Partisanship Is Not a Bipartisan Problem
By ANDREW ROSENTHAL
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I take issue, however, with the fact that Mr. Lugar laid the blame for dysfunction in Washington equally on the Democrats and the Republicans. “Partisans at both ends of the political spectrum are dominating the political debate in our country,” Mr. Lugar said.
There is plenty wrong with the Democratic Party, but monolithic adherence to liberal orthodoxy is not one of them. On the contrary the old Will Rogers joke “I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat,” still resonates. Just for example, thirty-four House Democrats voted against the Democratic president’s signature health care legislation. The far left is not dominating the political debate in the slightest; it hardly has a voice at all. What passes as American liberalism today is awfully similar to the Republican platform of the Eisenhower area (something Rachel Maddow has noted.)
As Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in a much-discussed Op-Ed for the Washington Post, “the Republicans are the problem.” Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, famously said his party’s “number one goal” was to keep Mr. Obama from winning a second term. Yet the roots of blind partisanship go much farther back – to Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.
Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Mann and Mr. Ornstein argue, had a single-minded devotion to attaining a Republican majority in the House by “convincing voters that the institution was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents, especially those in the Democratic majority.” Mr. Norquist created the “no-tax pledge,” which precludes any sane discussion of how to achieve deficit reduction, and which has inspired copy-cat pledges “on issues such as climate change, that create additional litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible.”
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http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/partisanship-is-not-a-bipartisan-problem/
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