Why postpartisan is a bullshit codeword for "Dems roll over"

[Dominus Atheos]

Glenn Greenwald, converted from HTML using this script.

Numerous people have commented on the deeply repellent behavior from former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey on Hardball yesterday, when he appeared with Salon's Joan Walsh. You can watch the video here. After dismissively cackling every time Walsh spoke, Armey finally spat at her: "I am so damn glad that you could never be my wife, 'cause I surely wouldn't have to listen to that prattle from you every day." I want to focus on two points highlighted by this episode:

First, Dick Armey isn't some obscure, aberrational Republican. He was one of the key leaders of the so-called "Gingrich Revolution" of the 1990s, when the modern incarnation of the Republican Party fully degenerated into the crazed, primitive, regional mess that it is today. He wasn't a back-bencher. He was the Republicans' House Majority Leader for eight years -- from 1995 to 2003 (when he left Congress, failed to have his son elected to his seat, and was replaced as the GOP's House Majority Leader by Tom DeLay).

People like Dick Armey -- and Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity -- are the face of today's GOP, its heart and soul. Armey, who once notoriously referred to Barney Frank as "Barney Fag," comes from a faction -- the Texas Republican Party -- that continues to advocate formally in its 2008 Party Platform (.pdf), among so many wonderful planks, that sex between gay people be criminalized and that all gay citizens be denied the most basic rights, including even the right to adopt children and to have custody over their own children [p.12]:

We also believe that no homosexual or any individual convicted of child abuse or molestation should have the right to custody or adoption of a minor child, and that visitation by such persons with a minor child should be prohibited [p. 14]. . . .

The Texas GOP wants creationism taught in the public schools alongside evolution and given "equal treatment" [p. 17]; Guantanamo to remain opened [p. 24]; the U.S. military to remain in Iraq with no timetable for withdrawal [p. 24]; and extraordinary medical care to be denied to all prisoners except for those who can pay for it themselves [p. 19].

The party's 2008 Platform also demands that the U.S. -- this is really what it says -- "cease strong arming Israel" by pressuring them "to make future diplomatic concessions, such as giving up land to the Palestinians on the West Bank" [p. 24]. American policy towards Israel, they argue, should be "based on God's biblical promise to bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel and we further invite other nations and organizations to enjoy the benefit of that promise" [p. 24]. Armey himself, in a 2002 Hardball appearance, advocated that Palestinians should "leave" the West Bank and Gaza (which Armey believes is part of Israel) and go somewhere else. His state party's Platform also wants the U.S. to "immediately rescind our membership in, as well as financial and military contributions to, the United Nations" [p. 25] .

These are the people who have largely been in power for the last two decades and the country is in the shape one would expect it to be in as a result. That's why all of this chatter about post-partisan transcendence and trans-partisan harmony and the like is so inane.

Why would anyone think that "common ground," on any consistent basis, can be found with people like this, or that it would be beneficial to eliminate real differences in order to accommodate their views? People in this country -- like most countries -- have radically different views of things, and politics is about having those ideas compete with one another for persuasive supremacy. This compulsion to eliminate differences and disharmony in pursuit of some feel-good, trans-partisan consensus is not only futile but also destructive. Why would it be a good idea to mold one's beliefs and actions to induce the assent of the Dick Armeys and the Texas GOPs, even if that could be done?

Second, Republicans have made about as clear as possible that even though they'll pay lip service to "bipartisanship," they don't actually want that. The principal criticism Armey was launching at Joan Walsh in that Hardball segment was that she, along with most people, degrade our politics generally, and our economic debates specifically, by turning them into partisan wars. We should rise above that for the good of the country, Armey repeatedly intoned.

But please go read the email that John Cole posted last night about the stimulus package which the very same Dick "Post-Partisan" Armey was sending around on behalf of his group FreedomWorks, on the very day he was on Hardball excoriating those who want to politicize our economic debates. Armey's mass-emailed screed urges opposition to the stimulus package as nothing more than "the Left's Multi-Billion Dollar Handout to Liberal Allies."

