Cheney on CNN
I’m sitting in the airport waiting to fly back to DC watching Dick Cheney being interviewed about Obama’s policies on CNN and I’m wondering why. Its not like what he is going to say is going to be a shock to anyone. You can sum up what he’ll say as simply as “Whatever that Obama guy wants to do is bad.”
Its as worthwhile as having Nancy Pelosi come on and ask her about Bush policies. Every one of her responses would essentially be, “He’s bad and so are his policies. I’m not really thinking about what the policies are, but if Bush wanted it, it has to be bad.”
Now I might be exaggerating a little, but does anyone really care what these uber-partisan people have to say about policies from the opposition. Maybe you do care and you’re game for that, but it seems like a huge waste of time to me. If you’re going to trot someone out on TV, at least give me three seconds of suspense where I don’t know what they’re going to say in response to a question before the question is finished being asked.
Then again, I’m probably asking too much since there aren’t enough of those people to go around.
RSS Feed
Do you feel that is how they govern as well? Republicans against anything Democrat and Democrat versus anything Republican? Regardless of policy, just in principle?
Just curious of your thoughts on how they comment versus how they govern.
I think that’s largely the default way of operating. With as much bitching as we hear with little in the way of constructive plans suggesting a better way to do it, I feel like they are way too interested in political gain rather than fixing things. When the party of opposition isn’t in power, they’re more interested in getting into power through political gamesmanship rather than showing the people they have a better way of doing things and getting in that way. Its way easier to make the other guy look crappier than you rather than making you look better than the other guy.
Politicians and politics suck…and yet I still pay attention to it. What is wrong with me?
I know you didn’t ask me that question, Steven, but hey: this is the Internet, and everybody gets to stick their noses in where they’re not specifically invited.
I do hope that if your general feelings about my unprompted outbursts devolve from “not specifically invited” to “not wanted,” you’ll have the self-awareness to offer me a rolling donut and suggest one or two exercises I might engage in with it, instead of simply punching me in the face with a brick the next time you see me (which might very well be at Erik’s wedding – and you have to admit, that would be awkward, if you did it then….).
Anyway, my own personal 2ยข is that – well, to start, that’s an excellent thing to wonder about. Politics often seems (retail politics, anyway, as practiced at the national level) like so much Kabuki theater: Politician A from party A gets up on TV (especially if it campaign season, which unfortunately, like sports, now seems to be nearly year-round with no discernible off-season), and says that the members of party B – and especially Politician B – are simply playing politics. They’re “demagoguing,” “caving to special interests,” “using the failed ideas of the past,” etc. And those are just the non-partisan insults (by “non-partisan,” I mean only that they can be deployed by either side, not that their USE isn’t partisan in origin or purpose). If the denouncer who’s managed to snag a TV interview is a Democrat, you’ll hear (depending on how inflammatory the speaker wants to be) “warmonger,” “in the pockets of big ____ (oil, pharma, avocado, what have you),” etc. If it’s a Republican, you’ll hear “tax and spend liberal,” “weak,” “terrorist-enabler,” etc.
Ugly? Yes. But sadly, that does seem to be the way our politics have evolved in this country. We didn’t invent ugly politics, but they sure seem to be making a comeback in this country lately. I could offer some thoughts about why THAT is, but I think your question was more directed toward the question of whether you think that politicians govern like they campaign (or interview). I have to say: no. I don’t. Oh, some always will, unfortunately. And while it may feel viscerally exciting to hear a public figure engaging in demagoguery by grabbing a (figurative) megaphone and lambasting the opposition for real or perceived faults, it doesn’t actually solve any problems. There’s a reason why Rush Limbaugh has spent his entire career behind a microphone, instead of a congressman’s desk. I’m sure part of it is that congresspeople don’t get paid nearly what Limbaugh can earn from his unaccountable perch over at the OIB Network (Oxycontin In Broadcasting), but even if Limbaugh were not as successful nor as wealthy as he is, I doubt he would consider running for office, because he is, at bottom, a complainer. His show is all about outrage and resentment, sometimes warranted, often not. But, warranted or not, it’s what he serves up, day after day. And, on the days when he’s really on to something, it can feel quite cathartic to listen to him rant, if you agree with him. But that sort of perma-outrage almost NEVER serves to make progress in actual governing.
