So do the government's promises to get better, the new laws guaranteeing immediate action and the next round of damning reports. Tell people enough times that government is plagued with fraud, waste and abuse, and they come to believe it. Americans might have asked Thompson. We thought it was more. Americans also may no longer trust the Republicans to lead the fight.
Democrats now own the war on waste.
They won it from Republicans by changing how candidates talk about big government. The proof is in the University of Pennsylvania's database of every word uttered in recent presidential campaigns. Locked in the Rose Garden during the Iran hostage crisis, Carter was virtually silent on the issue. When voters heard someone talk about the evils of big government in 1980, they inevitably heard a Republican. In 1992, however, it was a Democrat, not a Republican, who dominated the conversation about bureaucracy.