Democratic “message adviser” Mark Penn makes a good point in this New Republic piece about Dubya’s first series of campaign ads:

The point of early advertising is not to reinforce your positives; it’s to plug holes in your negatives. … The issues that Americans care most about today are the ones where the president is weakest — the economy and health care. But rather than try to address this weakness, Bush seems content to avoid it.

Dubya, to the chagrin of advocates of limited government, has pushed or at least signed into law a series of big-government measures (as Tim Lee, to pick one of many, has pointed out), and yet he’s already falling back on tax cuts and strong defense as his core issues.

Subsidizing agribusiness, enacting protective tarriffs on behalf of steel companies, limiting political speech, federalizing education policy, pork-barrelling the transportation budget and vastly expanding Medicare may not be my cup of tea, but it’s the kind of crap Dubya’s signed off on for political purposes, presumably.

And now the political season has rolled around, and these “accomplishments” are nowhere to be seen in the Bush ads. Penn points out how adeptly Clinton used his administration’s support for additional federal death penalties and handing out dough to local police departments to cultivate a strong-on-crime image.

It’s well known that politicians often pass laws not in the public’s long-term interest but in their own short-term political interest. That’s about the only explanation for much of Dubya’s terrible domestic “agenda” — if such a word can be used for a policy of signing every piece of crap that comes across your desk.

And yet Rove & Co. don’t appear to be using this stuff to gain any kind of political advantage. So Dubya & Co. appear to not only be willing to depart from smaller government whenever it appears to suit their political purposes, but they are too incompetent to even follow up politically on those departures.

Once again this question occurs to any reasonable observer: Are these folks evil, or are they just stupid?

I ponder with dread the answer.