[Mb-civic] The Party of Performance - David Ignatius - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

The Party of Performance

By David Ignatius
Friday, September 9, 2005; Page A25

In the aftermath of Katrina, there's an opening for a different kind of 
politics in America. The new politics isn't about values; it isn't about 
settling scores. It's about performance. It's about putting a wounded, 
shaken country back on its feet, much as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did 
in his famous First Hundred Days.

One politician who is clearly articulating that vision right now is the 
recovering right-wing firebrand, former House speaker Newt Gingrich. 
I've always had a soft spot for Gingrich, despite his sometimes nasty 
partisanship during the 1990s, because he is that rare political figure 
who actually does think "outside the box" about how to solve problems. 
And he's doing that now.

The immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has looked like politics as 
usual. The Democrats are in a paroxysm of righteous indignation -- much 
of it justified but in the long run counterproductive. When Senate 
Minority Leader Harry Reid proposes that the Senate investigate whether 
President's Bush's vacation contributed to the disaster, the public 
response is likely to be: Give me a break! When the Democrats focus all 
their criticism on the GOP-led federal government and ignore the 
appalling lapses of Democratic administrations in New Orleans and 
Louisiana, they lose credibility.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, remains in its hunkered-down 
defensive crouch, with White House spokesman Scott McClellan treating 
any demand for accountability as a partisan "blame game." It's 
outrageous to read that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has 
been telling members of Congress that media reports are overstating the 
problems for storm survivors -- this from a man who was denying on 
National Public Radio last Thursday that there was any crisis at the New 
Orleans convention center at the very hour reporters were finding dead 
bodies and abandoned, starving people there. If the administration 
maintains that tone, it will self-destruct.

Now listen to what Gingrich has to say about "changing the playbook" 
after Katrina. His comments are drawn from two memos he has circulated 
to Republican leaders since the storm hit and from a conversation we had 
this week exploring some of his ideas.

Gingrich argues that the values debate that has divided America so 
sharply during the past decade is over. There's a broad consensus about 
most issues, and anyway people realize that the country's big problems 
aren't about morality but performance. "We're not in a values fight now 
but over whether the system is working," Gingrich told me. "The issue is 
delivery." And that's true at every level -- city, state and federal.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/08/AR2005090801557.html
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