Perhaps we should give up asking President Bush any more questions. While the questions may be interesting, his answers, I’m certain, will be useless or irrelevant. But there is an important and possibly revealing question to be asked of the presidential candidates, especially the Democrats, for we can presume what the Republicans will say. And the answer will either contrast with or mean the continuation one of the salient features of the Bush administration–its disdain for government.

My question: Do you believe in the need for big government? How would you go about repairing and restoring the damage on the Gulf Coast from Katrina and preventing future such disasters. And how would you tackle the need to upgrade the nation’s obsolete infrastructure of highways, bridges, water and sewer systems?

Some background for reporters who have not questioned the claim, by President Clinton, in his 1996 State of the Union that “the era of big government is over.” He didn’t mean government should be benign, but his attempt at what was later called “triangulation,” or having it both ways, caught on. He followed in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan, who proclaimed government the problem. And before that, Jimmy Carter’s hostility towards Washington earned him the presidency. And before that, Gerald R. Ford, who spent his adult life in government, won cheers ridiculing Washington when he traveled outside the city.

The last president who believed in the efficacy of the federal government in domestic affairs and expanded its role was Republican Richard Nixon, who championed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and approved the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Before that it was a given that the United States could accomplish almost anything through government. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society established, among other successes, Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. John F. Kennedy in 1961 launched the massive, public-private effort that Americans on the moon and gave the U.S. the superiority in space. And Dwight Eisenhower, arguing that it was needed for defense, won approval of the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act of 1956, appropriating $25 billion for 40,000 miles of interstate highways, at that time, the largest public works project in American history. And compare our rebuilding efforts in Iraq so far with Harry Truman’s triumphant Marshall Plan, which saved Europe for the west.

Before all this, the standard for a can-do big federal government was established under Franklin Roosevelt with the construction of Hoover Dam (conceived by Herbert Hoover), the Grand Coulee, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which brought electricity to the south and eradicated malaria, and the Works Progress Administration that spent $11.4 billion on highways, local and farm roads, public buildings and public utilities. Attention George Bush: WPA restored the Alamo, and built what is now Camp David.

Yet in the wake of Katrina and the Minneapolis bridge collapse, John McQuaid, of the Open Society Institute, wondered in the Outlook Section of the Washington Post, Aug. 5, whether the U.S. is no longer the can-do country. “And it’s not just bridges,” he wrote. “Has there ever been a period on our history when so many American plans and projects have, literally or figuratively, collapsed?…The United States can no longer be relied upon to succeed or even muddle through. We can’t remake the Middle East. We can’t protect one of our own cities from natural disaster or…rebuild after one…Can-do America has become a joke, an oxymoron.”

One of the most important reasons, he suggests, is that “the New Deal and Great Society structure of ‘big government’ has, in effect, stopped working.” And, he added, “the Bush White House’s hostility toward the federal government has been quite purposeful.” Bush may be hostile to government, but he has spent billions in Iraq, sent the nation into deep debt and broadened his presidential powers to an extent that Roosevelt, in four terms, never dreamed of even in the midst of war and depression.

But lest there be more Katrinas and downed bridges, the next president must decide on the uses and efficacy of government. Will he or she follow the examples of Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson or those who became president by running against government and could do little else? Let’s ask the candidates.