John Broder discusses how Congress seems incapable of tackling the big problems, like immigration, health care, global warming, and pension entitlements.
It sometimes seems that it takes a catastrophe to create consensus. The Great Depression, Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11 all shattered partisan divisions and led, at least for a time, to enhanced presidential power and a rush of bipartisan lawmaking (some of which political leaders later came to regret). Today, however, the partisan chasm in Washington is deeper than it has been in 100 years, according to some academic studies, as moderate blocs in both parties have all but vanished.
Six years after the beginning of the Great Depression, FDR was riding high in the midst of creating a ruling coalition that would last nearly 60 years. Six years after Pearl Harbor, Truman enacted the National Security Act of 1947 that created the Cold War infrastructure that still remains largely unchanged sixty years later. Where are we six years after 9/11?
For me things went wrong on 9/11 itself. The first indication was Bush’s appearance before the cameras in the Emma E. Booker Elementary School’s media room at 9:30 AM.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America. I, unfortunately, will be going back to Washington after my remarks. Secretary Rod Paige and the Lt. Governor will take the podium and discuss education. I do want to thank the folks here at Booker Elementary School for their hospitality.
Today we’ve had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country. I have spoken to the Vice President, to the Governor of New York, to the Director of the FBI, and have ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families, and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.
There were two things wrong with this statement. First, who the hell wanted, at that point, to hear Rod Paige and the Lt. Governor discuss No Child Left Behind? Second, what was he doing calling the terrorists ‘folks’?
Things never really improved. Bush continued in this vein, asking us to go on with our lives as normal, while he would enlist a minority of the country in the job of hunting down the folks that had committed the acts. This refusal to engage the entire country in the effort to avenge 9/11 had an insidious effect. Despite a tremendous amount of solidarity and good feeling in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Bush’s failure of leadership gradually eroded any bipartisanship, and any consensus on what our foreign policy should be. And it wasn’t just the decision to go into Iraq.
Early on there were fights over whether airport security workers would be unionized. Karl Rove decided to use the war as a wedge issue for the 2002 elections. And the American people were not asked to sacrifice in either blood or treasure…nor even in time. There would be a global, generational war on terrorism, but it wouldn’t cost average Americans anything.
Bush, thereby, polarized the nation by refusing to allow Democrats to take equal responsibility or equal credit for the war on terrorism. He wouldn’t let ordinary Americans participate, either. And he was just as dismissive of our traditional allies in NATO and the United Nations. In short, Bush was embarking on a new Cold War, but he wasn’t bringing anyone but partisan Republicans and our armed forces along for the ride.
Part of the problem lay in what Bush wanted to do. There wasn’t any consensus for it even within his own administration. Everyone had to be steamrolled, bullied, and coerced into supporting his policy. This made it of paramount importance that his policy work. He couldn’t afford setbacks that would cause second guessing.
Broder says that moderate blocs in both parties have all but vanished. This isn’t really true. The Blue Dog coalition in Congress is significant. And the Senate remains extremely moderate in its ideology. Two things changed. First, the Republican Party lost its moderates (and had been for some time) through a combination of factors. These include the ascendancy of the religious right, the anti-tax pledge crowd, the gerrymandering of districts, the electoral strategies of Karl Rove, and the legislative strategies of Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay (no legislation would be brought to a vote unless a majority of Republicans supported it).
Republican moderates were primaried, they were not recruited for new open seats, and they were rendered powerless in Congress.
The second thing that changed was that Democratic moderates were not rewarded for crossing the aisle and working with the President. They were made to look like witless credulous fools. They earned no good will, promises were broken, and they were targeted just as aggressively for electoral defeat.
These two factors combined, in short order, to destroy the logic of bipartisanship. No one was rewarded for working across the aisle. It came to be seen, by both sides, as an act of treason.
But this does not have to be a permanent feature of American politics. We may see a change after the 2008 elections. In the Senate we will probably see a large Democratic majority, but that majority will be made up of a lot of seats from fairly conservative areas, like Montana, Virginia, Colorado, Nebraska…maybe even Alabama. These won’t be old Jim Crow Democrats, but they will be much more likely to find common ground with Republicans than Pat Leahy, Barbara Boxer, and Russ Feingold. At the same time, the Republicans will find themselves virtually shut out of New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the upper Midwest. If they are to make a comeback, they will need to rediscover the Eisenhower or Rockefeller Republican. It won’t be too long before the Republicans are running people like Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee again.
New coalitions will arise that cross party lines. And this will make it possible to tackle some of the big problems facing the country. But one thing we will have to do first, is put the Global War on Terror to bed. Terrorism does not and cannot form the basis for our foreign policy. We will not have another Cold War against phantom threats. We have big problems…but terrorism is not one of them.