One of the things Joe Biden said during the campaign which I thought was one of the best lines from any politician, including Obama, was that he learned (was taught) early in his career that it’s a mistake to assume that the guys across the aisle (or sometimes even in one’s own party) are acting in bad faith, because most of the time, they’re not. One of the most difficult things for humans to do is to TRULY put themselves in another person’s position, especially when that person’s position differs or even disagrees with one’s own. Biden expanded on it, saying that he learned that most of the time, people with opposing viewpoints were there not because they were evil or stupid. They had the interest of their districts or states or the country as a whole at heart every bit as much as he did…they just had a different idea about what sort of policies would best achieve it. Sounds simple, but every person is egocentric to a greater or lesser degree, and as the degree of one’s passion about “how things ought to be” increases, one’s ability to recognize that people who disagree are not “the enemy” tends to decrease in inverse proportion. Simply put: unbridled passion and/or demagoguery of the sort Limbaugh deals in actually, measurably, impedes not only the progress of government (which, after all, is crafting and administering laws for the benefit of the country), but human understanding and compromise itself.
Obviously, I don’t know Limbaugh personally – nor Biden either – so I could be mistaken. But even if the private Rush is very markedly different from the public one, I’d still say the above, because we, the public, do not get to SEE “the private Rush,” which renders any such distinction moot. But I’m pretty sure that Limbaugh knows that his brand of oppositional, scorched-earth political flamethrowing sounds a lot better coming through a person’s car radio speakers than it does out of the mouth of an actual elected leader, through the TV’s speakers on C-SPAN. As it is now, Limbaugh isn’t accountable to anyone except the people who sign his checks, and no matter what people might think about him, almost no one I’ve heard denies that he’s got an uncanny ability to entertain and to bring people in to listen to him explode as reliably as Old Faithful, every day from 12-3 EST, on their radio dial.
The difference between him and Biden isn’t necessarily that Biden is a better man – it’s that Biden learned a long time ago that the sort of “turn it up to 11″ rhetoric which Limbaugh excels at, while viscerally enjoying in a sort of “red-meat-for-the-faithful” sort of way, almost never gets one anywhere in the actual process of governing. If you’re a politician, and you’re sitting in committee or on the floor of the house or senate, looking at the men and women of the other party across the aisle, and thinking of them as “the enemy,” then the resulting legislative process is going to look like a war to you.
And though politicians will always jockey for position and try to one-up each other, I think a systemic change happened in the Bush administration. For the first time in my own memory, it became gradually apparent that the political arm of the executive branch was calling the shots for the policy arm(s). During the campaign, a Presidential candidate signs on literally dozens of advisors to help him formulate policy proposals on everything from defense to economics to various other things. But you rarely see those people, because frankly, the details of crafting policy are intricate, opaque and therefore pretty boring. Not exactly “thirty-second-spot” material. During the campaign, the political arm is always in charge and pretty much the ONLY part of a Presidential hopeful’s campaign that we, the public, see. And that’s as it should be, since, during the campaign, the reality is that if the political arm of the campaign can’t deliver a victory on election day, then the policy boffins working away on the intricacies of governance in some back room aren’t going to get their chance to shine. It’s a winner-take-all, zero-sum game. But in the past, once elected, the political arm tends to shrink both in size and importance almost immediately, becoming a nascent organization which waits until the next campaign cycle begins in earnest. That’s – in my mind, anyway – also as it should be. But under George W. Bush, you actually had Karl Rove, who had never before run anything besides the college Republicans at one point in his career, in charge of domestic policy.
