The Competence Question

Some people are to-the-death Democrats who will vote for any Democratic candidate from Marion Barry to Ted Kennedy. Others are die-hard Republicans who have no problem pulling the lever for someone like Mark Foley or Tom DeLay just because they’re Republican. This naïve and blind faith is almost quaint to me. These otherwise rational people would agree that unquestioning devotion to just about anything would be dangerous in any other fashion, but not politics or ideology.

To the rest of us, including many who don’t follow public affairs as passionately as I do, politics comes down to a matter of competence mixed with your personal and cultural mores and ethics. For me, it can come down to intelligence. Who’s the smarter candidate? Which empirical, not ideological, argument makes the most sense? I can’t work for anyone dumber than me, so I wouldn’t want to vote for someone who’s dumber either.

But as we approach the 2006 elections, competence is up for the public to decide. Republicans have been in charge for six years – long enough to develop a track record. And for me, the past six years have been marked by a steady decline in competence and a startling rise in mismanagement, buck passing and decisions that have true nonpartisans wondering when the real conservatives left the Republican Party.

If you take a pure, non-partisan, competence-only look at what the Republicans have presided over during the last six years, you find a downward spiral of incompetence and incomplete efforts that leave you wondering who’s steering the ship. Of course, Iraq has deteriorated into a civil war that could have been easily prevented with some forward thinking and the equivalent of a Marshall Plan. Every week another book comes out or military leader comes forward that emphasizes the administration’s incompetence. This is especially painful for me because people are dying and I strongly supported the decision to go to war because a democratic Iraq would be the best anti-fundamentalist medicine you could have. With the exception of Saddam Hussein’s capture and trial, we have the opposite – an anarchic Iraq that could drag additional countries into a larger conflict. This is completely preventable incompetence of the highest order, and Donald Rumsfeld, the man in charge of this, is still employed.

Afghanistan is not much better. Last week’s Newsweek story seriously depressed me. The advice they give to “stay the course” in these conflicts again belies incompetence – look at where this course has brought us! If anything, now is the chance to change and possibly get things right! If the Republicans want to make the war on terror the centerpiece of their campaign, then the voters need to assess how competently they have waged this war.

I’ll weigh in with thoughts on various other issues over the next few weeks, but Republicans everywhere should be assessing the competence of their leaders. Are you satisfied with the way the leaders have dealt with other critical issues, like Mark Foley, finding new sources of energy so we don’t help rogue states like Venezuela and Iran by buying their oil? When you look at conservative canards like smaller government, less spending and limits on executive power, has the party served you well? Is this the best the Party can do? Does their track record earn them another two years in power? And finally, if they were not Republicans, how would they vote?