As I've documented many times before, Beltway "bipartisanship" means that Democrats adopt as many GOP beliefs as possible so what ultimately is done resembles Republican policies as much as possible (anyone doubting that should simply review these "bipartisan" votes of the last eight years). I'm glad that the stimulus package yesterday -- which Democrats watered down and comprised on as much as possible to please Republicans -- did not attract even a single Republican vote in the House: not one.

Republicans aren't interested in "bipartisanship" except to the extent that they can force Democrats to enact their policies even though they have only a small minority thanks to being so forcefully rejected by the citizenry. And why should they be interested in bipartisanship? Why should they vote for a stimulus package that they don't support and that is anathema to what their most ardent supporters believe? It's very hard to find any virtuous attribute of the contemporary Republican Party, but one thing that can be said for them is that -- unlike Democrats, whose overarching desire in life is to please the needy harmony fetishists by adopting as many GOP views as possible -- Republicans are willing to incur criticisms by opposing what they oppose and supporting what they support.

And that's how it should be. As Atrios wrote yesterday:

If I were advising the Republicans I would've told them to vote against the stimulus package. I would tell them to make the point clearly that if they were in charge, the bill would be a different bill. They're a competing political party and they need to, you know, highlight the fact that their vision for America is actually different. I appreciate that members of both parties don't always toe the line completely, but on a bill as big as this it makes perfect sense for it to play out as it did.

Of course the flip side is that Dems should've pushed the best plan that could pass the Senate instead of pushing some pointless fantasy about bipartisanship.

Some Obama supporters will claim that the whole post-partisan song is nothing more than a political game, a super-shrewd, exotic political tactic Obama is employing in order to cast the GOP as obstructionists. But if so, that's a Beltway tactic almost as old as Obama himself. Media Broderites and The Third Way have been demanding for decades that Democrats move as close as possible to Republicans in the name of overcoming partisanship (for instance, watch as Time's Joe Klein desperately tries to convince Dick Armey himself not to view Klein as a radical who is far away from Armey, but rather, that they're both "playing between the 40-yard-lines here").

Partisan disputes happen because people are very different and have very different views. Partisanship is about advocating for your own beliefs and discrediting the beliefs that you reject and believe are harmful. This doesn't mean that these disagreements must or should break down along Republican/Democratic lines. On so many critical, contentious issues, the leadership of the two parties are in perfect harmony. Many of the worst policies are embraced by the mainstream of both parties, and the real disagreements now break down on other lines, whether it be insider/outsider or diverging socioeconomic interests or rapidly-re-aligning ideological divisions. But politics is and should be about defeating ideas -- and people -- that are discredited and destructive.

To see why that's a good thing, not a bad thing, go watch the Dick Armey video or read the platform of the Texas GOP. Or re-review what has happened over the last eight years. The further away one is from that morass, the better; the closer one is to it, the worse off things will be.



UPDATE: Those claiming that Obama has masterfully depicted the Republicans as arrogant obstructionists by extending the hand of compromise should review this latest Rasmussen Reports poll, which finds the public split almost evenly on whether they support the Obama/Democratic economic recovery package, with a clear trend towards increased opposition.

This is what happens every single time: the Democrats do everything possible to "accommodate" the Republican position and then get attacked anyway (they voted in large numbers for the Iraq War in and then got attacked for being soft on Terror in 2002; they voted for virtually every Bush "Terrorism" policy and the same thing happened, etc.). Here, they did everything possible to change their bill to please Republicans and nothing is happening except full-scale GOP opposition accompanied by a constant barrage of GOP attacks against them as big-spending, reckless, wealth-transferring liberals.

Ultimately, the success of this program will be measured by whether it produces successful results, so why shouldn't Democrats use their majority to enact the policy they think is most likely to achieve that? That's true on this issue and in general.



UPDATE II: In the media narrative, here is what Obama has to show for his efforts to change the bill in order to please Republicans.

Anyone who's been following the stimulus package will know just how much the dems have been rolling over on it, including public transit, tax cust, and contraception, but the Republicans all voted against it to a man in the house. The Wall Street Journal expains how the reason is is because the Obama and the Democrats were mean and refused to compromise on anything.

