Hankering for Unity
David Broder in the Washington Post:
The hankering for unity is also palpable and reflects the conspicuous absence of agreement -- and excess of partisanship -- in the contemporary political scene. I have been saying for months that voters care less whether the next president will be a Democrat or a Republican than that the person moving into the Oval Office be someone who can pull the country together to face its challenges.
. . .
Where each party used to have an ideological mixture, each is now more clearly defined in opposition to the other. The result is a Republican Party that is far more universally (and stridently) conservative; and a Democratic Party whose center of gravity has moved equally far to the left.
. . .
The congressional divisions have been heightened by President Bush's strategic decision to govern almost entirely within his own party's relatively narrow political base. He courted mainly core Republicans to power his two trips to the White House, and he has relied almost exclusively on Republican votes in the House and Senate to sustain his program.
While giving him some notable victories, this strategy also solidified the opposition and stiffened the Democrats' determination to oppose him at every opportunity, whatever the consequences.
The first paragraph makes sense; the rest is that peculiar form of beltway wisdom that bears little resemblance to reality. I mean, just where is this Democratic determination to oppose the president at "every opportunity, whatever the consequences"? The Democratic party did virtually nothing while in the minority, claiming they were powerless, and now that they are the majority party, they've still given Bush just about everything he's asked for.
The Republicans, who apparently have different advisors, keep going for party unity over reaching across the aisle, which has cost them, but still allows them to paint the Democrats as weak-willed when they continually bend over backwards and collapse in their attempts for unity across party lines.
And the Democrats have moved as far to the left as the Republicans have to the right? What planet is this guy on? Look at the last election where the Democrats elected several members who were former Republicans disgusted at what their party had become. If anything, the Democratic leadership has shifted rightward. Just because the Republican party has moved to the hardest of hard right positions in most areas doesn't mean that their opponents have done the same.
But, as Brownstein notes, there has been no comparable increase in partisanship among the voters, who cling stubbornly to a common-sense, moderate conservative view and simply want the practical problems that bother them addressed. The things the public worries about -- the Iraq war, health care, energy, immigration -- are not partisan problems but national challenges.
More-or-less true, with the caveat that there aren't any moderate conservatives left in the Republican party. Success for the Democrats will come when they stop trying to court the ultra-partisan Republican supporters and start speaking to the vast majority of Americans who already support their ideas, if they'd only start standing up for them.
