A nice distillation to send to your "bipartisan" friend
by David Atkins
Regular readers of progressive blogs won't find anything in it that Digby, I and others haven't been saying for years now, but this piece in The Prospect provides a nice, concise distillation of the argument that both sides aren't in fact to blame for government gridlock, and that the Democratic Party has gone way out of its way to enact "centrist" policy. Also, the article is from a "respectable" source, so if you have a a bipartisan fetishist friend, it might have more credibility for them than some link from Hullabaloo, Greenwald or DailyKos. Here's a taste:
For two years, President Barack Obama struggled to build a biparisan consensus around deficit reduction. The Affordable Care Act was built on conservative ideas, and pitched as a move toward fiscal sustainability. Independent projections bear that out—over the next decade, it’s projected to reduce the deficit by more than $1 trillion, making it the largest deficit-reduction package since 1993, when Democrats under Bill Clinton passed a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts that began to bring the budget into balance.
In 2010, Republican opposition to tax hikes led Obama to extend the Bush tax cuts over liberals' objections, and last year, Obama—with the support of top Democrats—tried desperately to reach a “grand bargain” over deficit reduction with House Maority Leader John Boehner and the rest of the Republican leadership. But GOP opposition to tax increases—Boehner refused to trade Medicare cuts for tax increases on the wealthy—meant that these talks were bound to fail.
The Democratic Party isn’t perfect—or even particularly good—but it’s unfair to say that the United States has “irresponsible” political leadership, or that the political class is lacking as a whole. Over the last three years, Democrats have passed bills to achieve universal health coverage, reform the financial sector, bring carbon emissions under control, and save the economy from a second Great Depression. Deficits have receded to the background, but it remains true that only Democrats have been behind partisan deficit reduction—in 1993 and 2010.
If there’s a problem in American politics, it’s the Republican Party, whose theological devotion to to tax cuts and “small government” has destroyed our finances—both Reagan and George W. Bush were responsible for huge explosions of debt—and made bipartisan cooperation impossible. Our government is dysfunctional, but the pox isn’t on both houses, and the media’s quest to ignore that fact has only exacerbated the problem.
I would argue that more and more of the political class is starting to wake up to this. The Murdoch media empire is reeling from its own lawbreaking with increasing numbers willing to call it out as severely problematic. NPR's new ethics guidelines to pay more attention to truth than balance are a culmination of years of bitter progressive complaints.
But it's still a long, slow road toward making opinion drivers see the obvious reality of the situation. One might argue that they do see it, and they're all corrupt because their financial interests depend on it. Maybe, but that's not the case with most of the bipartisan fetishists in politics that I know. The local media and political people I fight and struggle with routinely on this issue seem to believe that partisanship is evil and both sides are to blame almost as a religious principle, with no corruption at all (careerist Linda Parks excepted.) There are a lot of people out there who just don't want to believe that one side is to blame, because then they would be awful tribal partisans. There is a holier-than-thou superiority complex that comes from taking a "principled" stand against partisanship.
So if you know people like that, send them the Prospect article. Post it up on your preferred social media. Keep chipping away at this meme until it finally sinks in.
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