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Grist's Dave Roberts has an excellent piece up today, which you should read in its entirety. There's too much to cover in one blog post, but I want to focus on this:
Yet still there seems to be this craving, in Obama and sooo many other self-styled pragmatic, post-partisan moderates, to take the politics out of politics. To have an Adult Conversation. To be Reasonable People, to draw forth other Reasonable People with the power of ideas and together transcend petty partisan squabbling and move forward with a Commonsense Agenda based on Shared Values. (Are you tingling yet?)As I said, there's a lot more there you should read, particularly about the failure of climate legislation and the naive belief that some tweaks to cap and trade would have brought Republicans into the fold. But let me make a radical assertion: Democrats can be really good at politics, when they decide to be.Granted, there are many instances in which they haven't been. But I know lots of extremely smart and creative Democratic operatives. As a group, Democratic pollsters and ad makers and direct mail consultants aren't worse at their jobs than Republican ones. The 2008 Obama campaign was one of the most brilliantly designed and executed in American history. Yet many of the people who created it have bungled so badly over the last two and a half years in managing the politics of governing. As strange as it is to say, their problem may be that they haven't treated governing enough like a campaign. They haven't, as Roberts details, understood their opponents well enough. Because when your opponents have completely divorced politics and policy, they make different choices and respond differently to the incentives you think you're presenting to them, and the consequences are profound. All through the last two years, the White House thought they were trying to pass legislation and solve policy problems, while the Republicans thought they were engaging in a political struggle that had almost nothing to do with what was good policy - i.e., what would help the economy, what would produce a good health care system, etc. President Obama believed that though there are significant value differences between him and his opponents, eventually he might be able to convince them that there was at least some merit to his position, and compromises could be worked out. But to the Republicans, that was about as crazy as one candidate in an election calling his opponent up and saying, "Let me explain why I think you should give me some of your votes." It's not like Republicans have made a secret of this. After all, Mitch McConnell, the minority leader of the Senate, whose official job is to legislate, said unapologetically that his top priority was to deny President Obama a second term. So perhaps now that the 2012 campaign is beginning, and the White House begins viewing everything through a political lens, they can start seeing things clearly in a way they haven't since November of 2008.It's a nice idea but it's not how American politics works. There is no huge class of uncommitted independents waiting to be persuaded. There are no Reasonable People behind the curtain, pulling the strings. The selling points of the conservative agenda -- small government, free markets, patriotism -- have no motive force of their own. They are not binding and command no intellectual consistency (which is why the endless, tiresome charges of hypocrisy from the left are so fruitless).They are the politics, not the policy, and the two are not connected.
