Both sides determined to get beat?
Almost no one disagrees that our two major political parties have become increasingly extreme and estranged during the past decade. It’s a startling contrast with the state of political conflict in the dozen or so years after the fall of the Soviet empire.
In 1992, Bill Clinton ran on a moderate Democratic Leadership Council platform and, after the implosion of Hillary Clinton’s health care plan and the election of Republican congressional majorities in 1994, mostly governed accordingly.
This was the natural reaction of a politician who found an unusually wide range of policy positions acceptable and who was aware that Democrats had lost five of the six previous presidential elections by an average of 10 percent of the popular vote.
In 2000, George W. Bush ran as a compassionate conservative, distancing himself from the abrasiveness of congressional Republicans and the militant liberalism of congressional Democrats. This was the natural reaction of a politician with a narrower range of acceptable policies and an awareness that hostile mainstream media would do everything possible to delegitimize a confrontational approach.
In the 1995-2005 decade, their approaches, including bipartisan compromises on major issues, seemed to produce popular results.
Those days are long gone, and similar approaches are angrily attacked. Contrast the platforms of Bill Clinton 1996 and Hillary Clinton 2016. Contrast the policies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
My earlier attempt at a general rule explaining this is that a party’s wingers — left-wing Democrats, right-wing Republicans — grow increasingly discontent when their party is on the brink of, and after, losing a congressional majority. My updated version is that party politicians have, unlike candidates Clinton in 1992 and Bush in 2000, been operating in reckless disregard of losing congressional majorities.
In retrospect, the tea party rebellion that broke out in Barack Obama’s first year in office and swept the 2010 midterm elections was also a rebellion against Bush policies — budget deficits, the Medicare prescription drug entitlement, the bank and auto bailouts.
The House Republican rebels who pushed the 2013 government shutdown and ousted Speaker John Boehner in 2015, acting out of purism, jeopardized Republican majorities. Similarly, their unwillingness to support measures to revise Obamacare prevented moving policy in a conservative direction and gave increased leverage to House Democrats.
Democrats, currently with their smallest congressional minority since the 1920s, seem eager to take stands risking perpetuation of that status. Despite Hillary Clinton’s defeat, a confidence that Trump’s unpopularity will doom Republicans seems to be shared by many Democrats. Thus, 16 Democratic senators have endorsed single-payer health care, a policy voted down resoundingly in purple Colorado and abandoned in deep blue Vermont.
The rush to the extremes in both parties threatens to derail an obvious compromise on immigration triggered by Trump’s announcement that he would withdraw Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which granted protection from deportation and permission to work to immigrants brought here illegally as children.
Some Republicans oppose giving legal status to “dreamers,” despite its overwhelming popularity. Some Democrats are insisting on giving legal status not only to dreamers but practically all immigrants and will most likely resist effective enforcement measures, despite their widespread popularity. So it’s possible that neither side will get what it wants.
One might get the impression that large segments of both parties are determined to lose the next congressional and presidential elections — and that both deserve to.
Mike Pence gave Rex Tillerson a pep talk to get him to stay on
as secretary of state. Because nothing screams ‘pep’ like a talk from Mike Pence.”
Jimmy Fallon
“The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon”