In defense of politics

June 25, 2007

I know I’ve been picking on David Broder quite a bit — perhaps too much — the past several months, but part of me singles him out because I expect better from him. I could pick on Sean Hannity, but what would be the point? Hannity commands no respect and isn’t taken seriously; Broder is the dean of the DC media establishment. The prior is a clown; the latter is held in high esteem.

Which is why his work of late is so troubling. Consider this gem from Broder’s column yesterday.

More than that, there is a palpable hunger among the public for someone who will attack the problems facing the country — the war in Iraq, immigration, energy, health care — and not worry about the politics.

Also yesterday, Broder shared these words of wisdom on Meet the Press.

“Well, the Democrats have taken the position that they now will do with the nation’s business. And if they’re not doing that business, and clearly the immigration issue is very much on people’s mind, I think they will suffer the same consequences that the Republicans suffered a year ago. People are fed up with seeing Washington bickering, fighting, infighting and never dealing with the issue.”

Sure, it all sounds very nice. What’s not to like? Broder wants leaders who won’t “worry about politics” and will “do the nation’s business.” What a great idea! Why didn’t anyone else think of this?

Broder probably hasn’t thought about this way, but he’s actually showing a certain disdain for politics. Through overly-simplified analysis, he’s suggesting that all policy problems have a solution, and were it not for the political process, leaders would get together to embrace that solution.

None of this makes any sense.

Consider Broder’s take on immigration. He’s never actually explained what he’d like Congress to do about immigration; he just thinks lawmakers should do “something.”

But therein lies the rub: immigration policy is kind of complicated, and different people want it “fixed” in different ways. Broder’s position seems to be, “Fix the problem by passing a new policy.” But which policy? What’s the “problem” that needs fixing? Does Broder blame Senate Dems because they didn’t pass Bush’s bill, or because they didn’t embrace a more conservative approach to the issue? Broder doesn’t say; he’s just “fed up.”

The same with his column. Broder is in the midst of a desperate search for someone who’ll step up and “attack” problems such as the war, energy policy, and health care. How should leaders attack them? He doesn’t say; just wants someone to do something. Whether that “something” is a good idea seems entirely inconsequential.

This is political analysis at its most unsophisticated. It implicitly suggests political differences are meaningless and unsubstantial, which is absurd.

Well-intentioned, intellectually-serious, honest political observers look at these complex questions differently, and recommend competing solutions. Some ideas are better than others. It’s the height of laziness to dismiss these differences as trivia, and throw up one’s arms to demand an undefined progress.

Jonathan Chait laments the Broderization of American politics.

Bloomberg has … become the most prominent example of what you could call partisanship scolds. These are people who believe that disagreement is the central problem in U.S. politics, that both parties are to blame in equal measure, and that rejecting party ties or ideology is synonymous with the demonstration of virtue. While partisanship scolds believe that they stand in bold contrast to Washington, they are probably more heavily represented among the Beltway elite than any other demographic.

The official lobby of the partisanship scolds is a group called “Unity ’08” — a collection of graying eminences from both parties who are calling for a bipartisan presidential ticket, perhaps led by Bloomberg. Their rhetoric appears to be targeted at people who enjoy kittens, rainbows, and David Broder columns. Specifically, Unity ’08 says its ticket will run on “ideas and traditions which unite and empower us as individuals and as a people.”

And if people didn’t have sincere disagreements over policy, this approach might even have value.

Isn’t the partisanship scold presidential position taken already? By Obama?

  • A person who doesn’t care about politics will not, ipso facto, get involved in politics. If by some twist of fate they ever do, they fail because they get stabbed in the back by people who care about politics.

    So another of Broder’s problems — or another way of describing it — is an inability to discern happy fantasy from cruel reality.

  • perhaps if the republicans would abandon their faux fillibuster obstructionism, more would be getting done right now.

  • I know I’ve been picking on David Broder quite a bit — perhaps too much…

    Not possible.

