5th Avenue: A Primer on Bipartisanship

  America is not clamoring for bipartisanship.  She is tired of the petty fighting that passes for political debate.  America is a centrist nation.  The current crop of Republicans, with few exceptions, couldn’t find the center with Yahoo maps.

  Hal Cohen -- World News Trust

  Feb. 9, 2009 -- Manhattan, liberal bastion that it is, actually makes a good base for a metaphor of our political situation.

  We are bounded on the left and right by rivers, the Hudson and East, respectively.  We also have a center, Fifth Avenue.  So looking at Manhattan with north up top and south on the bottom, the west is left and the east is right.  There are 12 numbered avenues that run north to south, and I think it’s ironic that that the avenue acting as center, 5th Ave., is right (east) of center.

  Using this Manhattan as a graph west to east, let us plot the various liberals and progressives left (west) of Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas, another irony).  We’ll plot the conservatives on the right (east) side of Fourth Avenue (known familiarly as Park).  Let’s say that self-described swing voters occupy the land in between.  I think we can agree that the largest bloc of voters belong in this midtown.

  During the 1970s, Republicans and Democrats roamed that middle ground together.  The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were accomplishments of the Nixon Administration.  Starting with Ronald Reagan and his 11th Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill of Another Republican,” the party started edging further east.  Vice-President Bush correctly derided Reagan’s tax policies as “Voodoo Economics,” and had been Pro-choice on abortion prior to joining the ticket.

  As the legend of Reagan grew, the fewer members of the Republican Party maintained contact with Fifth Avenue.  It became party dogma that all taxes are bad.  That was why then-Vice President Bush uttered the infamous, ultimately broken promise, “Read my lips- No New Taxes!”  When a recession helped derail his re-election bid (he received 37.7 percent of the vote, many people saying they voted along the ABB(Anyone But Bush) line), the party blamed his broken tax pledge.

  What moved the party closer to the East River then, was Pat Buchanan’s primary bid adding anti-immigration to the anti-tax and anti-abortion formula.  The truth is that when President Bush (41) passed his tax increase, it was, in his words, the prudent thing to do.  St. Reagan had raised taxes two years after his tax cut because his advisors told him he had to.  By the time Bush did so, however, his party had moved farther east.

  Ross Perot, who campaigned as a deficit hawk pledging to raise taxes, and Governor Clinton, the draft-dodging tax-and-spend liberal, got 18 percent and 43 percent of the vote, respectively.  The Republican response?  "We weren’t conservative enough" -- they moved further to the east.  Newt Gingrich put that rightward shift of the party on steroids with his Contract With America.

  At this time, let’s look at what was going on with the Democratic party.  For starters, the official name of the party is the Democratic Party.  Republican leaders and their conservative radio propagandists call it the Democrat Party because they think its demeaning and funny.  This behavior is brought to you by the so-called Daddy (Republican) Party.  How far to the left did the Democratic Party move during this time?  Not an inch.

  As proof of the lack of a westward (leftist) movement in Democratic circles I offer as exhibit A Reagan Democrats.  Additionally, there was the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council, the so-called “centrist” pro business wing of the party whose standard-bearer, Bill Clinton, ended “Welfare as we know it.”  We have the “Blue Dog Democrats,” twelve of whom just joined every Republican in the House of Representatives in opposing the Economic Stimulus Package.  Finally we still have Joe Lieberman, who not only endorsed the Republican candidate for President, he openly campaigned for him.

  Will Rogers once famously said, “I’m not a member of an organized party, I’m a Democrat.”  So, politically speaking, Democrats remain all over the map.  We now return to our essay already in progress:  When we last left our Republicans on their relentless march to the East River, Newt Gingrich was engineering the Republican take over of Congress.  Deficit-hawkism had become quite popular during the just ended recession, and newly elected President Clinton and his Democratic Colleagues passed legislation raising the highest tax rate to 39.6 percent in an effort to balance the budget.

  Despite the reputation of Republicans as being fiscally savvy watchdogs of the deficit, not a single Republican voted for that bill.  They claimed the tax increase would wreck the economy.  After its passage, the United States enjoyed seven years of uninterrupted economic growth.  We averaged adding 225,000 new jobs per month.

  The Republican victory in the mid-term was more a repudiation of the Clintons' failed Universal Health Care initiative than it was a vote for conservatism.

  Indeed, fresh off the mid-terms, Bill Clinton had been declared an irrelevant lame duck.  When Gingrich shut down the government because he had to sit at the back of Air Force One on a middle east trip, the President resized the initiative.  In the ‘96 elections, which also featured third party Perot, Clinton garnered 6 percent more of the popular vote than he had in ‘92.

  Republicans declared victory even though Clinton had won with more votes than he received four years earlier.  If you compare the campaigns of Bush 41 in ‘92 and Dole in ‘96, the message, like the result, was essentially the same.  Then, leading up to the ‘98 mid-terms the Republican controlled House impeached President Clinton for what most of the country considered a minor indiscretion.

