Dinosaurs and Prizes in Politics
April 25th, 2006Ted Kennedy is a “throwback” to an old era where you “tried to get things done,” the Washington Post writes today, and he’s a “Tyrannosaurus Ted accordingly. The article is about Kennedy’s habit of working with Republicans in a bipartisan manner, and this is truer of no other Senator in the last five years aside from, perhaps, Hillary Clinton. Clinton, on one hand, works with the Republicans on foreign policy, mainly, while Kennedy works with them on all sorts of things but foreign policy.
These are, if not in those exact words, awfully close to the current Washington whispers. He doesn’t understand the way things work these days , you’ll hear. You can’t cooperate with these guys the way he’s used to doing. You work with them and they’ll just roll you in conference, or trot out the 30-second spots against you. Or both.
Look what happened to Kennedy — so the argument goes — when he teamed with President Bush to pass the No Child Left Behind Act: The president failed to deliver the promised funding. It happened again when Kennedy began working with Republicans to craft a Medicare prescription drug bill, only to see it hijacked in conference, when it was too late to stop it. Fool Kennedy once, these Democrats say, shame on Republicans. Fool him three times, shame on us.
The way I see it, Kennedy is wrong to join the Right on these issues because it’s nonsensical and naive to. The House of Representatives tilts so far to the right that they might fall on their axis and break their cheeks if they take one misstep (isn’t that happening already, politically?) and anything accomplished in moderation on the Senate Floor is likely to be destroyed in conference. There’s nothing wrong with working with your opponents, but everything’s wrong with expecting them to keep their committments when the nature of their caucus won’t allow it.
Policies, not people, are what’s wrong with the Bush White House, argues Robert Samuelson in Newsweek, but I don’t buy it. It’s Karl Rove hijacking the Legislative process that’s ruining legislation, or it was until Josh Bolten stepped in to stop that.
The prize for stupidest editorial of the day goes to Newt Gingrich for his opus, “Our Majority is in Jeopardy.” What is it about? Nothing with regard to the headline, that’s for sure. Since we’re talking about prizes, Pat Buchanan is out calling any leak of classified information treasonous, and bemoaning the granting of a Pulitzer Prize to the woman who ran the article on secret CIA prisons. In other news, he still thinks Richard Nixon the greatest President since Caligula.