  • What Broder is doing is trying to muddy the water. Acting like the current (Democratic) congress isn’t trying to solve problems is just a ruse to hide the Republican inability to do anything but play politics even when they had congress and the presidency.

    The fact that he proposes no solutions is yet more evidence that “the dean” needs to be flunked.

  • I’m not sure that partisanship, per se, is the real problem. People argue about partisan positions all the time, and as long as the result is to create the best product possible, usually by compromise, then there’s no real harm done.

    What the Republicans have done is taken the position that anyone, even in their own party, who disagrees with the White House position is by definition an evil, terrorist-supporting traitor. So where is compromise possible now?

    This really isn’t about partisanship, it’s about theocratic
    neo-con absolutism that has no other objective than total power for itself. And that’s a way tougher nut to crack than simple partisanship.

  • Just recall that Broder didn’t think much of the whole Watergate scandal when the scandal was breaking out.

    Shows how much judgment he has, which is to say, None.

    Broder and the whole Washington news media have a problem — nobody believes them anymore and they’re widely seen as enabling acts that are violative of the Constitution.

    Where’s the outrage? Could it be that we averted a Constitutional crisis during Nixon simply because of the baby boom bulge? They were young and anti-authority, but now that they’re satiated and many of them have become Republicans, the Constitution lies in tatters? Is this a sociological answer to the numbness of our national consciousness?

    Setting aside the utter obliviousness of tools like Broder.

  • “Well, the Democrats have taken the position that they now will do with the nation’s business.”

    Notice the way the slickster tries to frame the issue: Now, at long last, the Dems finally have decided to do the nation’s business. Yea, right. First off, who made Broder the spokesperson for what the Dems have decided on ANYTHING?! Second, the Dems have been trying to do the nation’s business forever, but have been sent into closets to hold hearings by the effrontery of the then Repig majority. The Dems have tried to do the nation’s business, but have had their microphones turned off in violation of Congresssional rules. The Dems have been trying to do the nation’s business, but have been told to ‘go fuck’ themselves. There were ‘yea/ ney’ votes where the Dems were clearly the victor, but Bonehead Bohner declared that, in his “opinion” as leader, that the Dems had lost the vote. The Rethugs have no respect for the rule of law, or the Constitution. They who have no intention of doing the nation’s business, unless there is money to be made, and lots of it. Talking-head mouthpieces like Broder either have no conscience, no memory, or are deluded.
    We can’t let them decide on how arguments will be framed, we MUST call them on it, or we lose before we are out of the gate.

  • I’ve been reading Jonathan Alters’ book on FDR (“The Defining Moment”.) HL MEncken and Walter Lippmann thought FDR was a fool when he was first elected.

    The pundits have always been idiots, and we have always been idiots if we paid attention to the pundits. Why spend our time paying attention to adult men whose entire working life is spent writing about what they heard at an exclusive private dinner party. I have friends who attend exclusive private dinner parties, but they also have intense real jobs in the outside world, and the dinner parties are only for diversion.

  • “…as long as the result is to create the best product possible, usually by compromise, then there’s no real harm done.”

    Yet there’s a lack of compromise in DC today, from both parties.

  • I’m beginning to think that Broder’s problem lies in his name. There seems to be something wrong with pundicks whose name is David Bro- (Broder, Brooks, Brody)

  • I think it’s the sports metaphors gone wild. When you think of political parties as basically sports teams, you assume that they’re both just trying to win, and that their common goal is really to entertain the fans.

    These—Iike the term ‘pundicks’, libra, mind if I steal it?—forget that politics is in fact the authoritative allocation of scarce resources, and that things like “the war in Iraq, immigration, energy, health care” are the very core substance of the discipline.

    Of course, what they mean by ‘politics’ is “the election game.” But that’s an awfully narrow focus on a tiny subsection of politics. Besides, it’s interwoven with all the “real” issues.

