Ezra Klein has inadvertently provided a vital clue to the misunderstanding between our president and his core supporters, by revealing that "politics as usual" means something different to the president (and to Ezra) than to many of us who agree it should end — it's an entirely different "it":
Perhaps the final and most conclusive evidence that the strategy had failed came last week, when Democrats lost special elections in Nevada and New York. Both seats were winnable for the Democrats. Both were lost to candidates who focused most of their fire on the president. It was a far cry from the special election in May, when Democrat Kathy Hochul picked up a Republican-leaning seat by hammering her opponent’s support for Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare-slashing budget.
The White House could have been hammering that message since the day the House Republican Conference passed Ryan’s budget. They didn’t. The truth is, they didn’t want to. The president doesn’t think of himself as that kind of Democrat. He believes that there are sensible cuts that can be made to both Medicare and Social Security. He would like to win by governing effectively, by cutting deals with the other party, by making Washington work. He doesn’t want to run a generic Democratic campaign hammering Republicans for being willing to cut Medicare even as they cut taxes on the rich.
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That isn’t how the White House would prefer to govern. It’s not how they would prefer to campaign. It is, let’s admit it, politics-as-usual. It’s the triumph of the old way of doing things, an admission that Washington proved too hard to change. But it’s also the only option they have left.
What Obama meant when he said "the end of politics as usual" is entirely different from what we, the people, heard. In Obama's mind, if Ezra is right, "politics as usual" is leaders standing firm for their beliefs, and the core values of their constituencies, with the two major parties often taking strongly contrasting positions. In the minds of those of us listening, "politics as usual" is leaders of both parties putting the interests of the rich and powerful ahead of the interests of the rest of us.
Since each party has its own constituency among the rich and powerful, the Obama approach was to find a middle ground that could please the entirety of the rich and powerful, a grand compromise in which the parties would no longer stand in anything like strong opposition, but would instead unite in serving the primary source of their donations, and social peers.
What we, the people, hear in "the end of politics as usual" is something far different: No more pandering to the rich and powerful. A Democratic party which stands uncompromised, and shakes off the taint of corruption. A Republican party left to either reform and join the march to a worthy future, or fade into oblivion. We know this ideal will never be realized in an utterly pure form, but also know we can be many miles closer to its realization than we've yet gone, and the direction is worth pursuing.