Election 2014: Getting to No – And Staying There
Tuesday, America held the most important election of our lifetimes. I know, because we’ve had 18 of them that I could vote in; all were the most important, and this one looked exactly like them. Nobody knows what happens next.
On CNN, while Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper stood around like the only people who can see themselves in mirrors, well-compensated political experts were explaining how to double down on or undo this great loss. They giddily moved on to 2016 — two years swept aside before they even happened, like Hitler in the bunker moving paper armies unburdened by flesh and blood. Overlooked was that not much has changed. Apparently, this is great news for the Democrats‘ plan, which doesn’t exist, or the Republicans’, which doesn’t either.
Refusal is not a legislative plan, and neither is the Democrats’ pleading “cooommme onnnnnnn!” reply, but this is the settlement we’ve long achieved, and the idea that the Democrats “lost control” Tuesday misses the point. As an anti-government party, Republicans have no incentive to do anything. As a pro-government party, the Democrats have to find every avenue for compromise. Thus you can have an Ebola outbreak and no confirmed Surgeon General, dozens of unconfirmed federal judges and the constant threat of credit default, and you know one side will almost always choose to lose this game of chicken and hope that every 2-4 years something will bail them out. In that way, “no” is a form of perpetual control.
GOP candidates ran on saying no to Obama this cycle, which is tactically great but answers nothing for the longterm. It so thoroughly defined their approach that you saw Florida Governor Rick Scott essentially run against Charlie Crist via Obama, while Tom Cotton, a candidate for the US Senate from Arkansas, said “Barack Obama” 74 times in one debate. This attitude presented merely the midterm election extension of the obstructionist agenda that began on Inauguration Night, 2009, when GOP Representatives, Senators, Newt Gingrich and pollster Frank Luntz gave the new president all of 12 hours before plotting to gum up the works. It’s the same mindset that then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell voiced a year later when he said that the GOP’s legislative agenda was to make Obama a one-term president. It’s the same philosophy behind holding the debt limit hostage over and over.
The trouble with sticking your fingers in your ears, stomping around and saying “No!” is that it looks really weird when you are in charge. (Who are you even yelling at?) And what the GOP has so far is pretty thin. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, the walking argument for shoving nerds in lockers, says they plan to pass some new version of Paul Ryan budget fatuity and the Keystone Pipeline. No idea if the former will still have $4.6 trillion of unaccounted for “mystery meat” in it, but the latter will bring literally dozens of permanent jobs to America, have little perceptible impact on oil prices and only stretch a giant poison-leaking innard across America’s largest aquifer.
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