I don’t know where you work Mr. Moran, but you sure don’t work with the same sorts of people in politics I’ve worked with for the last thirty-odd years. I can tell you exactly when pragmatism began to die: 1972 when the Left seriously began their takeover of the Democrat Party. By the ’80s that takeover was nearing completion but had produced unelectable condidates thus far. The Voting Rights Act was making minority districts beyond safe so minority representatives could be howling mad communists and still get elected and re-elected. Burgeoning and radicalizing public employee unionization made the Blue States safely and deeply Blue and all but totally unaccountable to their taxpayers.
The minimum winning coalition had been the staple of US politics in name since the ’60s and in practice for even longer. A young radical governor who’d taken the Alinsky methods of coopting the appearance of moderation seriously was head of the DLC. He and his accomplice, Algore, morphed the minimum winning coalition away from assembling a constituency and doing things that constiuency wants into assembling a minimum winning coalition, identifying its issues, and talking about them endlessly and feeling the “pain” associated with the issues. Were you to actually solve and issue, you’d lose the constituency associated with that issue, so when pressed for a solution, you offer the most expensive, pie-in-the-sky solution that you know the opposition will reject out of hand. With that you get to keep the constituency AND tar the opposition for their insensitivity to your constituency. In twenty years of dealing with AFSCME, I never saw them make a serious proposal and from the time they arrived on the scene in my state, I never saw an AFSCME-backed politician, all Democrats, of course, make a serious proposal, just as the Country has never seen Comrade Obama make a serious proposal. The Democrats all take bargaining positions that pander to the craziest and most extreme members of their constituency and then place the other side in the position of bargaining with themselves to try to come up with something that will get the Democrats’ allies in the media to stop calling them names. This sound familiar with the debt ceiling, the so-called jobs bill, the Bush Era tax cuts? The only way you get agreement with them is by giving them what they proposed and as often as not they’ll excoriate you for going back on the promises you made when you were opposing what they proposed. “No new taxes” sound familiar?
Frankly, Newt Gingrich is the only conservative who has had real power since the new and improved Democrats came to power in the ’90s. He had to try to advance a program and keep a majority in the face of the nominal inventor and a very skilled practitioner of the “feel your pain” school of politics. I think he did very well most of the time, though Clinton, using the public employee union strike playbook, handed Gingrich his head on the government shutdown and Clinton’s lackeys in the media handed the Republicans generally their heads on the attempted impeachment. But what we are seeing now is Gingrich being castigated by the left, right, and center for the steps he had to take to keep a program going and a government running in dealing with the Democrats.
The rules are simple: you cannot bargain in good faith with a Democrat, you cannot believe a Democrat, you cannot trust a Democrat to keep any promise or agreement, oral or written, public or private. Democrats will do or say anything to keep their butts in the big chairs. You can only get an agreement with a Democrat (or a union) if you have the power and the will to hurt them, politically, socially, financially, or even physically if necessary. They can actually think fairly clearly when they have a gun, figuratively of course, pressed to their temple. But, after you an agreement with them by such means, they will never keep that agreement unless you are in a position to once again press that gun to their temple, figuratively, of course.
And you propose that we sane people, we “problem solving” Republicans, be more pragmatic with people like that? The pragmatic solution is to exterminate them, but baseline human decency forbids that.