It looks like a win but feels like a loss.

The party-line vote in favor of the stimulus package could have been more, could have produced not only a more promising bill but marked the beginning of something new, not a postpartisan era (there will never be such a thing and never should be; the parties exist to fight through great political questions) but a more bipartisan one forced by crisis and marked by—well, let's call it seriousness.

President Obama could have made big history here. Instead he just got a win. It's a missed opportunity.

It's a win because of the obvious headline: Nine days after inauguration, the new president achieves a major Congressional victory, House passage of an economic stimulus bill by a vote of 244-188. It wasn't even close. This is major.

But do you know anyone, Democrat or Republican, dancing in the street over this? You don't. Because most everyone knows it isn't a good bill, and knows that its failure to receive a single Republican vote, not one, suggests the old battle lines are hardening. Back to the Crips versus the Bloods. Not very inspiring.

The president will enjoy short-term gain. In the great circle of power, to win you have to look like a winner, and to look like a winner you have to win. He did and does. But for the long term, the president made a mistake by not forcing the creation of a bill Republicans could or should have supported.

Consider the moment. House Republicans had conceded that dramatic action was needed and had grown utterly supportive of the idea of federal jobs creation on a large scale. All that was needed was a sober, seriously focused piece of legislation that honestly tried to meet the need, one that everyone could tinker with a little and claim as their own. Instead, as Rep. Mike Pence is reported to have said to the president, "Know that we're praying for you. . . . But know that there has been no negotiation [with Republicans] on the bill—we had absolutely no say." The final bill was privately agreed by most and publicly conceded by many to be a big, messy, largely off-point and philosophically chaotic piece of legislation. The Congressional Budget Office says only 25% of the money will even go out in the first year. This newspaper, in its analysis, argues that only 12 cents of every dollar is for something that could plausibly be called stimulus.

What was needed? Not pork, not payoffs, not eccentric base-pleasing, group-greasing forays into birth control as stimulus, as the speaker of the House dizzily put it before being told to remove it.

"Business as usual." "That's Washington." But in 2008 the public rejected business as usual. That rejection is part of what got Obama elected.

Instead the air of D.C. dithering continues, and this while the Labor Department reported Thursday what everyone knew was coming, increased unemployment. The number of continuing claims for unemployment insurance as of Jan. 17 was 4.78 million, the highest in the 42 years they've been keeping records. Starbucks, Time Warner, Home Depot, Pfizer: The AP's count is 125,000 layoffs since January began.

People are getting the mood of the age in their inboxes. How many emails have you received the past few months from acquaintances telling you in brisk words meant to communicate optimism and forestall pity that "it's been a great ride," but they're "moving on" to "explore new opportunities"? And there's a broad feeling one detects, a kind of psychic sense, some sort of knowledge in the collective unconscious, that we lived through magic times the past half-century, and now the nonmagic time has begun, and it won't be over next summer. That's not the way it will work. It will last a while.

There's a sense among many, certainly here in New York, that we somehow had it too good too long, a feeling part Puritan, part mystic and obscurely guilty, that some bill is coming due. Hard to get a stimulus package that addresses that. (The guilt was part of the power of Blago. He's the last American who doesn't feel guilt. He thinks something is moral because he did it. He's like a good-natured Idi Amin, up there yammering about how he's a poor boy who only wanted to protect the people of Chicago from the flu. You wish you could believe it! You wish he really were what he is in his imagination, a hero battling dark forces against the odds.)

I think there is an illness called Goldmansachs Head. I think it's in the DSM. When you have Goldmansachs Head, the party's never over. You take private planes to ask for bailout money, you entertain customers at high-end spas while your writers prep your testimony, you take and give huge bonuses as the company tanks. When you take the kids camping, you bring a private chef. Goldmansachs Head is Bernie Madoff complaining he's feeling cooped up in the penthouse. It is the delusion that the old days continue and the old ways prevail and you, Prince of the Abundance, can just keep rolling along. Here is how you know if someone has GSH: He has everything but a watch. He doesn't know what time it is.