I don’t want to pick out one person to pick ON, but that’s the clearest example I can think of to demonstrate what I’m talking about. In past administrations, once elected, you would see advisors and cabinet-level appointments made using people who were experts in various fields. Sure, if it was a Democratic administration, you’d expect to see experts with more-or-less Democratic principles be appointed (though not always), and the reverse if it was a Republican administration. Greg Mankiw (Bush’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisors) is unquestionably a supply-side conservative. But no one doubts that he’s also among the top tier of respected professionals in the field. But what you WOULDN’T see is people who were literally campaign professionals elevated to top positions. What you WOULDN’T see is decisions being made which appeared to take into account the impact on the President’s career and his party’s prospects, and only AFTERWARDS, the good of the nation.
This is the difference between Biden’s quote and Limbaugh’s approach, and it’s a difference which made its way into the White House and the highest levels of the halls of both houses of congress, starting with Tom DeLay and the K-Street project during the late ’90s, and cemented as de-facto policy during the Bush administration. I’m sure that if you asked Rush Limbaugh, he’d probably tell you that he wants what he perceives as Obama’s across-the-board ultra-liberal policies to fail, and that’s why he says “I want him to fail.” But there’s a tiny but CRUCIAL difference, in my opinion, between saying “I think that guy’s wrong on almost everything, and I hope that we can keep some of what I regard as the worst of his policies from being enacted as-is,” or “I hope his mind can be changed before he can enact this or that policy,” and saying “I hope he fails.” The difference hinges on the fact that there’s no quarter given, no allowance made, in the latter pronouncement. I would say that MOST politicians hope that the unvarnished policies of their political opponents aren’t enacted as-is. That’s why they OPPOSE them. It’s understood. But the actual PROCESS of government involves genuine compromise, in other words: what Biden described. It involves taking a deep breath and forcing oneself to remember that these people are not the enemy, and that perhaps they might actually have some good ideas once in a while, but that in any case, in order to pass legislation of ANY kind, some compromise and willingness to work together is necessary. That doesn’t mean that “centrism” is the goal, nor does it mean that “capitulation” is necessary. I’d argue that it’s only when viewed through the increasingly popular “us-vs.-them” lens of provocateurs like Limbaugh and Coulter and others (yes, some on the left side, too – though at present, it’s far more prevalent and virulent on the right) that attempting to reach compromise is even VIEWED as “capitulation.” Only when the good of the party and its ideologically favored solutions is the primary goal does ceding ground to anyone who thinks differently become “failure” or “a loss.”
Yet, time and again, that’s what we saw during the last eight years. The 2002 AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the joint resolution which gave Bush the authority to invade Iraq) was cynically scheduled in October, only weeks before the 2002 midterms where the President (and his political advisors) knew that the Democrats in Congress would be having to face an electorate scarcely a year away from the horrible memories of 9/11; an electorate which was still very fearful, angry and uncertain. An electorate which would instinctively endorse security and a “can’t-be-too-careful” model over a nuanced geopolitical approach. Politicians from even what had been previously considered “safer” Democratic districts were suddenly faced with the dilemma of appearing to be easily-mockable ditherers, parsing words and old UNMOVIC intel reports, while “the enemy” gathered strength and prepared for yet another attack. Never mind that Iraq hadn’t attacked us and – as we learned after the war and many people even pointed out BEFORE it – wasn’t ABLE to attack us, we were in “better-safe-than-sorry” mode, “protect-the-homeland-above-all-else” mode. And anyone, especially any politician, who appeared on TV or on the hustings and tried to make the argument that perhaps fighting for democracy abroad and security at home wasn’t best served by invading a sovereign nation and occupying it for years, but instead by continuing the boring, uncertain (but, it turned out, ultimately pretty darned successful) regimen of sanctions, no-fly zones and above all, internationally-led weapons inspections, was quite easily and skillfully painted by Rove and Ken Mehlman and others from the political arm of the Bush administration as being weak-kneed and oblivious at best, and possibly even in league with America’s enemies at worst. So – to their everlasting shame – too many Democrats voted along with the President because they (probably correctly) deduced that their choice at that time, right before the elections, was either to publicly buy in to the President’s definition of national security, even if they did not fully agree with it, or be removed from office and thus from any ability to do ANY good in the future.
