I recently wrote about how, despite a seismic shift that has brought about the mainstreaming of positions and policies formerly considered “left wing,” the traditional media continue to insist on promoting the idea that on almost every issue the truth is to be found smack dab in the bipartisan middle.
This weekend, the Wall Street Journal served up a classic example of this wrongheaded conventional wisdom, a lengthy piece entitled “America’s Race to the Middle,” by John Harwood and Gerald Seib.
I was handed the Journal on my Saturday flight from New York to San Francisco on United Airlines. And the Harwood/Seib piece was so out of touch with the current zeitgeist that I found myself repeatedly checking the date at the top of the page to make sure the flight attendant hadn’t mistakenly given me a paper that someone had left on the plane a decade ago.
The piece starts off by rightly noting the public’s “hunger for change” and “major reforms.” But the authors then argue that the cause of this hunger is the fact that “the two parties have moved further apart on the ideological spectrum,” resulting in “party fatigue.”
Excuse me? The reason 82 percent of the public thinks the country is on the wrong track is because of “party fatigue”? This is beyond parody. Might it not have something to do with the Iraq
war, the sputtering economy, the price of gas, skyrocketing foreclosures, and the way the Bush administration has systematically shredded the Constitution and abandoned the moral high ground?
Wasn’t the Iraq war the crowning example of bipartisanship during the Bush era? And we know how well that bipartisanship worked out. Actually, what is tragic is that, in the run-up to the war, we didn’t have more of the “gridlock” Harwood and Seib decry. A lot of people are dead because of the bipartisanship that Harwood and Seib venerate.
And it’s not just Harwood and Seib, but two of the people they turn to in order to buttress their case — Karl Rove and former RNC chair Ken Mehlman. “Both parties,” Mehlman says, “having accomplished the big things that they set out to do, fight over the small things.” Yeah, small things like that little fracas going on over in Iraq. Or the collapsing housing market. Or 45 million people without health insurance.
The solution? According to Harwood and Seib, the answer is quite simple: Politicians from different parties need to hang out more. I’m not kidding. The problem is that “fewer lawmakers from opposing sides actually live in Washington, where they and their families might get better acquainted and engage in the natural human inclination to compromise with a friend.”
|
