Here’s Tommy Friedman, making a modicum of sense.
…we have to solve the big problems in our control, not postpone them or pretend that more lobby-driven, lowest-common-denominator solutions are still satisfactory. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, but a reprieve and a breathing spell — which is what we’re having right now — is a really terrible thing to waste. We don’t want to look back on this moment and say: How could we have gone back to business as usual and petty political gridlocks with all those black swans circling around us? Then we will really kick ourselves.
In some ways, this echoes the standard progressive critique of the Obama administration. For example, the health care bill can fairly be described as the lowest-common-denominator solution that could pass Congress. A remarkable achievement, yes, but also a remarkable disappointment that fell well short of what was proposed and what was needed. One thing many on the left seem to miss, however, in their dismissal of post-partisan language, is that Obama’s approach isn’t really aimed at reaching common agreement through compromise. He wanted to create an unstoppable coalition of the center-left by incorporating the center-right.
That’s why Obama let Gates stay on at the Pentagon, offered Powell a job, brought on Ray LaHood to run Transportation, made John McHugh the Secretary of the Army, and offered Sen. Judd Gregg the Commerce Department. He wanted to put the reasonable Republicans in his camp and isolate the crazies on the other side. That way, an increasingly shrill and detached minority would make a spectacle of themselves as they impotently railed against an agenda that had strong backing from a solid majority of the country. Everything is working according to plan except for one little problem. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have actually decided to keep their caucuses united in opposition to everything and they have succeeded. This is only possible through a combination of Democratic disunity and the filibuster rule in the Senate.
Of the two, the filibuster rule is actually the more important one for creating delay and for forcing legislation to the lowest-common-denominator. Without that rule, a good health care bill would have passed by July of 2009. Without that rule, we’d already have passed financial reforms, a cap and trade energy policy, and we’d plausibly be working on an immigration bill that could pass.
It’s not possible to do the things we need to do in the way we need to do them so long as we cannot even vote on those things. This is supposed to be a democracy of some sort where the majority prevails. But it’s the minority of forty in the Senate that exercises veto power over the president’s agenda. Do we want to keep it that way? After all, one day soon it will be a Republican president whose agenda is stalled, and we may all be grateful that they can’t screw everything up quite as easily as they might want to.
I guess my point is that Friedman makes some excellent points, but he never once assigns blame where it belongs. The Republican Party is responding to multiple threats and crises by using every procedural rule in the book to prevent concerted action. That strategy forces Obama to go for lowest-common-denominator solutions that are basically whatever Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe can agree on. And the president did not run on enacting the Nelson-Snowe agenda. That’s not what the country voted for. It shouldn’t be what we have to settle for. And it’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough.
