Broder's Delusion: Democrats and Repubs Equally to Blame for the Divide

[BurtWorm]

If the Dean of Washington journalists suffers from this vision problem, it's not hard to see why the rest of the industry is similarly fuzzy on what the Republicans are up to and why they keep wanting to assign symmetrical blame for the sorry state we're in.


http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2006/01/index.html#008966

ENOUGH, BRODER. David Broder has done it again. In this morning’s Washington Post, Broder has written what must be his hundredth column bemoaning increasing partisan divisiveness in Washington as the main ill afflicting the republic. As evidence, he refers to several recent roll-call votes where the House or Senate tended to split along partisan lines, and concludes, yet again, that this outbreak of intense partisanship is ruining the country. He refers to the good old days of greater bi-partisanship and concludes that the present pattern is “likely to continue -- at least until the American public really rebels against this extreme partisanship and finds a way to demand a different approach to governing.”

But Broder, the genial dean of Washington pundits, gets it spectacularly wrong. He suggests, as he always does in this recurring column, that the evil is symmetrical. What has really happened in recent years, however, is a shift by tightly disciplined Republicans to the hard right, while Democrats have become more moderate and centrist. With the exception of old-line Dixiecrats, now largely replaced by southern Republicans, the congressional Democratic Party used to be a largely progressive party. Now, it’s divided between liberals and New Dems. And in case Broder missed it, dozens of Democrats actually voted with Bush on the president’s top priorities -- the Iraq War, the tax cuts, the Medicare Drug bill, and confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts.

The most important political science book in a decade, Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker’s Off Center, demolishes Broder and others who espoused the idea that symmetrical partisanship is wrecking democracy. Hacker and Pierson use voting data going back several decades to demonstrate what really happened.

Bi-partisanship flourished in the early Nixon era, when Nixon worked with both parties (and a Democratic Congress) to get environmental and consumer legislation, and in the Carter and Clinton presidencies, when the Democratic White House was more centrist, and reached out to Republicans. Under LBJ, however, Democrats were united and a passel of landmark progressive legislation was enacted, from Medicare to the great Civil Rights acts. The issue is less partisanship than whether the governing party is delivering good or bad policy. Whether or not you think bi-partisanship is a good thing, what’s killing partisan cooperation and solutions to national ills is not both parties becoming more cohesive, but one party becoming more extreme. Broder should get this disabling cliché out of his computer, and address America’s real political crisis.

--Robert Kuttner