I remember the father in the movie script of "Dr. Zhivago," inviting what's left of his family, huddled in rooms in what had been their mansion, picking up the stump of a stogie and inviting them to watch the lighting of "the last cigar in Moscow."

When you have GSH, you never think it's the last cigar.

But you don't have to be on Wall Street to have GSH. Congress has it too. That's what the stimulus bill was about—not knowing what time it is, not knowing the old pork-barrel, group-greasing ways are over, done, embarrassing. When you create a bill like that, it doesn't mean you're a pro, it doesn't mean you're a tough, no-nonsense pol. It means you're a slob.

That's how the Democratic establishment in the House looks, not like people who are responding to a crisis, or even like people who are ignoring a crisis, but people who are using a crisis. Our hopeful, compelling new president shouldn't have gone with this bill. He made news this week by going to the House to meet with Republicans. He could have made history by listening to them.

A final point: In the time since his inauguration, Mr. Obama has been on every screen in the country, TV and computer, every day. He is never not on the screen. I know what his people are thinking: Put his image on the age. Imprint the era with his face. But it's already reaching saturation point. When the office is omnipresent, it is demystified. Constant exposure deflates the presidency, subtly robbing it of power and making it more common. I keep the television on a lot, and somewhere in the 1990s I realized that Bill Clinton was never not in my living room. He was always strolling onto the stage, pointing at things, laughing, talking. This is what the Obama people are doing, having the boss hog the screen. They should relax. The race is long.

As a matter of fact, they should focus on that: The race is long. Run seriously.

So everyone should remember: Whenever you hear anyone talking about "bipartisanship" or "post-partisanship", it really means "The Democrats need to bend over and take it up the ass. If they don't they're being partisan."

[Crossroads Inc.]

Fuck the Dems...fuck them in their spineless limp asses... Seriously, You steam roll the GOP you get a president, senate, and you STILL roll over and take it up the ass, Cutting Transit, Health care, Family planning? everything we've been screaming for, for years? Fuck you Dems!

[Fire Fly]

The problem is that there are a large number of very conservative Dems who replaced their GOP counterpart, the Dems are still afraid of being labeled as liberal (I don't think they've really recovered from the trauma and drama of the 2000, 2002, and 2004 losses), the Dems are too afraid to take risks, and they have very poor leadership. If the Dems really wanted to shake things up, they'd toss out Harry Reid. He comes from a pretty toss up state and thus he tends to roll over for the GOP on many issues. I don't understand why they keep selecting Senate leaders from relatively conservative states (Tom Daschle comes to mind); they ought to pick someone safe who is from a more liberal leaning state and who is wiling to charge head on. The great skill of the GOP is that they can project themselves to be larger when they really don't have a lot of power. I don't think they've really learned anything from their past losses and victories. Ever since L.B. Johnson, the Dems have been short on guts and ideas I think.

[ray245]

Wait, I thought that Obama still needs the support from a number of Senate Republicans for the bill to be approved? What tactics can the Democrats do, in order to bully the Republicans into supporting the bill?

Label the Republicans as anti-American?

[Zablorg]

Wait, I thought that Obama still needs the support from a number of Senate Republicans for the bill to be approved? What tactics can the Democrats do, in order to bully the Republicans into supporting the bill?

Label the Republicans as anti-American?

I think the point is that they're not. Despite being in office, the Dems are still allowing themselves to be bullied like this, which is stupid and dissapointing.

[Knife]

lol, bullied? They added stuff in a bill that was more or less designed to be negotiation points and pulled them to look good and you're bitching they're gutless? Come on.

Granted, I'd like to see Pelosi and Reid canned from their positions, they both come off as nothing but ineffective political operators in it for the lime light.

