It’s pretty unusual for a columnist at a major paper to rebuke a beat reporter from the same paper, but if you’re willing to read between the lines a little bit, I think the WaPo’s E. J. Dionne Jr. took a pretty direct shot at the WaPo’s Dan Balz today.
Last week, in response to the collapse of the compromise immigration legislation, Balz wrote a lengthy analysis blasting the “political culture” and a “polarized political system in which the center could not hold” for killing the bill. The piece was, regrettably, awful.
The partisan blame game was already at fever pitch as the bill was going down yesterday. But to those far removed from the backrooms of Capitol Hill, what happened will fuel cynicism toward a political system that appears incapable of finding ways to resolve the nation’s big challenges.
If Washington cannot produce a solution to the glaring problem of immigration, they will ask, what hope is there for progress on health care, energy independence, or the financial challenges facing Medicare and Social Security? Iraq is another matter entirely.
Voters wanted an immigration deal…. The collective failure of the two parties already appears to have stimulated interest in a third-party candidate for president in 2008 whose main promise would be to make Washington work.
Um, no. As Matthew Yglesias explained, “Balz doesn’t seem to have any particular provisions he’d like to see the bill contain. He just thinks there’s a big ‘immigration problem’ and that Congress should ‘do something’ — anything — about it…. There isn’t a unitary ‘immigration problem’ that Washington is failing to solve. Rather, various people see various different problems and there’s not a consensus as to which problem is sufficiently problematic as to warrant action.”
Dionne doesn’t mention Balz by name, but he seems to openly mock Balz’s piece: “An imperfect immigration bill is pulled from the Senate floor, and you’d think the Capitol dome had caved in.”
The tendency to blame the system is a convenient way of leaving no one accountable. Those who offer this argument can sound sage without having to grapple with the specifics of any piece of legislation. There is the unspoken assumption that wisdom always lies in the political middle, no matter how unsavory the recipe served up by a given group of self-proclaimed centrists might be. […]
Is Washington a mess? In many ways it is. The simplest explanation has to do with some bad choices made by President Bush. He started a misguided war that is now sapping his influence; he has treated Democrats as if they were infected with tuberculosis and Republicans in Congress as if they were his valets. No wonder he’s having trouble pushing through a bill whose main opponents are his own ideological allies.
Maybe you would place blame elsewhere. But please identify some real people or real political forces and not just some faceless entity that you call the system. Please be specific, bearing in mind that when hypochondriacs misdiagnose vague ailments they don’t have, they often miss the real ones.
Thank you, E.J. Blaming “the system” for failing to find “centrist” solutions is lazy and unpersuasive. Political disagreements among political leaders over policy lead to political wrangling. Sometimes, it leads to compromise. Other times, like last week, the result is a legislative defeat. Is that a good thing? If it’s a bad bill, yes. If not, no. But under Balz’s vision, it’s necessarily some kind of systemic flaw. That’s nonsense. Sometimes complex issues aren’t resolved quickly through controversial legislation. There’s usually a muddled, split-the-difference option, but there’s no reason to assume that’s the ideal solution to every problem.
Blaming “the system” is easy; governing is hard.