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Another whining rage of despair

By Jack M. Balkin

Tom Friedman has yet another column, this one from Davos, in today's Times bemoaning the present state of affairs in the U.S. and noting that his fellow participants in the Davos conclave are, for the first time, raising the question of "political instability" in America. I think that such questions are altogether rational. Alas, though, Tom Friedman--like, for that matter, all other famous pundits--seems constitutionally incapable (pun definitely intended) of offering a cogent response to his interlocutors. All he can do is is quote one K.R. Sridhar, the founder of Bloom Energy, a Silicon Valle feul cell company, who states that "Our two-party political system is broken just when everthing needs major repair, not minor repair" (emphasis added). Again, true enough. But apparently "everything" doesn't extend to the Constitution itself, which creates, in substantial measure, the dysfunctional political system that is leading, according to Friedman, the potential replacement of the vaunted "Washington consensus" with a new "Beijing consensus," inasmuch as the Chinese system seems to be working in a way that ours most definitely is not.

All that the leading columnist in the leading newspaper in the United States can say is that we are "stuck" in partisanship, and that the answer is for President Obama and "just six or eight Republican senators--a few more Judd Greggs and Lindsey Grahams" to meet "somewhere in the middle on deficit reduction, energy, health care and banking reform." Apparently, Friedman believes that these Republicans will decide that what they most want to do is to re-elect Barack Obama in 2012, just as Teddy Kennedy (plus, of course, Osama bin Laden) elected George Bush in 2004 by providing cover for Bush's "signature" domestic issues of No Child Left Behind and the Prescription Drug Bill. There is no reason to expect any Republican to do so. Even such vaunted "moderates" as Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins seem incapable of engaging in more than a scintilla (if that) of independent thinking or, more to the point, voting. This is true even of someone like George Voinovich, who isn't even running for re-election but is still incapable of truly breaking with his party on anything important.

Frank Rich, whose understanding of American politics is, I think, far better than Friedman's, has an excellent column on the "Comatose" state of the union. But even he can't connect the dots and realize that the problem is the dreadful Madisonian system we are afflicted with in an age of a basically parliamentaryopposition, whose primary, indeed exclusive, goal is discrediting the party "in power" and replacing it.

I join Andy Koppelman in commending Sen. Udall for his announced intention to try to eliminate the filibuster at the beginning of the next session of the Senate, in January 2011. But there is zero chance of success unless many other Democrats, led, of course, by President Obama, join not only in their opposition to the filibuster, but also, and perhaps m ore importantly, in educating the public as to its existence and consequences for the issues that most concern them. Consider Charles Blow's excellent column in Saturday's Times, which demonstrated that significantly less than a majority of Americans are even aware of the "60 vote rule" and theh fact that not a single Republican was willing to vote for the health bill (or, for that matter, to raise the limits on the federal defecit). It is absolutely essential for President Obama to take the lead in educating his constituents. By election day, we should treat the mantra of "McConnell, Kyl, and Cornyn" as the equivalent of FDR's "Martin, Barton, and Fish." It is certainly nice to see Obama going to Baltimore to take on his enemies, but he surely must realize at some point that they are his enemies, who wish only and exclusively his political destruction, and that they will continue to use the absurd and indefensible rules of the Senate to deprive him of anything that he will be able to claim as a truly important "achievement" in 2012. If he thinks anything else, he is stupid, and I do not think that is a word that one can use with this President. Nor are the American people stupid. They are simply stunningly uneducated and in need of genuine leadership. Will he, or any other Democrat, join Sen. Udall in providing it?

Full post as published by Balkinization on January 31, 2010 (boomark / email).