazil, the dark
arts rebounded in Tallahassee.

Jeb acolyte, Speaker Marco Rubio organized a counter-demonstration in
the state capital: a forum to promote industry-friendly opposition to
Crist with a keynote speaker who had earned credentials as an early
advocate for likely positive economic impacts from higher temperatures.

Yesterday, the dark arts rebounded, again. Rubio filed a lawsuit
against Crist, challenging a deal made by the governor to expand tribal
gambling operations of the Seminoles, in exchange for $100 million-a
revenue source meant to help fill the government budget shortfalls in
Florida, now totaling more than $2 billion, because of crashing real
estate markets.

Rubio says Crist is usurping the power of the legislature, but there is
more to it.

In the Miami Herald, "Crist-Rubio feud grows by the day", Jim King, a
Jacksonville Republican senator who led his chamber in 2003-04 said,
"Jeb and Marco are in lots of contact, and Jeb long ago had nearly
anointed him as potential governor, King said, referring to a ceremony
in which Bush gave Rubio a samurai sword."

The Herald notes, "Crist is pragmatically moving to the left-while
Rubio shuffles to the ideological right."

And so it goes, as Jeb sharpens his attack against a moderate
Republican, educating the students, and plots the day when a
strong-willed father figure with Bush as a last name will be summoned
to rescue a nation whose confidence has been sapped by fear and a
massive reversal of fortune.

That the Bush dynasty, consiglieres and other apostles of laissez faire
free market orthodoxy were largely responsible for the chasm into which
American democracy has fallen is a point to be erased from memory, if
the Republican Hogwarts have anything to do with it.


[Alan Farago of Coral Gables, who writes about the environment and the
politics of South Florida, can be reached at alanfarago at yahoo.com.]