The first thing to understand about Jeb Hensarling, head of the
RSC, R-TX 5th district, is that he is going to operate as a sleeper for a long while. This is going to allow him to figure out some things, and sleep off others. For instance, he'll be able to figure out how to pay for an undefined committment to Iraq without raising taxes (A: Economic Growth! Like in the 80s!). He'll be able to evade questions about his
weirdly specific interest in defending online poker sites. And he'll be able to work out his relationship with Green Mountain Energy, a
greenwashing business (selling incinerator-generated electricity as wind-and-solar, among other crimes)
that savaged McCain in 2000.
Unless Green Mountain goes Enron, or leaks dioxin into the East Texas atmosphere, Jeb, former VP, is safe. Even a Keating-Fiver can run for president! (DIGRESSIVE, BUT IMPORTANT: Now, whether 'Merkins will
trust said Keating-Fiver with their money is another story. And the point there is not whether anyone remembers the old transgression, but whether the transgressor can demonstrate new competence. For McCain,
character is the real issue: swayed by his own vanity, he leaned on a regulator on Keating's behalf. Swayed by vanity, he divorced his crippled wife, married a beer-distributionship heiress, picked Palin, dissed Letterman. He's John McCain, (R)-The Media. Vanity is the source of McCain's petulance toward Obama, as if he's mystified that anyone could mistake his hammy quips and tin smile for charisma. It's an illusion: a corpse running in a war-hero's suit. As the authors of Ecclesiastes tell us,
hevel hevolim, vehakol hevel, Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. END.)
But what I see in Hensarling -- though at this early date, who really can evaluate his character with certainty? -- is not McCainiac. McCain has always been obsessed with his own mythopoesis: thus the image of his body as a reliquary of torture, the arms not lifting, the hair prematurely white, the teeth mangled, the knees crushed. Hensarling, again, at this stage, is a loyal jihadi; one who believes in his body as the vessel for a cause. Witness the selflessness of his
"Why I opposed the bailout." This is career-making writing: an even cadence, an appeal to reason. If he were a Back Bay Democrat instead of a SE Dallas Republican, he would need change but one word, probably "subsidize" for "socialize":
"In my heart and in my mind, I believe that this plan was fraught with unintended consequences, would force generations of taxpayers to pick up the tab for Wall Street losses and could permanently and fundamentally change the role of government in the American free enterprise system. [...] Once the government socializes losses, it will soon socialize profits. If we lose our ability to fail, we will soon lose our ability to succeed. If we bail out risky behavior, we will soon see even riskier behavior."
Now, when the bailout passed, he was capable of escaping, because it's the ideas (or, cynically, the soundbites) that are important, not Jeb of the Texas Fifth, and he can fade into the background with a hiss about the
"slippery slope to socialism."The past may hold other road work for his future. Back in 2005, Jeb was on the forefront of
financial deregulation; broadly speaking, deregulation is one of the causes of our current situation, n'est-ce pas?. But in effect -- and fact-checkers, please check -- his 2005 bill was written to provide to credit unions, S&Ls and small community banks the same benefits that financial services giants got in the 2004 version of the bill. If we were in the business of spinning for this guy, it would be easy to say that in both these cases, Jeb was on the side of Main Street against Wall Street, was ensuring a level playing field, was for the David-banks against the Goliath-banks, etc.
Again, ideas are paramount, and the RSCers have been busy for a while. In May they could tell their party was going to reap the whirlwind, and called for a
restatement of principles. The best part of this little manifesto is the sense of self-awareness buried in there, as if he's saying to his peers: "Fine, go home and run against 'Washington,' just remember you're It." Bring on the self-flagellation:
"And [Americans'] anger boils over as they watch politicians in Washington point fingers at each other, launch politically motivated investigations, waste money on wasteful pork barrel spending, and reward special interests over the national interest — while consistently failing to provide solutions to the real problems that they face each day[...]The time has come to move beyond empty political rhetoric and to revitalize our contract with the American people."
So, Q: Is Hensarling too devout to be successful? That is, when his balanced budget noumenon hits the defense appropriations phenomenon, which one yields? Phil Gramm, Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp all lost. (A: I don't think so. The man has admitted that reforming the budget process is unsexy. I think he defines success differently than other politicians.)
Q: Is he then unlikely to win hearts and minds even if he wins his ideological turf-war?
Q: Is any of this stuff even
plausible in the face of a trillion-dollar deficit and endless war?
Q: And by the time BHO is done remaking government, isn't the Phil-Gramm-budget-hawk-model going to look awfully vestigial?
Q: By the time we've set up a national Infrastructure Investment Bank (whereby gov't subsidies stimulate the production of
physical objects that we sell to
other people in the World War on Carbon Emissions), isn't the notion of tax-cuts-as-stimulus going to look like what it is, i.e., endlessly dosing a dead heart with atropine?
These are my concerns, Jeb. What I'm hearing on the radio telescope, it's either a faint persistent signal, or just static...
--
ds
The gift and the curse of Sarah Palin is in full effect as Republican governors retreat to Nixon's turf for their winter meetings. The gift is the unprecendented media attention given, by spillover, to dudes like Tim Pawlenty. 