[Pablo Sanchez]

If the Dems really wanted to shake things up, they'd toss out Harry Reid. He comes from a pretty toss up state and thus he tends to roll over for the GOP on many issues. I don't understand why they keep selecting Senate leaders from relatively conservative states (Tom Daschle comes to mind);

You're confusing cause and effect, I'm pretty sure they select Senate leaders from conservative states because of an already existing desire to triangulate towards the middle. I think the cause may be that, although in the national party organization the odious Democratic Leadership Council (the Clintonian arch-wafflers who led the Democratic Party from one defeat to another for a solid decade) are discredited and out of power because of Dean's and Obama's successes, the party structure in the Senate and House is still run on their principles because the senior membership is all... senior.

lol, bullied? They added stuff in a bill that was more or less designed to be negotiation points and pulled them to look good and you're bitching they're gutless? Come on.

Even if they were designed as negotiation points to make the GOP look like assholes, I still have two problems with it. One, it doesn't work, as Greenwald pointed out in his updates at the bottom of that post, and two, the provisions dropped were all ideas that we could actually use. Hopefully Obama will learn from this experience and move from trying to create a post-partisan consensus in the House and Senate, and move towards trying to do it on the national stage by marginalizing the GOP and showing them to have no ideas and no function.

I mean, seriously, all the GOP could think of for their alternative to the stimulus plan was "durrh... more tax cuts?"

[Knife]

That might be so, however if you look back at Bush and I do believe Clinton, they all seemed to want to be bipartisan at the beginning of their terms. Whether for political reasons or just plain dumb optimism. IDK.

[Knife]

Ultimately, what I think I find humorous about this is it is pretty much politics as usual. Maybe not the policies, but the mechanism behind them. Obama didn't run on changing the system rather changing the policies. Why are you, and the OP, surprised when they continue to play the same game?

The only way Obama has even tried to change the mechanism was his stance on lobbyists and even then he still has some in his administration. Nice first step to ban current officials from coming right back to by lobbyists but in no way changes all of it. He wants to look bipartisan, Congress puts crap in bill that they really don't care if it gets passed as part of this bill, opposition throws shit fit, they take em out and look the better for it. Same old same old. Except you're surprised by it.

[Pablo Sanchez]

That might be so, however if you look back at Bush and I do believe Clinton, they all seemed to want to be bipartisan at the beginning of their terms. Whether for political reasons or just plain dumb optimism. IDK.

With Clinton, I think he actually would have liked to be bipartisan but he didn't have much opportunity, because the GOP took the House in 1994 and went totally batshit (it's present condition). With Bush, it was clearly a front even from the very beginning, something he thought people wanted to hear. To an extent people do want to hear it, but I think that American's could learn something from other countries, where major parties actually try to represent themselves as alternatives to one another, instead of racing to claim an imagined "middle majority" of voters.

Except you're surprised by it.

Except I didn't say that I was surprised by it, because I'm not.

[Duckie]

It's surprising because in the exchange, the Democrats got rid of useful parts of the bill, Obama met and compromised with the Republicans, and then the Republicans all voted against it, leading to headlines about how Obama failed.

A standard political tool it might be, but it's supposed to make the minority party look bad, not cripple the bill and make the people in charge look powerless.

[Pablo Sanchez]

It's surprising because in the exchange, the Democrats got rid of useful parts of the bill, Obama met and compromised with the Republicans, and then the Republicans all voted against it, leading to headlines about how Obama failed.

It's not "surprising" because it follows the pattern that both parties have established for more than a decade. The Democratic party is way more interested in compromise than the GOP and gives up some stuff, then the House GOP votes against whatever the bill was with lockstep unity and thus gets some part of what it wants without giving up anything. This has been especially pronounced, and infuriating, since the 2006 elections, and the major change is that the House GOP no longer has the votes to filibuster, which is splendid. They don't just represent the GOP, a useless party with no ideas, they're the arch-conservative rump of that party.

There are two lessons that Democrats and Obama need to take away from this. First is that the House Republicans don't want to be post-partisan--for fuck's sake, they don't even want America to succeed if it means they're wrong. So fuck them, you don't need them. Concentrate on splitting just a couple of Senate Republicans and government will continue running. Second, the media narrative is not friendly to this kind of triangulating maneuver, so don't even bother. Look strong and decisive and get work done. Ask the Republicans for ideas now and then, so as to expose these shitty ideas to ridicule. But don't worry about what they want, since it's not what Americans voted for.

[HamsterViking]