Please stop trying
by David Atkins
The President speaks:
As senior aides for President Obama and GOP rival Mitt Romney stepped up their political attacks, the president said he was frustrated that he had failed to change the toxic political atmosphere in Washington after he was elected in 2008.
“Washington feels as broken as it did four years ago,” Obama said Sunday in a taped interview on the “CBS This Morning” show.
“And if you asked me what is the one thing that has frustrated me most over the last four years, it’s not the hard work. It’s not the enormity of the decisions. It’s not the pace. It is that I haven’t been able to change the atmosphere here in Washington to reflect the decency and common sense of ordinary people – Democrats, Republicans and independents – who I think just want to see their leadership solve problems.”
He added, “There’s enough blame to go around for that.”
The President is a smart man. By now he must know that what is broken about Washington's politics cannot be fixed by goodwill, common sense, heart-to-heart meetings, or a transformative charismatic figure.
Washington is broken because corporations can bribe and intimidate even good legislators with unlimited amounts of money, because the media is more interested in balance than truth, and because about 30-40% of the country truly believes that the government's primary job is to deliver the cosmic justice of divine punishment to those lesser humans who didn't work hard enough enough to be wealthy, male, or white.
Sure, people want to see leadership solve problems. But two halves of this country tend to have very different and diametrically opposed perceptions of what those solutions should be.
Nothing much can be done about that, so it would be nice if the President would stop trying. As the President proved with the Ledbetter Act and the Affordable Care Act, you don't need to fix Washington's culture to impose your will on it. You just need a bare minimum of legislators to pass the bills. All the attempts to achieve compromise with the other side of the aisle were functionally useless. A lot of nasty concessions had to be made to various corporate interests just to get to 60 recalcitrant Senators to pass the Affordable Care Act. We might even have been able to enact single-payer if all we needed were 50 Senators.
Right now the biggest roadblock to reform is the filibuster. No matter who controls the Senate, start by killing the filibuster. It hurts us in the long run much more than it helps. Sure, it might allow some crazy Republican bills to pass, but that's a good thing. Let the people see what Republicans really do when they get the wheel. And then make the wheel just as easy to turn back in the other direction. Government would be less stable, but much more responsive. Over the long term, the Senate itself is a dysfunctional, anti-democratic institution that should probably be weakened if not gently discarded.
Once the filibuster is gone, work on campaign finance and disclosure laws to reduce the power of corporate threats and bribes. Do as much good work as possible while waiting for the older racists and misogynists to pass into the great beyond.
That would go a long way toward fixing what's wrong with Washington.
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