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Broderism On The Rampage

If you believe the Bush presidency is a failure, what then?  Do you delight in whacking him like a piñata for the next 18 months with your only objective a Democratic blowout victory in the 2008 election? ~Cal Thomas That would hardly be my objective.  As anyone knows, the object of whacking a piñata is to […]

If you believe the Bush presidency is a failure, what then?  Do you delight in whacking him like a piñata for the next 18 months with your only objective a Democratic blowout victory in the 2008 election? ~Cal Thomas

That would hardly be my objective.  As anyone knows, the object of whacking a piñata is to get at the delicious candy inside, plus the visceral satisfaction of the whacking itself.  I’m not sure what the equivalent of the candy would be in this metaphor (impeachment?), but just striking the piñata for the sake of breaking it seems like a decent option at present.  Thomas seems to have written this column under the odd impression that Democrats are the only ones who think Mr. Bush is a failed President. 

Thomas continues:

Politics has always been a contact sport, but in the past – even during difficult times – there were those who transcended partisanship, putting the country first. In her book “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin writes of how Abraham Lincoln brought his severest critics into his administration to work with him, not against him, for the promotion of the general welfare.   

Well, actually, he was working for the promotion of the war effort against the South and not exactly “the general welfare,” and he didn’t do a lot of transcending partisanship, since he only brought Andrew Johnson onto the ticket in 1864 because he feared he faced the real danger of losing the election.  Notoriously, many of his early top generals were obviously political favourites chosen for their connections to big Republican pols and not for their ability to command men in battle.  That was part of the system, but hardly one that resulted in success.  The Cabinet was made up of Lincoln’s political opponents within the Republican Party–he did not appoint Vallandigham to be Secretary of War!  The members of the Cabinet may have disagreed with each other (Seward and Chase forming one particularly bitter pair of opposites), and they may have had old grudges against Lincoln, but this was the sort of transcending of partisanship that would allow John Warner and Trent Lott to work side by side.  Lincoln bringing in Seward is the sort of bold aisle-crossing that would have President Bush embracing John McCain (which he already did, after a fashion).  Lincoln may or may not have been a smart politician, but I have to wonder whether his example is one we want to follow.  I tend to think that when you start ordering the killing of large numbers of people whom you claim as your fellow citizens, you have rather failed as a leader of the nation.  Whatever else he was, he was definitely not David Broder with a beard. 

There then follows, in classic High Broder style, a lament about the division of the nation:

This is a foreign notion in our day of 24/7 cable news, talk radio, fundraisers and polarizers. These exist and profit from stirring the pot, never achieving harmony or consensus.  Each has a vested financial, political and career interest in division, not unity.

Thus spake the professional pundit and frequent guest on FoxNews.

Thomas goes on:

While that might make bloggers feel good and occupy their time until the next election, does it strengthen the nation against multiple threats?

Well, if it can put some pressure on Congress to check the abuses of the executive and help curtail his reckless foreign policy, which is in turn adding to the dangers our country faces, it may do just a little bit of good.  Turn that question around: have the reliable apologists of the administration been preventing the correction of erroneous policies?  Have they helped perpetuate dangerous and foolish courses of action?  Actually, whatever the tremendous flaws with their arguments, they have been engaging in something we in a free society like to call “speech” and “political argument.”  Supporters of bad policies, especially wars that have lost the support of the public, will often look to stymy, discourage and shut down a wide-ranging debate on the policies themselves and on almost anything else.  The lack of unity and consensus is not taken as a sign that the policies lack sufficient public backing and are therefore being carried out in express defiance of the voters, but rather as evidence that we, the citizens, are somehow failing the government and the goals the government has set forth for its policies.  What these arguments miss is that the government’s goals will never be achieved if they lack the support of the public, and the public will (ideally) withhold that support if the goals are unrealistic, misguided or fundamentally wrong.  When your allies are riding roughshod over the land and calling all of the shots while the opposition cowers in the corner, there were no great cries against the evils of partisanship from Mr. Bush’s supporters.  Back then it was taken as given that the fierce partisan style of the President was part of his “leadership” and it was natural and appropriate to act in this way.  Now that GOP triumphalism has come back to bite them, some are taking shelter in the cave of “centrism,” compromise and consensus.  So enamoured of bipartisanship has Thomas become that he even supports the appointment of blue-ribbon panel called “Americans United”!  Eat your heart out, Unity ’08.

He comes to the conclusion:

Assembling a group of respected Republicans and Democrats, bypassing the rank partisanship of the Democratic congressional leadership, and declaring his final months in office will be dedicated solely to attempting to do what’s right for the country and not for Republican advantage in the next election might – if successful – have the incidental benefit of helping Republicans in 2008.

The problem is that Mr. Bush believed that this is what he was doing with the immigration bill.  It was magnificently bipartisan, uniting establishment figures of left and right like nothing else, and Mr. Bush evidently sincerely believed that it was the “right thing” the country, since he was willing to say that opponents of the bill “didn’t want” to do the “right thing” for the country.  No one, except perhaps Mr. Bush, Mel Martinez and Karl Rove, could have confused the immigration bill with something designed to help Republican prospects in the future.  It was exactly what Cal Thomas calls for today–and it was repudiated by a broad (and bipartisan!) majority of the U.S. Senate.  The problem with Mr. Bush’s policies is not that they have been too partisan, but that they have been bad policies.  No amount of backslapping, “improved communications” and aisle-crossing will change the reality that Mr. Bush is simply out of sync with the country on many of his major policies.

Update: On the same theme of “why can’t we all just get along?”, I give you David Ignatius.

Steve Benen at the Monthly comments:

I don’t doubt that Ignatius means well, but his argument is lazy and hard to take seriously.  It’s easy to urge Americans to get together; it’s a challenge to lay out an agenda for them to rally behind. It’s simple to tell people to stop arguing; it’s hard to talk about solutions. The column reads like Broderism at its least persuasive.

Which is pretty unpersuasive.

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