Return of the moderates, revenge of the ...
While the aftermath of the nomination compromise isn't as
exiting as the U.S. Senate playing chicken with locomotives on a single
track, there is still plenty going on.
Possibly, though, people think none of this is interesting Drama on the Hill: Americans shrug | csmonitor.com. There is the 'Pact' itself of the gang of 14 as I like to call them and it's immediateate effect Breakthrough Pact Unlikely To End Battle.
I've also heard "McCain Mutiny" used and like that as well. Since I
purchased todays paper; for my 37 cents I will let them bring the
story essentials:
Last week's agreement was crafted by 14 senators from both
parties...to head off a bitter showdown over Bush nominees who had been
blocked from confirmation for months and even years. Under the deal,
the Democrats agreed to allow three Bush appellate court nominees to
receive floor votes, effectively ensuring their confirmation, while
leaving four others unprotected....In exchange for the Republicans
dropping the "nuclear option," a plan to reinterpret Senate rules to
eliminate the minority's right to filibuster judicial nominees, the
Democrats agreed not to filibuster future Bush nominees except in
"extraordinary circumstances... means that no future nominees could be
filibustered for being as conservative as the three covered by the
deal. Bush Poised to Nominate Dozens For Judgeships, GOP Insiders Say.
This is from a story that indicates that the administration has 40
potential additional nominees vetted and ready for their names to be
sent up the hill. This seems to indicate that the administration for
whatever reason has signed on with those wishing to challenge
this pact. The last sentence I pulled out of the article could be key
to holding it together, a baseline has been implicity drawn.
Compromises by definition don't leave people feeling fulfilled,
still this is an example of norm entreprenureship at a high and useful
level. It preserves the idea of compromise and the future of the
moderate wing From Senate strife, a center takes hold | csmonitor.com.
The section of both parties still willing to talk to each other and
pretend to be the deliberative body they are paid to be. Possibly
lessons on the ebb and cash flow
of political currency. You can also look at how this is playing out, to
think on the meaning of political extremism: gaming or revolution. Is
this winner take all approach to politics seen recently, a by-product
of America's tendency to fold everything into a metaphor of sports. And
the attendant idea that if you haven't won; you've lost. That there is
no realm where that type and degree of competitiveness doesn't make it
all a better game.
The problem is that the metaphor doesn't hold, sporting events are
encoded by strict rules designed to provide a particular outcome -
entertainment for spectators. The rules arn't challenged because they
have purpose. Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay and others like them - Others
who follow their model on either side of the aisle are bad leaders.
Outside of their effectiveness or ineffectiveness at the political
game, or on where you sit and how you view each. This because of
their need to try to recast the system and permanently realign the
nations politics. Which speaks of a discomfort with the broad human
culture that will exist in a mass society, of a defense (reactionary)
need to narrow it. It speaks to a rejection the open society (Karl
Popper's notion that George Soros has glomed onto).
In the long run this political behavoir, which calls into being
mirrored reactions from the opposition, is unlikley to produce the
effect those who play it think it will. It makes political targets of
its practioners who then must increasingly face their work as make or
break career ending battles. It is not even the path to the new ideal
world of their imagining, it's the path to continual strife, gradual
impoverishment, and conceivably, civil war.
The idea that Karl Rove has given George Bush - that elections can be
won by with devotion and fidelity to a core element within their base,
while correct in a narrow sense has two vital errors within it.
It has led these elements to imagine they are the mainstream of the
party. They are not; they are just the simplest to rally. The easiest
to speak to, by routine and commononly understood ways in mass popular
culture, and they are statisticlly recognized as the most likely to
show up at the polls on election day.
The other thing it has done is to lead certain politicians to
believe that if they can win by a battening down to the base without
recourse to consensus politics - that they can govern that way too. As
if only this segment of the country existed, that those who did not
vote for them have disappeared or ceased to matter, and they did not
have to work for them also.
The new gerrymandering and district balkanization is accelerating this
polarization, moving the competition out of the hands of the people,
allowing a nominally representational class that is more rigidly
ideologed in its view than the general populace, at the moment, to come
into power.There is some feeling that this movement needs to stop Ending the Gerrymander Wars - New York Times.
The effect of this leadership is to encourge hardened views in their
followers. These errors are moral failings, they represent a broken
faith with the people.
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