  • David Broder represents what’s wrong with America. It’s a bunch of senile idiots in DC that are completely out of touch with the rest of the nation and the world.

    Keep talking Dave, because you’re one of the best arguments to vote for change in DC on TV.

  • Will somone puh-leeze tell me how this moron became the “dean” of Washington political writing? He’s been WRONG on every major issue he has written about for THE PAST FORTY YEARS (you can look up his bullshit on Google going back to 1982, 25 years, and folks are finding all kinds of stuff from the other 15 – like the gem in 1969 about the “anti-Nixon cabal” organizing to keep the president from being successful in his efforts to withdraw from Vietnam because the terrible liberals didn’t want Nixon to get the credit).

    The man has been a lifelong idiot. Now he’s an idiot with Alzheimers, which he’s probably had for a long time but he’s such an idiot people couldn’t tell (sort of like my response when they finally admitted Ronnie the Ray-Gun had Alzheimers – “how could they tell?”).

  • The quotes CB pulled out tell a story not about partisan politics but about insider politics. Broder is seeing the winds of change blowing and he’s realizing a new administration filled with outsiders will be blown into town — unless the current crew of politicos chills out. Remember Broder’s lambasting of the Clintons for “trashing the place” when they came to Washington? After all the years of comfy relationships with Republican insiders, the “dean’s” well of insider information and political scoops over lunch dried up when Bill and Hill installed a newcast of characters in power. The outsiders we in and the insider like Broder were out.

    Broder is desperately calling for a maintenance of the status quo. When he says, “there is a palpable hunger among the public for someone who will attack the problems facing the country — the war in Iraq, immigration, energy, health care — and not worry about the politics,” Broder is saying to Washington insiders to quit playing the normal games or Broder’s little town will be turned on its ear like it was when the Clintons were elected and David’s comfy gig was up. Broder is not calling for civility or common sense to return to politics, he’s saying the voters are pissed and unless the insiders start actng like everythings fine and diminish voter anger, all the insiders will find life much harder than it has been during these Bush gravy train years.

  • There are times when I wonder if it’s any better, but the British system doesn’t have the same problem of a new government being run by a set of strangers to the capital.

    And the American system cuts both ways: the journalists lose their sources, and you need the confirmation hearings to test the new appointees. You lose one contraint of power, and one channel of manipulation, but you have something else.

    The big problem is that the word “politics” can mean so many different things. At one level, it’s the whole process, from which political parties spring, and which stops arguments short of riot and revolution. At the same time, it can mean the slavish devotion to party that kills compromise and provokes riot and revolution.

    And, if you look deep into the history of human culture, and at such things as the hunter-gatherer societies which have survived into modern times, you find something curious about the numbers.

    Effective parliaments are the size of tribes. 600 or so humans trying to sort out their differences in regular meetings, and speaking a language which the outsiders don’t always understand. Looked at that way, the Confirmation Hearing is a Rite of Passage: a text of adulthood and a ceremony on induction into the tribe. And parties are like clans, except that the numbers allow room for 5 or 6 clans, not just two parties.

    Well, that’s the House of Representatives. If you regard the Senate as distinct, it is a clan. One of the factors which makes a clan possible is the one-to-many social intercourse allowed by speech. Without political parties, and partisan loyalties, it could fall into monolithic uniformity.

    So politics is a reflection of the way in whcih we humans organise. And Broder is, we suppose, afraid of being excluded from the new order.

    But what is he being excluded from? There are still over 700 politicians, wheeling and dealing and trying to get out their version of the story. They’re still going to want to talk to journalists. They’re still going to have staff wining and dining, and leaking to, the Press.

    Is all this a sign of the corruption of the Press by the Karl Rove machine? Are they afraid that they have burnt their boats?

  • Yet there’s a lack of compromise in DC today, from both parties.

    Does completely caving (a la the Iraq Spending Bill) count as compromise?

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