I realize this piece was mentioned a couple of times yesterday, but ... not with the force necessary. For this truly is one of the most amazing columns ever. I literally laughed and nearly literally cried. It's tragic, and comic, and disgusting, and sad. I've just ... well, I've never seen anything quite like it. It's like an era passing, a world ending with a whimper in the form of a mailed-in column by a man who doesn't realize his time is up, the pundit version of a crank on the street talking about how he used to walk to school barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways. And it just says volumes about the charade known as the Iraq Study Group.
I'm speaking, of course, of David Broder ...
Well, let's jump right into the bracing first paragraph:
Whatever the final impact of the Iraq Study Group report being issued today, for the 10 commission members this was an exhilarating experience, a demonstration of genuine bipartisanship that they hope will serve as an example to the broader political world.
Mmmm-kay. Sure. Because the fact that this was an exhilarating experience matters so much more than the final impact of the report. Amazing how the actual real-world impact is tossed aside so casually.
The column goes on to celebrate how Bipartisaon it wall was, and how everyone on it was a "professional" and how the commission members were all Old (literally) and Wise, blah, blah. The usual stuff, only taken to an extreme so refined it is farce with a self-congratulatory tone that really has to be seen to be believed.
Leon Panetta, a former Democratic congressman and Clinton White House chief of staff, said the high average age of the 10 commission members contributed to its success. "This is a different generation of policymakers," said Panetta, who at 68 was one of the youngest members. "These are people who have very different views but are comfortable trying to understand each other and coming together to solve a terrible issue facing the country."
Little Leon Panetta, the young buck of the commission at 68, lectures all the younger generations. "This is how it's done, sonny," he says. "You little shits don't know how to do this thing. You never did, ever since you did that whole free love or stuff deer heads into mailboxes craziness, depending on which side you were on."
Despite all the goodwill, several of the members recounted that toward the end of their deliberations, one commissioner -- not someone who had served in Congress, they noted -- said he would not sign the report if one part was not removed.
James A. Baker III, the former Republican secretary of state, glanced at his co-chairman, former Democratic representative Lee Hamilton, and calmly said to the dissenter, "Okay, don't."
A little later, others recalled, the dissenting member asked to return to the disputed passage and, in short order, agreed to slightly modified language.
"No one wanted to see us embarrassed by being unable to come to consensus," Simpson said.
Yes, because embarrassment of the Old Men (and Woman) is a Very Important Consideration. But did you see how the ol' Velvet Hammer put down that dissenter? Boyo, he showed him! And, faced with ostracizement from the Very Important Consensus, that person came crawling back, abashed at stepping out of line.
And there's the nutgraph, so to speak. It's there that the column turns. Because that's the whole problem here. These guys (Broder, especially) are living in a world where membership into their little club of Very Important and Serious People is the end-all and be-all of ambitions. If you are out of the club, you are nothing. But, guys (and gal), the world just isn't like that. Bush doesn't give a shit if he belongs to your little club and that's one of the few things he's in the mainstream on. And, yeah, I ended a sentence with a preposition ... whaddya gonna do about it?
And from there, the column just becomes a satire, an unaware mocking of a world gone by.
Panetta observed that while most of the commission members had had some dealings with each other in their previous positions, they really bonded during their inspection trip to Baghdad earlier this year. "Fifteen hours on the plane together and three days in a tough place -- that was a human experience where we shared a lot and really got to know each other," he said.
Fifteen hours in a plane and three days being ferried around in armored limos. I wouldn't exactly call that "foxhole bonding." I mean, I guess it's not Davos, so it's all relative, right? While they pat themselves on the back and ruminate on the bonding experience of fact-finding trips, millions of Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of Americans are living in a hell in which they wouldn't last five minutes. Are they really this out of touch?
When I asked the commission members whether they thought their experience of coming to agreement could serve as an example to others, the answers were emphatic.
