The WaPo yesterday had a story a story about disarray at the DHS. It's the same old story of Bush administration incompetence:

The Bush administration has failed to fill roughly a quarter of the top leadership posts at the Department of Homeland Security, creating a "gaping hole" in the nation's preparedness for a terrorist attack or other threat, according to a congressional report to be released today....

"One of the continuing problems appears to be the over politicization of the top rank of Department management," concludes the report by the committee, chaired by Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.). "This could lead to heightened vulnerability to terrorist attack."

Captain Ed gives us the Republican spin, in a post titled Shocked, Shocked! At The Inefficiencies Of Super-Bureaucracies. Yes, that's right; don't blame Bush, blame bureaucracy:

The DHS got created by Congress in a fit of bureaucracy-building following the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 Commission, not coincidentally comprised almost entirely of bureaucrats, decided that the best approach to bolstering federal agencies in homeland security and intelligence was to burden them with even more bureaucratic overhead.

This, of course, is the standard conservative party line: specific failures of specific Republicans, failures that can be traced directly to the reigning Republican philosophy of (anti-)government, are actually failures of government in general.

And the problem, as I've written before, is that to some degree it works: by destroying trust in the government with their corruption and incompetence, they advance the Republican ideology that government can't be trusted. It's breathtakingly cynical, and so far it's been depressingly effective.

That may be changing, simply because the current systemic failure is so spectacularly greater than any we've been through before; but we're still faced with the same problem. The problem for Democrats is that

we believe in building things, and the Nihilist Party believes in destroying things, and it's always easier to destroy than to build....

The impossible task before us is to make the case for the possibilities of government even as we make the case that those currently in charge of government are corrupt and incompetent. We have to make the case that government can be trusted to act in our interest at the same time as we make the case that this government is actively working against the interests of most Americans.

To win in 2008, we need a candidate who can take the fight to the Republicans, who can hammer them on their venality and cynicism and hypocrisy and just plain inability to do the job. To win in the longer term, though, we need a candidate who can also make the affirmative case for government.