  Democrats gained congressional seats in a year that tended to favor the opposition party.
It was backlash against the continued rightwing move of the Republican party.  They pursued the impeachment anyway -- hoping to get Clinton to resign.  Clinton would leave office with a higher approval rating than Saint Reagan.  The right got on the George W. Bush bandwagon early.  They were still in denial about the first George Bush losing to Clinton.

  Vice-President Gore did not run on the record of a winning administration.  Governor Bush ran as a “Compassionate Conservative.”  He recognized the obvious point that the American People had rejected Conservative principles.  He “won,” losing the popular vote by 500,000 votes, claiming moderation.  At the time of his inauguration, we had a budget surplus, and a majority of those polled thought that paying down the deficit was more important than tax cuts.

  From his first day in office, President Bush pushed a hard-right agenda.  Republicans always believe that they are right -- in addition to right-wing.  Even though more people voted for Vice-President Gore, President Bush’s top priority was to pass a Trillion-dollar tax cut, that, although designed during good economic times, was suddenly the perfect remedy for the recession that hit just after he took office.  Virtually every poll taken at the time showed the American People not feeling the need for the tax cut.

  Imagine that for a moment.  A U.S. president passes his signature policy initiative, lowers people’s taxes and has an unfavorable rating.  Though he campaigned as a “uniter” his idea of bipartisanship was that others should do it his way as though he’s a customer and the Democrats are Burger King.  After the September 11th attacks, the country naturally rallied around the President.  He used our Patriotism not to spur us to some greater cause (shopping) but as leverage to move further to the right.

  Expanding executive power, more tax cuts, you’re either with us or the terrorists -- by now you could say the Republicans had reached First Avenue.  Let’s attack Iraq -- a neocon dream.  On the economy, healthcare, the environment, energy policy, Americans disagreed with the President nearly 2-to-1.  In 2004, however, with two wars and a still scared populace, we didn’t change direction.  Republicans, believing in their rightness, took this as an affirmation of their agenda and pushed harder.

  The re-elected President claimed he now had political capital to spend.  He spent the first few months of his second term pushing to privatize Social Security.  To say his efforts were an abject failure is the height of understatement.  By the way, if you want to know just how far the Republican Party has strayed from reality, President Bush regrets the timing of his presentation of Social Security Reform because he didn’t privatize it.  Consider how the system would look right now had he succeeded.

  Had Hurricane Katrina hit in 2004, and yes I know it would not have been called Katrina in ‘04, President Bush would not have won re-election.  The fecklessness of the response reminded people that yes government does have a role to play.  To paraphrase Don Maclean, that was the day the Reaganism died.  Reagan, if you are old enough to recall, proclaimed that government was the problem.  President Clinton was tipping his cap to Saint Ron when he said the era of big government was over.

  The American people unlike Washington Republicans never really thought of government as a dragon to be slain.  Bush 41’s presidency was doomed as much by FEMA’s inability to respond to Hurricane Andrew as anything else.  The people in general understand that when it hit’s the fan we need competent government to clean up the mess.  Bush 43 built an outhouse on the floor above a fan and acted surprised when stuff hit it.

  President Bush was not on the ballot the next time we went to the polls in 2006, but First Avenue right-wing nuttery was.  It was solidly rejected.  Chief wing-nut Rush Limbaugh proclaimed himself happy that they lost, he was sick and tired of carrying the water for people he didn’t actually believe in, basically denouncing everything he’d said on his show since 2001.  However, the right-wing narrative was that the loss was because they weren’t sufficiently right-wing, and needed to go further to the right.  So El Rushbo, filled his pail with more Republican water and carried on.

  Supreme Court Justice Stevens recently said that he has not moved left since being named to the Bench.  The perception that he has is because every single Justice, himself included, with the exception of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has been more to the right than the Justice they replaced.  In the last two national elections, 2006 and 2008, no incumbent Democrat lost, and nearly every open seat that was held by Republicans switched.  This is not winning, this is drubbing.

  Republican pundits who were calling Senator Obama a socialist prior to the election, declared his victory as evidence of a center-right nation.  Staunch conservative Senator McCain has been ridiculed by Republicans as a RINO (Republican in Name Only).  Even today, Washington Republicans who now geographically speaking are so far right they are wading in the East river -- halfway to Queens, act as though they are the insiders at Studio 54 during the golden age of disco.

  Republican calls for bipartisanship are as sincere as Hamas, who has called for Israel to be driven into the sea, offering a truce.  When Republicans “won” with a minority, they called on Democrats to compromise.  Now that Democrats have won with the largest majority in a generation, they are supposed to court extreme right wing views in the name of bipartisanship?!

  America is not clamoring for bipartisanship.  She is tired of the petty fighting that passes for political debate.  America is a centrist nation.  The current crop of Republicans, with few exceptions, couldn’t find the center with Yahoo maps.  I live in midtown.  If the Republicans want to come in from the cold, I will help wrap them in blankets.  Until then, all I can do is warn them that hypothermia can be fatal.

  Hal Cohen is editor and publisher of Mollynyc.com