Adam Nagourney’s Sunday New York Times op-ed of March 26, 2007, Perks and Perils of a Heavy Gavel, perpetuates an errant view of our current political moment.
Two things to remember are the elements of the public will. One is which way the people allow their attention to be directed at the moment. It is the product of a battle of the marketing wiz-kids and political gurus, and it produces short term swings in public perceptions. This was the source of the "Republican Revolution" of the 90s.
The other is the core, foundational beliefs of the majority of American people, what ideas they will support – when the alternatives are considered on an instinctive basis, and presented in the non-partisan context – in the long run. This is the source of lasting American alignment with liberal sentiment and policy.
The first gives us the spectacle of partisan pendulum swings, given a helping push by the most successful ad men of the moment, or the effect of the thumb on the scales by the party in power. Over time there seems to be some degree of left-right symmetry in this arena as the pendulum describes its arc.
The second shifts much less, and more slowly over time. Historically, this gut feeling of Americans has over the last 100 to 150 years has been gradually and steadily in the liberal direction, as evidenced by our movement for civil and human rights, pursuit scientific discovery and progress, and our cherishing of personal freedom of conscience and action. When polling is not couched in the favored marketing terms of the moment, America is a liberal society. We want to live our lives by our own lights, and let others do likewise. We generally support the availability of birth control, and other access to reproductive freedom, including legal and safe abortion. We want the government to participate in securing our well being in matters of health, education, and welfare. We want to assist our citizens in accessing opportunity. We want to be protected from excessive government intrusion into the privacy of our communication, and excessive corporate control of our fate in the name of reckless profiteering. We want our government to aid in protecting our freedom of expression. Americans seek a benevolent role in co-operative global foreign policy. These feelings are confirmed in opinion polling over the long term.
In asking how far the Democratic majority can go in their chosen direction, Nagourney says
Democrats clearly have some leeway to go at least as far as they have gone, if not further.
Well, leeway indicates the potential range of political action of which we will approve. "As far as we have gone" already, is not leeway – it’s what we are certain will be accepted at a minimum, as proven by the fact that we are gone that far without significant restraint by public sentiment. The "leeway" is beyond that – how far beyond is a fair enough question, but where we are, and the direction in which the Democratic majority is going at this moment, obviously has the public’s approval.
Nagourney further warns
There is a recent history of aggressive Congressional majorities paying a price for being overly confrontational. The Republican Congress that impeached President Bill Clinton went on to lose five seats in the midterm elections.
This ignores the fact that the contemporary opinion at the time was decidedly against that impeachment. Republicans went as far as their clever marketing would allow, but then left the public’s opinion in the dust at impeachment, ultimately elbowing past the people’s sympathies in the GOP’s partisan march into the sea of presidential removal. The people, simply put, wanted none of that.
Nagourney then quotes James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University:
Democrats...have to show they can govern. They have to show they can do more than investigate and push back on the president.
Here the argument slips away from demonstrable gut beliefs of the people. The Americans in general do not want torture. They do not want a politicized system of justice which will have us raise our hands to swear party identity, rather than allegiance to truth and justice. The people want a balanced government which incorporates the checks and balances which have been the traditional touchstone of our freedom and self-governance. We don’t want bloody military adventurism unleashed at the behest of giant, monied, global corporatist interests like Cheney’s Halliburton and Bush’s pals at Enron. We want our aggression turned against the true threats to our democratic way, not against our own, committed, loyal, troops in the trenches of intelligence.
The neo-conservative Republican political movement blew it when they tried to drag us into battles which were not mandated by the modern American’s core beliefs. The might of the heedless, hubristic, win-at-all-costs GOP machine was carried on its momentum well past what Americans truly want of their government.
Nagourney quotes Rich Galen, a Republican consultant, saying
"We got so focused on impeachment that voters got sick of it,"
"The danger comes if there becomes this sense that they are being truculent for the sake of being truculent,"
But it wasn’t the degree of focus on their party’s political course that voters were sick of, it was the whole witch hunt that they fomented in, and with the aid of their friends in, the media. Voters don’t consider a return to fostering their long term policy beliefs to be" truculence for the sake of truculence", they consider this to be getting our nation back on the course that truly has the people’s long term, core support.
Nagourney then queries whether
"Democrats would bow to a small segment of liberal voters ... for ... impeachment"
through the voice of "centrist" Democrat Rahm Emmanuel - "That’s not going to happen," he said. "Forget it."
But now we are seeing that it is not just a small fringe of voters who want an end to Mr. Bush’s policy helmsmanship. Two thirds of voters oppose the Bush/neo-con/Republican war in Iraq. Overwhelming public identity is with the views which are in direct opposition to nearly every Bush stand on policy and style of governance. We are nowhere near the limits of public opposition to what George W Bush wants to do - with government, and to us all.
The GOP seeded their destruction when they struck out in a determined direction that we the people did not wish to go. Marketing may have created distractions from our central direction, and may have served us a lovely chocolate covered dessert; as we have discovered the rotten meat in the dessert's center, we want none of it. Americans are much more basically determined to resist Bushist Republican government than they were to do a partisan dumpster dive into Bill Clinton’s personal life.
The punditocracy tends to "report" the cautiousness of the centrist sliver, an excessive caution born of the centrist faith in the punditocracy’s flawed peception of real America’s real beliefs. This dog should stop chasing its tail.
The majority of Americans, even including prominent Republicans and traditional conservatives such as Chuck Hagel and Arlen Specter, Bob Barr and Bruce Fein, believe that the Democrats have not gone nearly far enough in hosing out the corruption and perversion of the national will which Mr. Bush and his venal horde have perpetrated upon America and the world.