"Hopefully," Jordan said, "the House and Senate and both political parties will be instructed by our process. In the rollout, we're going to try to provide that example. I'll be going around with Ed Meese," the former Republican attorney general, "and there will be other bipartisan pairs, led by Baker and Hamilton."
Vernon Jordan and Ed Meese ... if they can come together, who can't? And everyone else can be "instructed by our process." These folks have lived in a rarified world for so long, they don't realize that the differences they see in each other are mere surface differences that are close to indistinguishable to the rest of us. It's like watching two penquins lecture me on overcoming differences. Um, Vernon, I can't tell you folks apart while your limos speed by ... skin color doesn't make a difference when all your windows are tinted.
When I put the question to Panetta, he said, "Our forefathers intended that a process like this work for people elected to office -- the president and members of Congress in both the House and Senate. They believed they would come from different places but ultimately find consensus -- that was the Miracle of Philadelphia," the compromise that produced the Constitution.
"What's unusual now is their contracting out to people like us a job that elected officials are supposed to do -- finding consensus on difficult issues. I hope this will be a lesson to them; otherwise, we're in for continued trench warfare."
Wow. Just ... wow. I'm speechless. Did he just compare the Iraq Survey Group to the Constitutional Convention?
Simpson was even more expansive. "This could be an example, not only of how to handle Iraq, but it could apply to immigration, Social Security and all those other things that have been hung up for so long. That's what this last election said: Get serious and get your work done."
I hope Washington is listening.
Actually, I thought the message of the last election was: stop being right-wing assholes. But I'll concede that that was just me.
But here's the point: the Iraq Study Group didn't solve a goddamn thing. They are so enamored of their process and consensus that they just don't see that the world changed. None of their recommendations are bold or interesting. If you gave me a couple days and told me, "Come up with a boring, pale distillation of what the Conventional Wisdom would come up with as a plan for Iraq," I would come up with something almost exactly like the Executive Summary I read.
But they try so hard, and in between the rage I feel toward the hideousness of their self-regard, I must confess to feeling just a little bit of melancholy. The myth of a bipartisan, wise consensus that can lead us out of the mess we find ourselves is a comforting one. It's like sitting in the backseat of the car lost on a family trip with your parents holding the map. You know you don't have to worry because they'll figure out where we're going. And for some, like David Broder I guess, that fantasy has lingered. And seeing it ... well, it's like watching the end of a Shakespeare tragedy. They deserve what the irrelevance that's theirs, but ... there's still a certain melancholy to the whole thing.
But, we're all grown-ups now, and I gave up the myth of the Infallible Bipartisan Consensus years ago. And The Wise Men of Washington have been utterly destroyed by the incredibly destructive force of nature known as the George W. Bush Administration. Bush and his folks gave the final blow to the world that came before, the world of Consensus Building and Calm Deliberation. They crumbled the foundations of all the assumptions that made that world tick, the unspoken rules of decorum, the shared morality of American politics, and the political niceties of seniority and reverance for the inner sanctum of the annointed. And the David Broders of the world who try to bring it back have about as much relevance as someone pining for the return of abstinence-until-marriage. Those days are gone.
Just watch. The Iraq Study Group report will fade far faster than anyone suspected. In a matter of weeks, it'll no longer be a major touch-stone of the debate. In fact, after the holidays, it may make barely an appearance into the New Year, and if it does, it'll only be as a rhetorical device by some folks or another. Because the days where the recommendations of careful, insider bipartisanship had any relevance are gone. The abdication of that world to George W. Bush came in 2002 and 2003, and there's nothing they can do to bring back their position now.
Wars change countries in very unpredictable ways. It can never be controlled and channeled. And, while the Iraq War is not a large one in the context of other wars this country has fought, its effect on the psyche of the nation will exceed wars many times its size in casualties and divisions engaged. I'm not sure what exactly where heading toward, I don't have any idea if it will be fairly good or incredibly bad (the range of possible I see), but I do know one thing: the world of James Baker and Lee Hamilton is gone forever.
David Broder and the Iraq Study Group are horse-n-buggy riders in the age of automobiles.