The WSJ’s ($) Alan Murray is spot on with regard to his analysis in his weekly Political Capital column that the Bush Administration’s second Treasury Secretary — John Snow — has been just as ineffective as the Bush Administration’s first Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill:

Even some of the administration’s closest allies wonder: Why has Mr. Bush failed in his first four years to find an effective Treasury secretary? And can he be expected to do any better in a second term?
Messrs. O’Neill and Snow have proved the least effective in recent memory. And it is worth asking: Why? Part of the answer comes from the fact that national-security concerns have pushed economic matters to the back burner. The secretaries of state and defense have been in the spotlight in this administration, and economic policy has been secondary.
But much of the answer comes from the fact that, for this administration, economic policy has been a direct extension of political strategy. The tax cuts that characterized President Bush’s first term were forged during the campaign, and were as much a plan for election and re-election as for economic reinvigoration. The Treasury secretary’s job was taken over, in effect, by political adviser Karl Rove.
If Mr. Bush is re-elected, that could change. He won’t be running for a third term and he won’t be pushing tax cuts. Yawning budget deficits make that certain. And unless Brother Jeb Bush signs him on, Karl Rove will have lost his client.
That could be the chance for a new approach to economic policy. President Bush has suggested an ambitious agenda for his second term. He wants to rewrite the tax code, to encourage savings and eliminate loopholes. He wants to give Americans more control over their health-care plans. And he wants to remake the Social Security system, restoring its finances while creating private accounts for younger workers. If he is serious about all this, he will need a very strong Treasury secretary at his side.

Quare: Each of the policy initiatives mentioned in the foregoing paragraph make sense and would be supported by the vast majority of Americans. Given the Bush Administration’s track record, is it more likely that such initiatives would be seriously pursued in a second Bush Administration or in a Kerry Administration?

Several months ago, Professor Ribstein commented on the phenomena in this election of Bush-bashing, which the Professor observed is premised on “an assumption that Bush and his supporters are not credible — that they are all idiots or worse.”
Along those lines, this Weekly Standard article by Andrew Ferguson examines how the political culture of Austin, Texas facilitated the Bush-bashing phenomenom. As Mr. Ferguson notes, Austin is . . . well, different from most other places in Texas:

With its university-town origins, its large population of musicians and artists, its long tradition of political liberalism, Austin is, as Jeff says, the “anti-Texas,” where “Texans who don’t really like Texas” choose to live. More important, it has also, in a larger sense, exported its own peculiar brand of Bush hatred to Democrats from one coast to the other.

And Mr. Ferguson points out that Austin’s brand of political opposition to President Bush may backfire big-time:

Austin has a lot to answer for, whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. Ponder for a moment the strange course the presidential campaign has followed these last 18 months. Judged by the simplest, crudest criterion–comparing the state of the world as it was the day he took office with the world as it will be on the day he stands for reelection–George W. Bush should be the most easily beatable presidential incumbent since Jimmy Carter. A frontal assault on Bush’s record, repeated endlessly and packaged cleverly, might well have resulted in a walkaway win for whoever the Democrats had chosen to oppose him.
It hasn’t worked out that way, as we know. Bush’s opponents instead find themselves in a tight race they well might lose. There are lots of reasons why, but one surely is that instead of mounting a substantial critique of what the president has done and hasn’t done, his Democratic adversaries have obsessed over piecing together odd, paranoid caricatures of the man who’s driving them nuts–Bush as the agent of Halliburton, Bush as the idiot son of Robber Baron privilege, Bush the religious crank, the right-wing ideologue, the draft-dodger, the front man for Enron or Rove or the Saudi royals or J.R. Ewing.

Interestingly, Mr. Ferguson notes that the trouble with the Austin-style of opposition to Mr. Bush is the underlying insecurity of those who promote it:

[An essential characteristic of the Bush-haters is] hatred for themselves as Texans. “Keep Austin weird” is the cute, self-congratulatory, semi-official motto the city’s residents repeat insistently, and there is, sure enough, something weird here. But the city isn’t weird in the way Austinites think it is. No matter where in Austin you find yourself–the waiting room of an auto body shop, the men’s room of a beer joint–you’ll be confronted with a community bulletin board coated thickly with fliers announcing a poetry contest or some new development in Hatha Yoga technique. In that way Austin is no weirder than any other college town. It’s weirdness lies in the fact that, unlike every other college town–Madison, Wisconsin; Lawrence, Kansas; Eugene, Oregon–it has never made peace with its home state. Texas progressivism sets itself in opposition to its surroundings, defines itself by what it isn’t. It depends on a blend of boosterism (for Austin and for a few progressive neighborhoods in Houston) and contempt (for everything else north of the Rio Grande Valley and south of the Mason Dixon line). “The feeling you get in Austin sometimes,” Nathan Husted told me, “is like we’re all living in West Berlin during the Cold War.”

