Life is comprised of actions and reactions. If you touch a hot stove, for instance, you'll burn your finger. If you listen to Barack Obama speak, you'll want to have a thousand of his babies. 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 leader's "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 compromise measures. There's this great book called The System which lays out the congressional maneuverings in great detail. A few quotes:
