Crossposted from Moral Questions Weblog.

Yesterday Paul Krugman gave perhaps the best commentary I’ve read so far on why conservatives are incapable of governing:

And aside from the effect on the deficit – we’re about to see the spectacle of tax cuts in the face of both a war and a huge reconstruction effort – this raises another question: how can discretionary government spending take place on that scale without creating equally large-scale corruption.

It’s possible to spend large sums honestly, as Franklin D. Roosevelt demonstrated in the 1930’s. F.D.R. presided over a huge expansion of federal spending, including a lot of discretionary spending by the Works Progress Administration. Yet the image of public relief, widely regarded as corrupt before the New Deal, actually improved markedly.

    How did that happen? The answer is that the New Deal made almost a fetish out of policing its own programs against potential corruption. In particular, F.D.R. created a powerful “division of progress investigation” to look into complaints of malfeasance in the W.P.A. That division proved so effective that a later Congressional investigation couldn’t find a single serious irregularity it had missed.

Why was FDR so determined to root out corruption?  Was he just an overly consciencious guy?  Probably not much more than most other pols.  Actually, politics required it.

This commitment to honest government wasn’t a sign of Roosevelt’s personal virtue; it reflected a political imperative. F.D.R.’s mission in office was to show that government activism works. To maintain that mission’s credibility, he needed to keep his administration’s record clean.

So can we expect the same from the current White House occupant?

But George W. Bush isn’t F.D.R. Indeed, in crucial respects he’s the anti-F.D.R.

    President Bush subscribes to a political philosophy that opposes government activism – that’s why he has tried to downsize and privatize programs wherever he can. (He still hopes to privatize Social Security, F.D.R.’s biggest legacy.) So even his policy failures don’t bother his strongest supporters: many conservatives view the inept response to Katrina as a vindication of their lack of faith in government, rather than as a reason to reconsider their faith in Mr. Bush.

    And to date the Bush administration, which has no stake in showing that good government is possible, has been averse to investigating itself. On the contrary, it has consistently stonewalled corruption investigations and punished its own investigators if they try to do their jobs.

Krugman goes on, not even mentioning the fact that Karl Rove of all people is heading up the recovery operation–which for the life of me I can’t understand why it becoming major area of criticism for democrats and supposedly now less deferential media.  It should go down as the biggest scandal of the entire Katrina debacle.

Anyway, the point is, Democrats have an ideology that is called into question if government isn’t working.  For Republicans, its just the opposite.  In the past, conservative presidents talked the game, but on a certain level didn’t fully believe all the tripe.  

Somehow, the guys involved in this one just never get that.  They are so fanatical in their commitment to their ideology that they are almost predisposed to undermine their policy efforts at every turn.

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