Even the flap over the now infamous 60 Minutes segment that relied on a untested forged document regarding Mr. Bush’s National Guard service has its genesis in the Austin culture of hatred toward Mr. Bush:

For our purposes, however, what was most interesting about the 60 Minutes imbroglio was the light it shed on the tiny, hermetic world of Texas Bush-hating. Rather himself–perhaps the world’s most prominent Texas Bush-hater–has a daughter, Robin, who is an activist in, and future contender for the chairmanship of, Austin’s Travis County Democratic party, which Rather once helped raise money for and whose chairman at that time, David Van Os, now serves as the attorney for Bill Burkett, who gave 60 Minutes the bogus documents and who has worked as a source for James C. Moore, who discovered the Austin4Kerry tape and whose book, Bush’s Brain, was co-written by Wayne Slater, Austin bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News, whose News colleague, Mark Wrolstad, is married to Mapes, who produced the 60 Minutes segment and who knew Moore when both were TV reporters in Houston, where Mapes still lives. It’s dizzying to think what Bush-haters would do with this web of intimacies if they were on the other side.

Read the entire piece. Quare: Is the Bush-bashing phenomena the natural result and counterbalance to the proliferation of demogogic right wing pundits that have arisen over the past decade (i.e., Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc.)? Or did the latter naturally evolve in response to the former?

Lou Dubose — co-author of The Hammer: Tom DeLay, God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress (Public Affairs 2004) and Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Vintage 2000) — pens this LA Weekly article summarizing the development of the multiple criminal and Congressional investigations into U.S. Representative Tom DeLay‘s allegedly illegal campaign fund-raising scheme that had as its goal the Republican takeover of the Texas Legislature. Mr. Dubose notes the background of DeLay’s fundraising effort:

For 10 years the Republican Party had been trying to capture the Texas House. Party operatives aimed for 2000 so the House, the Senate and the state?s Republican governor could have absolute control of redrawing the state?s congressional district lines when the Legislature met after the 2000 census. Despite years of spending record sums on campaigns, in 2000 they fell short. And the Democratic House speaker refused to go along with the governor and Senate?s effort to reconfigure the state?s district lines so that a half-dozen more congressional seats could be won by Republicans.
That?s when Tom DeLay came home to Texas. Working with one of his Washington operatives, he created a political-action committee in Texas, modeled on his own national PAC. Texans for a Republican Majority was spectacularly successful. It raised $1.5 million and elected 17 new Republican members of the state House, seizing control of the body for the first time in 130 years. With his handpicked Texas House speaker in place, DeLay personally presided over the redrawing of the state?s congressional districts. The map he put in place will provide the Republicans five to seven new seats in Congress.

As Mr. Dubose notes, there is a small problem with Mr. DeLay’s fundraising efforts:

Since 1905, it?s been against state law to raise or spend corporate money in Texas [political campaigns]. And DeLay?s Texas PAC raised three-quarters of a million corporate dollars. They reported their corporate contributions only with the IRS in Washington, avoiding disclosure to the state agency that regulates elections in Texas. Ronnie Earle, a D.A. with statewide prosecutorial authority, caught them. He also found they were doing some odd things with their money, like sending $190,000 corporate ?soft? dollars to the Republican National State Election Committee in Washington in exchange for $190,000 non-corporate ?hard? dollars that can be legally spent in Texas.

Mr. Dubose also does not find Mr. DeLay’s protestations about his relative non-involvement with Texans for a Republican Majority to be particularly credible:

DeLay insists he had little to do with Texans for a Republican Majority, which seems odd since he founded it. And the PAC?s Texas director said under oath that DeLay was consulted on PAC activities. DeLay has said he raised no corporate money himself, but a June 24, 2002, letter I found in the exhibits of a civil suit filed in Austin suggests otherwise:

Dear Congressman DeLay:
On behalf of the Williams Companies Inc., I am pleased to forward our contribution of $25,000 for the [Texans for a Republican Majority] that we pledged at the June 2 fund-raisers.
With best wishes . . .

Read the entire piece. Regardless of whether DeLay fades an indictment over his campaign fundraising, his designs on the Speaker of the House’s chair in Washington are (thankfully) no longer viable.