Similarly, in the last two years since Democrats re-took both houses of Congress, the Republican party, who as recently as three years ago when they were in the majority, were considering deploying the “nuclear option” in the Senate, to remove the ability of the Democrats to filibuster Bush’s judicial nominees, are now on record as the most filibustering session of Congress EVER, in history. Check this out, because hearing me tell it just doesn’t do it justice:
What you see is a graphical representation of the answer to your question, I think. It shows that, in the 110th Congressional session, with Democrats in charge of both houses – meaning possessing enough votes (on a strict party-line vote) to pass legislation in both houses by a simple majority – the minority GOP in the Senate used the filibuster TWICE as often as any previous session of Congress, Republican OR Democrat. The filibuster is one of the procedural tools given to ensure that the minority party is not relegated to a total lack of power and unimportant role. It was intended – and, until last term, understood – to be a tool which was used only in unusual circumstances (therefore infrequently), in which the minority party felt not only that whatever legislation was being considered was TRULY against their own core principles and also (in their opinion) harmful to the entire country, but also that the majority party was using brute force by wangling a party-line vote, rather than trying to convince Senators from both parties that their idea was a good one. I do not object to the existence of the filibuster, used properly. But, like just about anything, it can most definitely be misused. And, starting almost immediately when the Democrats ruined Karl Rove’s dream of a “permanent Republican majority” by re-taking both houses of Congress, it HAS been misused. It is now conventional wisdom that any legislation must achieve SIXTY votes in the Senate, not a simple majority of fifty one. I would argue that only a party whose leaders have come to find themselves in near-total agreement with both the policy positions and the intransigence of Rush Limbaugh – in other words, a party which most certainly governs from a philosophy of “my way or the highway” – would break with precedent and force this new reality upon not only Washington, but the entire country. I would argue that your question of “do they govern like they interview/campaign” can be answered best by the above graph, with a pretty clearly-defined “yes….starting in earnest with the GOP after 2000.”
It is my personal hope that President Obama will do what he can, by example, to roll back the tide of this very detrimental trend, rather than engaging in it himself. I hope that the Democrats in Congress will not use a dominant majority position to stampede or bully. And I hope that the GOP, in minority opposition, will not continue to stick a spanner in the gears of policy based upon partisan spite and obstruction. Based upon the number of high-level Republicans who have either been forced to publicly retract recent negative comments about Rush Limbaugh, or who’ve apparently decided proactively that their best move is to embrace him, I’m not optimistic. Want to hear something truly funny, in a horrible, Kafkaesque sort of way? Limbaugh’s ratings have traditionally gone up – waaay up – when Republicans are out of power. That’s not a hard phenomenon to understand. But it ought to give not only ordinary people and radio listeners, but especially the elected GOP representatives pause to wonder whether, despite Limbaugh’s fiery, pro-conservative and anti-Democratic/liberal rhetoric, his interests really are synonymous with their own…or the country’s. At the end of the day, politicans, whether Republican or Democrat, have to convince a majority of their district’s voters to re-elect them. And presumably, they have the interests of those voters – all of them – at heart. Limbaugh, whatever he may say on the radio, has to answer only to the executives and the advertisers, who love to put on popular shows, and make money when they do so.
There’s an old saying in politics that the best (and by that, I mean most successful) politicians are the ones who can be agreeable, even in disagreement. I think that’s a good summation of what Joe Biden was talking about: a genuinely open-handed approach which admits humility by being able to recognize that one’s self might not be the only one with good answers, and which recognizes that the guys across the aisle aren’t the devil himself, but simply people with a different idea of what would be best. President Obama referenced it a few weeks ago as the rancor over the stimulus bill reached its peak with ZERO house Republicans voting in favor of it, when he said “the majority party has to be inclusive, but the minority party has to be constructive.” I believe that we are at a point where it’s absolutely CRITICAL that we get back to such notions of governance.
Dammit, the link to the graph didn’t show up. I guess this server doesn’t allow uploaded graphics. Ah well….here’s the graph of filibusters by session of congress, and here’s the official Senate records data on cloture motions from which the graph was derived.
I can’t help but think of the movie The Distinguished Gentleman where Eddie Murphy is being told by one of his aides “If you’re for it, I can get you money from Group A, if you’re against it, I can get your money from Group B.” To which Eddie Murphy replies “If there’s that much money on both sides of every argument, how does anything ever get done?” To which the aide says “That’s the beauty of the system, nothing ever gets done.”
