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BRODER'S CHOICE. Life is comprised of actions and reactions. If you touch a hot stove, for instance, you'll burn your finger. If you move from California to DC, you'll spend about five months of every year bitterly regretting your decision and wondering how the hell people live in this Siberia. And if you start some overly-funded, ill-considered campaign to restore bipartisanship to Washington, you'll get a glowing David Broder column. Action, meet reaction. The latest poorly conceived bundle of bipartisan virtues to get the Broder treatment is the Bipartisan Policy Center, a heavily-funded, heavily-hyped initiative of Bob Dole, Tom Daschle, George Mitchell, and Howard Baker (all former Senate majority leaders). The BPC, Broder says, is a function of the four aged leaders' "alarm at the breakdown in civility and at the fierce partisanship that has infected Congress and blocked action on national priorities." And this time, they will lead by example. "Listening to them," Broder sighed, "it was possible to forget, for the moment, that they all were party leaders as well as Senate leaders. "Common ground," to use Daschle's term, carried more weight than the Republican labels on Baker and Dole or the Democratic brands on Daschle and Mitchell." You can almost see the hearts Broder doodled across the margins of his notes. The BPC, of course, already has $7 million in the bank and acres of newsprint hyping its prospects. One assumes the lavish funding comes because bipartisanship works so well. After the Baker-Hamilton Commission got the President to draw down the troops and begin talking to Iran and Syria about...oh, wait, sorry. Tripped through a wormhole there. Maybe the same one that Broder went through, actually. See, I remember Bob Dole. I remember what he did to kill the Clinton health care plan and deny any compromises. There's this great book called The System which lays out the congressional maneuverings in great detail. A few quotes:
All the co-sponsors of Dole-Packwood were prepared to vote against Dole-Packwood, including Dole and Packwood! I remember Sheila [Burke] saying to Dole in my presence as we were bringing up something with respect to Dole-Packwood and some senator (it may have even been me) saying to Dole, 'I can't vote for that.' Sheila said to Dole, 'And neither can you!"Chew on that for a second. In order to block a compromise, Bob Dole voted against his own compromise bill.
In the Senate, Bob Dole privately discarded any pretense of seeking a compromise...Bennett was appointed leader of the issue deemed most critical to opponents: employer mandates. He and his team produced a thick briefing book to use in the Senate floor debate. The goal was to frustrate and crush any Democratic bill. Don't let any Democratic measure come to vote.As Bennett said. "Dole made it very clear: No bill is the strategy."David Broder is aware of all this. He knows that Dole eschewed bipartisanship when it could have helped the country overcome the health care crisis, and is only now courting the label to secure his legacy. And do you know why I'm so sure Broder is aware of all this? Because he wrote the damn book!Yet Broder, who's been observing national politics for the better part of the last 300 years, is willing to buy into this absurd think tank of four powerless retirees based solely on the promise of bipartisanship -- even as it's bipartisanship apart from all the forces that makes politicians partisan (electoral concerns, powerful interests, party pressure, future ambitions, etc). It's absurd. And it's profoundly unserious. You can't bipartisan the health care crisis. You can't bipartisan Iraq. You can't bipartisan energy. There are solutions to these issues, and you have to be courageous enough and concerned enough to actually make the hard choices and advocate for the right ones. And maybe, if you're forceful enough, and savvy enough, you can get members of both parties to agree that your solution is the right one. But you don't start with bipartisanship, you end with it.The BPC, which has no power and no political vulnerability, isn't even taking on such contentious questions -- they're starting with farm policy. And Broder, an eminent Washington Wise Man, one of the few with the standing and platform to adjudicate some of these disputes, is happy to marginalize himself along with them. But they have an excuse: They're retired. They're chasing legacies. What's Broder's? --Ezra Klein
