Former Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign strategist Matthew Dowd said Monday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that Republican lack of funding for government programs made the devastation from the deadly flood of the Guadalupe River in central Texas “worse.”
Dowd said, “The problem is there’s Republicans at the local level, Republicans at the state level and Republicans at the federal level. All of them hold the leadership that’s necessary to fix problems like this. So we can identify specific things that could have been done at the federal level that might have been missing because of cuts and all of that, or at the state level.”
He continued, “There was a bill before the legislature that got defeated by Republicans that would have provided funding to counties to do communications, to do warnings, to do all that. It was defeated by the Republicans in the legislature. There was proposals at the local level in Kerr County to put together a warning system, it was defeated by the Republicans, who didn’t want to spend the money.”
He added, “When you constantly attack government and you treat government as the enemy and you treat service and government as as a negative, as people’s service and government as a negative, it’s no doubt in my mind that when it comes time to demand that the government serve people, you can’t ask for excellence when you’ve constantly castigated the people that serve government. So this idea that these Republicans are constantly, government is the enemy, government is the enemy but oh, by the way, we’re going to ask government to provide some sort of level of excellence to serve the people, it’s just two opposite ends that you can’t bring together and solve that problem.”
Dowd concluded, “Specifically, there are certain things Republicans did that I think made the matter worse and could have made it better. But broadly, we have to stop attacking service and government as the problem.”
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