Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Joe the Plumber.
Photo illustration by Darrow.
What’s Wrong with Washington?
Washington has always been out of sync with the rest of America, but since Obama’s election, Beltway pundits seem more stubbornly and stupendously irrelevant than ever. Have three decades of being wired for Republican power blown their jittery, Twittering minds?
by James Wolcott May 2009
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That the cultural eco-system of Washington, D.C., is out of whack with the rest of the country isn’t tree-shaking news. In 1994, Kevin Phillips published a polemic called Arrogant Capital, and the arrogance has only compounded since then, keeping pace with the rising price of psychodrama. The Beltway media went into caroming-off-the-walls hysterics over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, whipping itself into a flaming casserole even as Clinton’s standing with the American people remained upright and firm, so to speak. It reprised the Monster Mash with the frenzy over the Congressman Gary Condit and Chandra Levy scandal, in the summer of 2001, the nightly panels on Hardball, Fox News, and Larry King Live spinning ever more baroque abduction/homicide theories about the intern’s disappearance as al-Qaeda quietly put the finishing touches on its surprise package for September. The ramp-up to the war in Iraq—no need to rewind that chapter of disgrace. Nor re-stage the tragic soap opera of Terri Schiavo from 2005 (though it seems so much longer ago, the product of a more primitive people), and the unhingement that ensued, with a recessed Congress scurrying to the Capitol for a special weekend session to pass hasty legislation putting her case under federal review, a bill that President Bush flew back from his Crawford, Texas, hobby farm to sign. And yet despite getting it so dependably, stupendously wrong, the hive-mind of the Beltway bubble seems incapable of evolving and developing the introspective faculties that distinguish sentient beings from the Real Housewives of Orange County. Its wagon wheels travel the same old ruts.
In the first weeks of the Obama administration, “bipartisanship” was the reigning buzzword, and when the Beltway thinks bipartisan, it pictures President Reagan and Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill putting aside their differences and forging a legislative partnership, a ruddy pair of genial patriarchs bonding over the Blarney Stone. (Their Sunshine Boys routine supplies the first point of reference for nearly every stream of consciousness Sam Donaldson wades into on This Week.) If only the ghosts of the Gipper and the Tipper could inspire similar outreaches across the aisle, pined the Beltway oracles, playing matchmaker. When the newly elected Obama was assembling his Cabinet, Time reporter Karen Tumulty, writing for the magazine’s Swampland blog, offered “an out-of-the-box suggestion” for who should become health-and-human-services secretary—former Republican governor and candidate Mitt Romney, that aerosol can that couldn’t. As with so many who pride themselves on thinking outside the box, Tumulty would have been better off closing the cardboard flaps instead. Such stunt-casting would have dashed any hopes of a political future for Romney within the Republican Party against the jagged rocks, and stuck the Obama administration with a possible prima donna, violating its no-drama edict. Throwing Romney’s name into the hopper reflected the fetish that Washington entertains for a centrism that converts everything to mush.
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I wasn’t brought up in a crate. I understand that one of the purposes of bipartisanship is to cram something difficult and necessary down the American people’s gullets for which neither party has the fortitude to assume full responsibility. It’s a way of turning a possible gangplank into a teeter-totter. But it only works with a willing partner, one reasonably sane and responsible, which can’t be said of a Republican Party that invites McCain-Palin proletarian spokesmodel “Joe the Plumber” (Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher) to be a special guest at one of its congressional Conservative Working Group meetings to advise on the stimulus package, and tries to make the salt-marsh mouse the symbol of pork-barrel spending. (“Mr. Gingrich sees the stimulus bill as his party’s ticket to a revival in 2010, as Republicans decry what they see as pork-barrel spending for projects like marsh-mouse preservation,” wrote New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, never mind that there was no such provision in the bill, as the Times later acknowledged.) No matter how tightly the Republicans hole up in their huddle, say no to everything including the color of the sky, Obama will get pious flak from pseudo-moderates such as the Daily News’s columnist Michael Goodwin (a frequent panelist on CNN’s Lou Dobbs’s angry-white-men sweat lodge) for failing to entice enough Republican strays from the herd. In Washington, bipartisan cover confers legitimacy, but the American people are past that, understanding that one side has delegitimized itself. As Glenn Greenwald wrote at Salon, “The reason that Americans voted overwhelmingly in favor of Democrats in the last two elections and overwhelmingly against Republicans is because they want Democratic policies and not Republican policies. They drove Republicans out of office in massive numbers because they don’t want Republicans and their policies governing the country.” This realization has been slow to sunflower inside the official consciousness of our overseers. Greenwald:
“The political establishment has never come to terms with, and the media establishment just refuses to acknowledge, how deeply unpopular and discredited the GOP is among most Americans in the wake of the eight-year Bush disaster.”
more at:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/05/james-wolcott200905
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