Here’s a question – What do you think about having more than two prominent political parties? Or no official party affiliations, just independents?
I have long been in favor of a greater diversity of political parties in the US. In fact, George Carlin used to do a joke about it. He said: “Americans, we’re supposed to be all about CHOICE. That’s what the market provides, right? Freedom of CHOICE – we get to choose everything from our doctors to our cars. But have you noticed that it seems like the degree of choice we’re offered tends to vary inversely with the IMPORTANCE of the choice? Let me give you an example. You want some ice cream? We got 31 flavors, right this way, sir. What’s that? Political parties? Sorry, just two.”
It’s not really funny, when you think about the fact that although there are dozens of parties in this country (like most everywhere else), none of them (except two) are ever taken seriously by anyone – probably not even the people IN any American political party NOT named either “Democratic” or Republican.” The closest we came lately was that pint-sized nutcake Texas billionaire, Ross Perot. But can you even remember the name of the party under which he ran his first campaign for the Presidency – the one which garnered him something like 18% of the vote, and put Bill Clinton in the White House?
If you said “The Reform Party,” then you’ve got a better memory than most people. Because that campaign wasn’t so much about people organizing together around a commonly-held set of general principles upon which a party platform or ideology was based, it was about Ross Perot. The next time around, Perot got something like 3% of the vote, more in line with some of the other notable also-rans like Pat Buchanan or Ralph Nader. And speaking of Buchanan, the next time around, HE was the Reform Party candidate, demonstrating quite clearly that the Reform Party itself didn’t have much of a hold on the public’s mind. It was more like the closest available vehicle for one (very wealthy) person’s one-time shot at the Presidency. Sort of a “vanity label” if you will, because “The Ross Perot Party” just sounded too self-important, even for a billionaire.
I actually knew several people who voted for Perot the first time, for little other reason than they were fed up with their other choices, and supported the idea of a viable third party. I actually even considered it myself, briefly. But unfortunately, when the stakes are as high as they are in a Presidential election, I can’t bring myself to vote in a way I don’t think will have a good effect. Not that I wouldn’t ever consider voting for a candidate I was sure wasn’t going to win – in fact, I did just that in 2000 when I voted for Nader. But in the case of Perot’s 1992 run, neither of the possible outcomes were ones I wanted. I don’t think anyone really seriously expected Perot to win – certainly I didn’t expect it – but in a Presidential campaign, you either win or lose. If Perot had lost, then my vote would have been “wasted” (i.e.: it would have been a vote which could have gone for or against one of the more-likely candidates, which can be important in a tight race). But if Perot had WON….well….then we’d have had Ross Perot for President. And that just wasn’t something I was interested in.
So, despite my HUGE interest in a viable third party, I just couldn’t pull the lever for ol’ jug-ears. If he’d managed to scrape out a win, it would have proven that third parties could crack the dominance of the two-party system which has been so detrimental to us for decades. But it would also have focused the world’s attention on just how well such a thing worked out in practice in the USA. In other words, if Perot had become President, and he’d made a huge mess of things – arguably worse than the other candidates might have done – people would come away from the experience thinking “sure, we can elect a third party….and they’ll proceed directly to screw things up worse than if we’d just elected one of the “usual suspects” from the D or R column. See? We should never have messed with it.”
That said, I would vote in a heartbeat for a viable third party candidate who was not too far out of line with my own political beliefs, just for the chance at getting a little freshness into the system.
Believe it or not, I actually am convinced that Obama is currently being judged in a similar manner right now: as the first black President. It’s very unfair from a purely objective standpoint, but I promise you that if Obama’s Presidency turns out to be one we look back on, collectively, and think “what a disaster,” there will be a strong (though unwritten) sentiment in American culture and politics for at least a generation that black guys can’t be good Presidents. Silly? You bet, but that won’t stop plenty of people from making that argument. And plenty of others from wondering, just perhaps, if there might be something to such a line of reasoning.