Sept. 23, 2007

By Harry T. Cook

The title of this essay, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary Tenth Edition, means “an idea that dominates one’s mind, esp. for a prolonged period: OBSESSION.” We brought it directly into English from a French expression coined in 1836.

I have no way of knowing how many who sit in Michigan’s Legislature speak or read French, but of its 148 members apportioned between the House (110) and the Senate (38), I would bet not many. Likewise, I do not know how many Franco-phones there may be in the U.S. Congress. I do know that all too many English speakers who end up in Lansing or Washington, D.C. are afflicted with an id ©e fixe that’s fixin’ to do in the basic social contract proper to participatory democracy.

Going along with the crowd is President George W. Bush, who prides himself on not speaking such allegedly elitist languages as French. He is openly antagonistic to a bill about to be sent to his desk that would maintain health insurance for millions of American children and provide it for millions more.

The trouble is that Mr. Bush has an id ©e fixe, and it is that government should never do anything for its citizens that some private company can do for profit. The President does not want to expand government help of any kind – not because the government (of the People, By the People and For the People, by the way) can’t do it and do it pretty efficiently as it does the Medicare and Social Security tasks.

Mr. Bush doesn’t want government to help children of the poor because of his id ©e fixe or, as Merriam-Webster puts it, his “OBSESSION.” “Smaller government” is the mantra of many so-called conservatives. Smaller than what? How about we get the government out of the military business and hire Halliburton to destroy the parts of Iraq still standing? Halliburton will get the contracts to rebuild it anyway.

How about we auction off Air Force One and let the Bushes and their pooh-bahs fly coach and shell out $5 each for bags of stale peanuts? How about we turn the White House into a paid-entry museum and let the Bushes find a hotel that takes the American Express card? Enough government, already.

In lockstep with the Bush devolution, Republican members of the Michigan Legislature (and some craven Democrats) have been putting the state whose interests they supposedly serve at grave financial risk because, as one Republican leader put it when asked about a modest increase in the state’s income tax – perhaps even at graduated rates according to size of income – “my members are committed to smaller government. We will not raise taxes.”

Due to the severe downturn in Michigan’s economy, the state is staring into the abyss of a billion-dollar-plus deficit. Only the threat of a gubernatorial veto of a bill that would simply extend current spending into the new fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, thus assuring a shutdown of government is beginning to move a few (recalcitrant Republicans and Democrats fearful of an anti-tax backlash) off the dime.

This is not to say that Michigan’s government can’t take some budget hits. (I’d start with the bloated and over-staffed Legislature for openers.) But to cut revenue sharing to municipalities and school districts already pared to the bone, or to reduce essential services to the economically marginalized would be unacceptable. Providing such critical aid is what government is for. Our Founding Parents and their honorable successors did not envision government as a terrible swift sword of fiscal penny-pinching. Government (of, by and for you know who)

is supposed to support its constituencies, not find ways to deny them the necessary resources to continue the Pursuit of Happiness.

The late Ronald Reagan can be given partial credit for the smaller-government id ©e fixe with his famous (or infamous): Get government off the backs of people rant we heard over and over again in the political era he dominated. The logical extension is the starve the beast tactic conservative zealots advocate to cripple government so even if its stewards tried to make it work, it could not perform its rightful functions.

Admittedly, government got pretty big back in the New Deal days, and it’s a good thing it did. The New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt saved this country when it was down and out. Sure, FDR overreached at times, and some of his alphabet-soup initiatives became corrupt mainly through incompetence in their ranks. But of all that, Social Security stands as the finest thing of its kind government has ever done on the domestic side.

The cure for the “smaller government” id ©e fixe will be its discrediting by the courageous actions of a new regime. For that we must wait until the Democratic majorities in the U.S. Congress, the Michigan House of Representatives and elsewhere foreswear their pusillanimity, and, further, until the voters of this country elect a President who isn’t obsessed with a dead-end ideology.

 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.