Mann and Ornstein: “Brighter future for politics and policy requires a different Republican Party”

[babylonsister]

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/14/mann_and_ornstein_brighter_future_for_politics_and_policy_requires_a_different_republican_party/

Mann and Ornstein: “Brighter future for politics and policy requires a different Republican Party”
The Republicans have become a party beholden to zealots -- with little respect for science, facts or compromise
By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein

snip//


These two factors—asymmetric polarization and the mismatch between our parties and governing institutions—continue to account for the major share of our governing problems. But the media continues, for the most part, to miss this story. A good example was the flurry of coverage in the early months of the 113th Congress based on or at best testing the proposition that policymaking failures could be attributed to the failures of Obama’s presidential leadership. Bob Woodward may have started the pack journalism with his conclusion that President Obama, unlike his predecessors Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, “failed to work his will on Congress” (whatever that means). Soon the critical question to be parsed by the press was whether elements of Obama’s personality (aloofness) or strategic decisions on how and when to engage members of Congress, especially Republicans, accounted for the failure to reach bipartisan consensus. Republicans were delighted to provide commentary on behalf of the affirmative: “he doesn’t call us, meet with us, invite us to the White House, listen to our views, understand where we are coming from, etc.” The drumbeat from the press eventually led Obama to respond. He hosted a dinner with a dozen Republican senators at The Jefferson, lunch with Paul Ryan at the White House, and then a second dinner with another group of Republican senators. He also made trips to Capitol Hill to meet separately with both Republican conferences and Democratic caucuses. Initial reactions from participants were favorable, but it wasn’t long before reporters wondered if the president’s “charm offense” was failing.

The framing of this question reveals much about the state of American politics and media commentary on dysfunctional government. Presidential leadership is contextual—shaped by our unique constitutional arrangements and the electoral, partisan, and institutional constraints that flow from and interact with them. Under present conditions of deep ideological polarization of the parties, rough parity between Democrats and Republicans that fuels a strategic hyperpartisanship, and divided party government, opportunities for bipartisan coalitions on controversial policies are severely limited. Constraints on presidential leadership today are exacerbated by the relentlessly oppositional stance taken by the Republicans since Obama’s initial election, their continuing embrace of Grover Norquist’s “no new tax” pledge, and their willingness since gaining the House majority in 2011 to use a series of manufactured crises to impose their policy preferences on the Democrats with whom they share power. Persuasion matters if the people you are trying to persuade have any inclination to go along, or any attachment to the concept of compromise. But if a mythical magician could create a president from the combined DNA of FDR, LBJ, Tip O’Neill, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, the resulting super-president would be no more successful at charming or working his will in this context.


snip//

Any degree of success in this arena requires enlisting a small group of Senate Republicans who have tired of the lockstep opposition to Obama and relish an opportunity to legislate. As we’ve seen, there are ample numbers of House Republicans who don’t feel the need to answer to their Senate colleagues and allow a vote. But a coalition of seventy or more senators passing such a package might generate enough political pressure that Speaker Boehner needs once again to set aside the Hastert Rule and bring the measure to the House floor. It’s quite likely that such a vote would allow a Democratic majority, with a small number of Republican supporters, to prevail. But we are all too aware that there is a more plausible pessimistic scenario, in which the Norquist tax pledge retains its hold on virtually all Republicans in Congress, preventing the enactment of such an agreement and tempting Republicans to return to a strategy of hostage taking and brinkmanship built around the need to raise the debt limit.

A brighter future for politics and policy requires a different Republican Party, one no longer beholden to its hard right and willing to operate within the mainstream of American politics. After losing five of six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988, Democrats (thanks in large part to the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton) made a striking adjustment that put them in a position to nominate credible presidential candidates, develop center-left policies responsive to the interests of a majority of voters, and govern in a less ideological, more pragmatic, problem-solving mode. Nothing would contribute more to strengthening American democracy than Republicans going through that same experience. The initial post-2012 election assessment by the Republican National Committee took some steps toward frankly acknowledging their problems with the electorate and suggesting a course of action. However, with the striking exception of immigration policy, it moved little beyond message and process and in no way questioned the party’s absolutist position on taxes or crabbed position on the scope and size of government. That failure to move further made it even more difficult for the few problem-solving-oriented House conservatives, along with some of those in the Senate, to ignore the threat of well-financed primary challenges for apostasy from those absolutist causes.

Republicans have reason to believe the 2014 midterm elections will strengthen their position in Congress, even if they continue on the oppositionist course they set in the 112th Congress. Midterm elections usually result in losses for the president’s party, and if there is disgruntlement over continued dysfunction, voters may take it out on the perceived party in charge. But Republicans also know that there are risks associated with brinksmanship and obstruction, and they could be setting themselves up for a trouncing in 2016. Nothing concentrates the minds of politicians and their parties so much as the prospect of electoral defeat and political marginalization.

[totodeinhere]

1. I was with them until they tried to give the DLC credit for the recent presidential election success

of the Democratic Party. The DLC contributed as much as anyone else to the persistent rightward trend that we have seen in our politics ever since Reagan sabotaged President Carter in the 1980 election and came into power, notwithstanding Barack Obama and Bill Clinton's electoral success. And now the DLC's successors are continuing along their merry way doing the very same thing. Rather than hoping for a "different" Republican party, which is not going to happen, I am hoping for a bona fide progressive Democratic candidate in 2016.