Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - (Page 14)

TILTING at windmills By Charles Peters Guilty party “G.O.P. Edge As Dynamics Shift in House Races,” read a frightening headline in the New York Times this summer. How can this be happening after a record of ceaseless obstructionism by congressional Republicans? Much of the explanation, of course, rests on the media’s far too frequent reliance on blaming Congress rather than Republicans in Congress. On this matter, the new HBO series The Newsroom’s preaching is on the right track when it challenges the media to tell the truth about the Tea Partiers and the harm they have caused. As for the Senate, Michael Grunwald, in The New New Deal, confirms a point I raised in my most recent column about the claim that Obama could have gotten a bigger stimulus bill— maddeningly, the assertion continues to be made, most recently in a front-page story in the Washington Post’s Outlook section. What really happened was summed up for Grunwald by Joe Biden: “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators, who said, ‘Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything.’ ... The way it was characterized to me was: ‘For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back.’ ” And one Obama aide told Grunwald that “he received a similar warning from a Republican Senate staffer he was seeing at the time. He remembers asking her one morning in bed: How do we get a stimulus deal? She replied: Baby, there’s no deal.” 14 September/October 2012 When I read that there is an “enthusiasm gap” in the 2012 campaign that favors the Republicans by a considerable margin, I thought: If ever there was a time when the Democrats needed enthusiasm, this is it. The Republicans not only have a lot more money to spend on Vicki was a hooker who wanted the campaign, but they have to use my apartment as a pad been making a massive effort to suppress Democratic votes. where she could entertain her I remind readers of 2010, johns, for which I would be when liberals were devoting most of their attention to rewarded with a commission. criticizing Obama instead of working for a Democratic congressional victory, thereby alequally responsible than a hit and run driv- lowing the Tea Partiers to take over the House er and a victim.” and produce one of the worst Congresses of all time. For me, the most maddening example of They were for it before they what was going wrong with liberalism was were against it the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert “Rally Speaking of Republicans’ “unified opposi- to Restore Sanity.” I’m a fan of both men, detion” to Obama’s initiatives, I had known voutly so in Colbert’s case, but they missed that the individual mandate to buy health a great opportunity that day. They attracted insurance had originally been proposed by a huge crowd of some of the brightest peothe conservative Heritage Foundation and ple around, people who ordinarily would Okay, Biden and the staffer may not strike you as the most objective of sources, but two men who were Republican senators at the time of the stimulus, Bob Bennett and Arlen Specter, have confirmed to Grunwald that Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, “demanded unified resistance” to the stimulus bill. I also mentioned in the last issue that the political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann identify the Republicans as the guilty party in congressional failure, but I failed to note that they join in The Newsroom’s challenge to the media to make clear to the public that congressional Republicans and Democrats are “no more necessarily was at the heart of Romneycare in Massachusetts. I had forgotten, however, until recently reminded by Ezra Klein in the New Yorker, that the Republican alternative to Hillary Clinton’s bill in 1993, introduced by Senator John Chafee and cosponsored by eighteen Republican senators, including minority leader and 1996 presidential candidate Bob Dole, also featured a mandate. Don’t forget 2010

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

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