Fareed Zakaria, in Newsweek, has a bit about bipartisanship and how it would, you know, be nice to have it. Several things jump out, here...
During the 1980s, the United States tackled many of the problems it faced through bipartisan compromises. The government passed a massive tax reform, with Ronald Reagan and Democrat Dan Rostenkowski championing the bill. It revamped Social Security and passed immigration reform, as well as a series of trade deals—all with strong bipartisan support. These policies were crucial in setting the stage for two decades of strong economic growth. [...]
"With the end of the cold war, we saw a new, destructive kind of partisanship," says David Gergen, who has worked in Republican and Democratic White Houses. "And for much of the past decade, we've kicked the can down the road on our big problems." Some of this is because of the narrowcasting of American politics, a process in which the extreme ends of the spectrum have been magnified and the center gets lost.
Without getting into a discussion of the value of the Reagan years, the difference between then and more recent history, of course, is that Reagan had to compromise with Democrats to get anything at all done. And, in cases both good and bad, he did. The difference between then and "much of the past decade" is that "much of the past decade" has seen unilateral control of all branches of government by the same party. So if we've "kicked the can down the road" on our problems -- and I can't believe I'm honestly having to draw a freakin' map, here -- what honestly do you think that means?
And I also have to disagree on the premise that the extremes of the political spectrum have been magnified, losing the center; I think that is a fundamental misdiagnosis. I think one extreme of the political spectrum has been magnified. I'll grant you that both extremes have been magnified if you can look at Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, etc., etc., etc., and the entirety of Fox News and give me an even remotely equivalent number of hyperpartisan Democratic pundits on the airwaves. I'll wait. And no, Ward F---ing Churchill does not count.
If you're going to diagnose the problem, at least have the decency to do it based on the objective evidence. One party is reflected with disproportionate hyperpartisanship in the media. Not both. Even if you were to accept the canard that the entire news industry is secretly liberal merely through their own existence, being "secretly" for one party is a far stretch from overt hyperpartisanship for that party.
Part of it, Gergen argues, is generational. "I have a distinct memory that the World War II generation really put country ahead of party. That is simply not the case with the generation in power now."
These odes to a new bipartisanship always feel like a lot of squirming to avoid a rather fundamental point; when the Republicans controlled the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, they compromised on nothing. They didn't need to, so they didn't. This certainly could be obliquely what Gergen refers to, when he says "much of the past decade" and "the generation in power now." But golly gee, you'd be hard pressed to pry that meaning out of such a milquetoast, darn-both-parties piece of rhetoric.
Ironically, the American public seems to understand the point quite well; they've started voting Republicans out in droves. Nonetheless, the only place bipartisanship seems truly omnipresent is in punditry, where everyone wants it, everyone is sad it hasn't been happening, and you'll apparently be put in a box and dropped to the bottom of the sea if you dare mention, even in passing, that this new "tone in Washington" is in fact a product of the Republican "revolution".
You can't compare the militantly partisan (to the point of criminal) antics of a Tom DeLay to, say, a Tom Daschle. Doesn't freaking work. You can't look at the politicization of the Department of Justice by the Bush Administration and say "ah, well, either party would have done it." No, either party did not do it. That's sort of the reason it's a giant scandal (though you wouldn't have known it, from the initial press non-coverage.)
There seems to be a taboo against stating the obvious; the lack of bipartisanship was a conscious political decision by one party. Apparently bipartisanship in the press, though, means we're not allowed to analyze the objective history of the last decade, and only deplore the outcome in mealy-mouthed, tsking abstractions. On one side, we have Grover Norquist saying bipartisanship was just another word for date rape; we're never allowed to mention that. In the press, forcing supremely and monolithically partisan actions is praised as "playing hardball" -- nobody criticizes the partisanship when they're watching it happen, they only mutter about bipartisanship afterwards, and abstractly, and with no concrete examples (because the concrete examples would -- gasp -- not reflect equally badly on both parties.)
So here's a gentle admonition to the "centrist" press, figures like Zakaria and Gergen and countless others. Being a "centrist" is not equivalent to being an idiot. You're allowed to cast blame if blame needs to be cast, and it would help enormously to do so. If you are really interested in bipartisanship, it would have helped to mention it at any point in the last ten years when these things were actively going on.
Personally, though, I think the argument that we were less partisan in previous generations to be bunk. It is another edition of wistful Leave It To Beaverness, in which we forget all the bad things and wistfully wish for a time when everybody was drinking lemonade on their back porch and politics was civilized and the worst things anyone ever did were back-sass their elders and get stuck in giant soup bowls. There were crooks then, same as now; there were political machines, same as now; there were radical shifts of power as the American people figured out that maybe one party was considerably more to blame for things than some other party . Same as now.
