"Blowback" comes in many forms

The errors of President Bush and the Republican Party are coming back to bite them in so many ways: Iraq, Afghanistan, domestic policies, even the way they've conducted their campaigns. For example, this editorial from the Tomah (WI) Journal:

Editorial: Screening political foes backfired on President Bush

The tactics used by President Bush to filter political opponents from public events (campaign rallies and events associated with the official duties of his office) have been cynical, crude and obnoxious.

They’re also really dumb politics. Just ask former Republican Congressman Gil Gutknecht, who lost his Nov. 7 race for re-election in Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District to Democrat Tim Walz.

Walz, a high school teacher and retired sergeant major in the Minnesota Army National Guard, got politically active [only] after a 2004 incident at a Bush campaign rally in Minnesota.

The positive outcome of the Bush/Republican policies is that so many more people are becoming engaged, not just politically but in other advocacies too. For example, a conference on planning for the future of the Minnesota River watershed this week attracted over 200 participants — from farmers to environmentalists to agribusiness representatives to academicians to sport fishermen to elected officials and government workers. In previous years the same seminar would have attracted less than half that number.

What was most surprising about the conference is that the participants were all in agreement that the health and well-being of the river watershed's stakeholders was directly contingent upon the health and well-being of the river. Absent was any talk that protecting the environment was a trade-off for economic growth — a mantra that has been repeated ad nauseam by Republican free marketers. Instead, seemingly to a one, Republicans and Democrats alike — and there were a lot of Republicans in the room — the participants agreed that the environment and the economy were dependent upon each other.

"Blowback" is a term that has been used to describe the negative consequences of errors in foreign policy. It applies as well to politics, as in the Bush/Walz quarry event, and to domestic policy, as in a renewed interest in the importance of the environment.