An editorial a minute

While the pols in D.C. waste time

THE ARTIFICIAL crisis in Washington has gone the way of all hoked-up news. But it was kind of refreshing while it lasted. For this time the feds had to do just what a private enterprise has to do when the money runs out: Shut down. Which means the country might have experienced a shortage of government, but that can be a good thing. In the meantime, there’s been no shortage of news to comment on—good, bad and indifferent. Including the shutdown itself.

Both major parties assumed their usual postures as the shutdown did not much. Knowing from the past that the Republicans were going to be blamed for any loss of government services, the Democrats refused to take Yes for an answer, even when it came to programs most of them usually favored, like deferring action to deport the Dreamers—immigrants who had arrived here as children. The same lack of principle applied to issues like re-authorizing federal money for children’s health care. It was nothing but politics as sadly usual.

So what’s the Grand Old Party supposed to do now? Our considered editorial opinion: Do right and shame the devil. Yes, politics is the art of compromise, and there’s plenty of room for the wheeler-dealers in both parties to maneuver, but the GOP also needs to articulate why it’s prepared to go only so far and no further. At such times, both parties need to look to the spirit of their great leaders for guidance.

Abraham Lincoln was no stranger to practical necessity. He acknowledged that like the riverboat captains of old on the Mississippi, he might be reduced to just moving from point to point to point. But he never lost sight of his paramount aim. Just as Franklin Roosevelt could be a wily captain of his party, never letting his right hand know what his left was doing. Yet both steered the good ship Union to safe harbor in the end. How small today’s partisans in Congress and the White House look compared to those giants.

The political show must go on, leaving a surfeit of news to dissect and personalities to analyze. Sometimes those personalities join the madding crowd, but they can also rise above it, shaming their lesser colleagues. It happened when this state’s junior senator Tom Cotton told one constituent, Ms. Stacey Lane of Fayetteville, never to contact his office again because clearly she couldn’t keep a civil tongue. It seems she’d used an obscenity or two when phoning the senator’s staffers and he wasn’t having it.

End of lesson. Let’s hope it took— for the woman’s sake and that of Sen. Cotton’s staff. Working for a U.S. senator should not require having to put up with this kind of behavior, as common as it is, and we mean common.

LET’S congratulate Chris Christie, the happily former governor of New Jersey, on his joining the ranks of ordinary American citizens like most of us. And like most of us, here’s hoping he’ll be grateful to be a plain American. Instead, he seems to be acting like some kind of privileged character. For he recently tried to use the special lane reserved for Very Important Persons at Newark Liberty Airport instead of waiting his turn like an ordinary Joe. The good news from airport officials is that he was directed to the line used by all other passengers. It would be good to think that line-breaking was considered rude even by New Jersey standards.

The federal government may take a holiday from time to time, but that’s no reason good manners should.