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Jewish World Review Nov. 22, 2010 / 15 Kislev, 5771 Burning down the House By David M. Shribman
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Political unity? Not this month.
I'm not talking about the voters at the polls. I'm talking about the pols in both parties. You'd think the shellacked and the shellackers would at least feel common cause, either huddling in defeat or rejoicing in victory. Not our guys. They're even turning on their own.
Ordinarily the adults offer some wisdom for the playground, urging grace in defeat, magnanimity in victory. Those apparently are lessons for another day.
After this month's elections, the victors crowed, the vanquished whined. Then, in the Republican Party, the victorious insurgents took off on the party regulars. Across the great political divide, the liberals, who were the symbols of voter resentment, turned on the moderates, whose views were closer to public sentiment -- though, fatefully, not close enough for the Blue Dogs, as the Democratic centrists are called, who were battered black-and-blue and suffered losses far out of proportion to their numbers.
No wonder the public, viewing this Shakespearean spectacle that is at once comedy and tragedy, shrugs and says: A pox on both your Houses. Both your parties, now that we're at it.
Let's start with the guys who won the election. Some of them won because they were rebels, catching a breeze in the spring only to find it had become a gale by the fall. Carl Sandburg wrote how Lincoln carried in his vest pocket a riff from the great humorist David Ross Locke (who wrote under the name Petroleum V. Nasby and edited Ohio's Toledo Blade) in which everyone was "agin" everything. Some of the tea partiers are agin nearly everything, and that includes the Republican leadership.
No, no, they say when the reporters inquire, we're cool with the party grandees, but in truth they're cool to the political establishment that the Republican leadership now personifies, even in the Senate, where the GOP remains in the minority. The new House leadership has reached out to the insurgents, offering "a larger voice" -- Senate Republicans are demanding that, too, and encountering some opposition -- but promising few specifics.
Meanwhile, Republicans last week also grappled with an issue fraught with symbolic importance even if it has minimal economic importance: earmarks.
Earmarks are specific spending provisions keyed to specific areas, and there is nothing particularly new about them; in the broadest brush the Tennessee Valley Authority legislation from the New Deal was a huge earmark involving 10 states -- each of which, by the way, voted for George W. Bush in both the 2000 and 2004 elections and seven of which went Republican in each of the last three presidential elections.
But now the Republicans are having a range war over earmarks, which were opposed by 11 of the 13 new Republicans in the Senate. The rebels regard earmarks as mischief, and mostly they are. The regulars, until last week including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, regard earmarks as implicit in the power of the purse the Constitution provided the legislative branch, and that's technically true, though a bit of a stretch from a group that ordinarily doesn't like to stretch its definition of what the Constitution says.
When it comes to original sin -- a concept this group is more comfortable discussing -- they're guilty. The Republicans who have been around awhile have been glimpsed shopping at Earmarks R Us more than once. (GOP Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi has his own personal shopper there.)
Not that the Democrats don't have their problems, symbolized in last week's debate over whether to retain Speaker Nancy D. Pelosi as their leader once they shed their power in the House come January. It's never good for a party to have lawmakers running for re-election vowing to topple their own leaders. Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn never saw anything remotely like that.
And that was only the first battle among Democrats. The juicy fight over leadership will be followed by a beefy fight over taxes, and already liberals and moderates are wrestling over whether, or more precisely how broadly, to extend the Bush-era tax cuts that are to expire at the end of next month. Some Democrats are willing to let most of them continue, despite the implications for the deficit. (Their motto: In for a dime, in for a trillion.) Others are willing to permit tax cuts that assist the poor and middle class, but not those for the wealthy.
This is a struggle worth watching, and not only for the spectacle. For a generation Republicans have defined themselves by taxes. For the next generation, the Democrats might.
While we're watching the political class tear itself apart, don't miss the internal and external conflicts involving the bipartisan commission on reducing the deficit, which produced a plan so sweeping that it managed to alienate almost everybody, a sure sign that its plan has merit but not prospects.
So far: Democrats hate the proposed adjustments to Social Security, even though the system is heading toward catastrophe. Republicans hate the tax increases, even though marginal rates would drop. Motorists hate the hike in gasoline taxes, even though the nation remains dangerously dependent on oil from the most unstable region of the world. And lobbyists for the real estate industry hate the elimination of the mortgage-interest deduction for homeowners, even though most industrial countries, including Canada and every major economic power in the European Union, have no such provision.
In a month of remarkable quotes this might be the most remarkable: "I told people in the White House I had spent more time listening to people in the opposition party than they had done as a whole group," Erskine Bowles, the Democrat who is co-chairman of the deficit-reduction commission, told The Wall Street Journal.
He's probably right. Former Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, the Republican co-chairman, could probably say much the same about his crowd. Not that anyone will listen. Republicans and Democrats, liberals and mode
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David Shribman, a Pulitzer Prize winner in journalism, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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