My response to Brooks's NYT article today with a lot of Democrat blaming going on:
Mr. Brooks, I agree with a lot of what you usually write, and I respect you when I disagree. But did you actually see Pelosi's speech? I watched the whole thing. Hardly fiery. Sounded a lot more conciliatory than anything. She talked a lot about bipartisanship, and the only really partisan stuff involved criticizing the Bush administration's failed economic policies for getting into this situation that we are all in together -- something that one would expect would be pretty safe when around 80% of the electorate agrees with you. Barney Frank was right on. The problem wasn't whether he could have gotten the extra votes from his party or not -- it's that Boehner & co. were blaming their inability to get the votes they promised on Pelosi and her supposedly partisan "explosion", when they were just trying to cover their own behinds.
Moreover, it was the Republicans who killed this bill by a pretty substantial margin. More than two thirds of the GOP caucus voted no. Only 40% of the Democrats did.
That said, while both sides had reason to find this bill less than stellar, one might say that it was the Democrats who actually had real reasons to oppose it. The Dems at least understood that this was a big financial mess -- they were just worried that the bill wasn't good enough. And they were concerned about throwing a bunch of money into the hands of the Bush administration, without enough oversight or protections for the interests of American taxpayers and provisions for homeowners. Most of the Republicans who opposed the bill did so because either they didn't believe that the crisis was really that big a deal after all, because it conflicted with their ostensibly "conservative" Reaganite economic values (which are the ones that got us into the mess in the first place), or because they generally feel more like some sort of human applause meter than a thinking leader of the people.
Yes, a huge part of this was politics ahead of governance, but it's almost entirely a result of the polarization and liberal-hatred created by Rove, et. al. over the past 14 years or so. Add to that the fact that the Republicans are facing a really difficult electoral situation across the board, and many of them are fighting for their political lives. So it's like a magic "save-the-election" button: give them an issue a large percentage of the public seems to think is a bad idea, find a way to make sure that the Democrats get linked to the issue, and then come out in opposition to it so they can play the populist card and then run on that for the next five weeks. And the icing on the cake is that it's a bill that President Bush is pushing big-time. So they get to eviscerate the Democrats AND distance themselves from the universally reviled Bush administration in one fell swoop. Ahh, "country first."
Once they pull that stunt, the Democrats who are in close races absolutely HAVE to vote no, to keep this one (albeit really important) issue from changing everything overnight. So what's worse: a bailout delayed for a month or a government dominated again by the same people and philosophies that screwed everything up to begin with?
Because of the poisoned and polarized political environment -- a direct result almost entirely of the way in which the Republicans have gained their political "successes" for more than a decade -- the only possible solution is going to have to be one that a substantial portion of each party signs off on, so no one can effectively make a partisan stunt out of this in the fast-approaching election.
That's not nihilism. That's the American two-party system -- especially when one party has only been able to keep itself relevant through a combination of the unholy marriage between fiscal and social conservatism with a full-court demonization of their opponents as evildoers out to destroy the country. This will only change when they stop being able to win elections based on this approach.
So, while a well-written bill with unassailable bipartisan support may be what we need as a country, a wildly unpopular bill passed mostly by the Democrats and then turned into an effective political crusade by their opponents would be significantly worse for the American political system (and hence the economy) than sitting around and doing literally nothing. And you can thank the Republicans both for creating this situation, and for being the ones who are taking advantage of it for political gain now.
For the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/opinion/30brooks.html
