As the spread of Ebola has captivated the nation, a number of conservatives and elected Republicans have begun to take aim at President Obama for his handling of the issue — using it as part of a broader critique of the failure of his administration.
But in targeting Obama, they risk surrendering philosophical ground to liberals when it comes to the public conception of government.
“Barack Obama came into office promising competent [government], but his tenure has been anything but competent” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a likely 2016 presidential contender, wrote on Twitter. “The latest nightmare caused by the incompetence of Barack Obama is his detached response to the Ebola crisis.”
In a series of tweets, Jindal went on to write that, “Barack Obama is committing malpractice on his administration’s response to the Ebola crisis” and that Obama “seems to be more focused on getting through the 24-hour news cycle than actually solving the Ebola problem.”
Fox’s Bill O’Reilly slammed the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Thomas Frieden, as well as Obama. The host called for a travel ban from Ebola-affected countries and raised concerns about the “porous” southern border.
“That’s what happens when leadership is weak,” O’Reilly fumed. “Dr. Frieden, out of there. He botched it. Period. President Obama, stop the fundraising, pay attention to your country.”
A number of Republican members of Congress have also joined the chorus, with several calling for the appointment of an Ebola czar to coordinate the response.
Though there are fair criticisms of the CDC’s handling of Ebola, by giving into the temptation to point fingers at Obama, Republicans run the risk of reinforcing the idea that any crisis or perceived crisis can be handled if only there were a better person in charge. And this could cut against many of the arguments that conservatives usually make about the inherent problems with federal bureaucracies.
Reacting to criticism of the handling of Ebola, Yuval Levin noted in a post over at National Review, “The attitude is premised on the bizarre assumption that large institutions are hyper-competent by default, so that when they fail we should seek for nefarious causes. Not only liberals (who are at least pretty consistent about making this ridiculous mistake) but also some conservatives who should know better respond with a mix of outrage and disgust to failures of government to contend effortlessly with daunting emergencies. But do we really expect (or even want) our government to have the power and ability to smooth all of life’s edges and be ready in an instant to address the consequences of, say, a major hurricane or massive oil spill or deadly disease outbreak? What do we think that government would be doing with that power the rest of the time?”
One of the fundamental failures of Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign was that he didn’t make a coherent, overarching, philosophical argument against big government. The impression Romney gave was that large federal institutions weren’t necessarily innately flawed, but merely mismanaged. If only Americans elected Romney — the turnaround whiz who built businesses — to “run” the country, those institutions would perform well.
This isn’t to say that all forms of government intervention are equally invalid. Containing the spread of a deadly disease is certainly closer to a federal responsibility than, say, dictating what type of insurance every American must purchase.
There’s also an argument to be made that a government that takes a broader role in every aspect of Americans’ lives won’t be as well-positioned to perform core functions. Perhaps if officials from the Department of Health and Human Services weren’t so busy running much of the nation’s healthcare system, for instance, more resources could be directed toward emergency preparedness.
In a few weeks, the mid-term elections will be over, and Obama will effectively be a lame duck president. If the lesson communicated by Republicans is merely that the nation’s problems can be traced to his incompetence, they won’t win the broader ideological debate. And another ambitious Democratic candidate may very well peddle more big government programs — with the promise that this time they’ll be run more effectively.
