FRANK RICH: In Praise of Extremism -What good did bipartisanship ever do anybody?

[kpete]

In Praise of Extremism
What good did bipartisanship ever do anybody?
By Frank Rich

...........

This is the harsh reality Obama has been way too slow to recognize. But in his post–Labor Day “Pass this jobs plan!” speech before Congress, the lip service he characteristically paid to both Republican and Democratic ideas gave way to an unmistakable preference for Democratic ideas. Soon to come were his “Buffett rule” for addressing the inequities of the Bush tax cuts and a threat to veto any budget without new tax revenues to go with spending cuts. When he tied it all up in a Rose Garden mini-tantrum pushing back against the usual cries of “class warfare,” it was enough to give one hope. No, not 2008 fired-up hope, but at least the trace memory of it. Should Obama not cave—always a big if with this president—he might have a serious shot at overcoming the huge burdens of a dark national mood and flatlined economy to win reelection.

..........................

Obama, after all, is exactly that president. For the good deed of trying to defuse partisan tensions, he has been punished with massive desertions by the very independents who are supposed to love his pacifism. In the last Wall Street Journal–NBC News poll, his support among them had fallen by half since he took office, from 52 percent to 26 percent. Perhaps that’s because these independents, who represent roughly 36 percent of voters, are not the monochromatic ideological eunuchs they’re purported to be. One polling organization that regularly examines them in depth, Pew, has found that nearly half of independents are in fact either faithful Democrats (21 percent) or Republicans (26 percent) who simply don’t want to call themselves Democrats and Republicans. (Can you blame them?) Another 20 percent are “doubting Democrats” and another 16 percent are “disaffected” voters, respectively anti-business and anti-government, angry and populist rather than mildly centrist. The remaining 17 percent are what Pew calls “disengaged”—young and uneducated Americans, four fifths of whom don’t vote anyway. There’s nothing about the makeup of any segment of these “all-important independent voters” that suggests bipartisan civility has anything whatsoever to do with winning their support.

To pursue this motley crew of the electorate as if it had a coherent political profile is nuts.
You can't always reconcile your differences:

Obama can’t change his DNA. He is by definition a conciliatory man of the middle: as a black man raised in white America, as a mediator among warring political factions at The Harvard Law Review, as a community organizer, as a child of divorce. But sometimes blacks and whites, liberals and conservatives, and moms and dads cannot reconcile their differences. Sometimes the negotiations and compromises that are the crux of politics are nonoperative. This is one of those times. The other side has no interest in striking grand bargains or even small ones. It wants not so much to reform government, a worthy goal, as to auction off its parts and distribute the proceeds to its corporate backers. It’s a revolution beyond the one even Goldwater or Reagan imagined. They didn’t talk about seceding from the union.

THE REST:
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/bipartisanship-2011-10/

[frazzled]

1. As little good as partisanship

We complained for 8 years that the Bush administration never consulted a single Democrat, never invited them to the White House (till the very end of the second term). They railroaded legislation through their lockstep party in Congress that was very harmful.

That was partisanship, and its effects were very damaging to the country. You can't say it's only good when it's YOUR side's partisanship. Of course, we all think that ... but in the bigger scheme of things, you're just going to get an escalating merry-go-round, yo-yoing (keep mixing the metaphors) of left and then right policies. And that is really not good for the country in the end. If we could conceivably move forward together somehow in at least SOME areas, which was the historical practice for many years in many cases, we might put the country back on track.

[Ruby the Liberal]

2. Good thing those additional revenues got added to the debt ceiling deal, aye?

I didn't read the whole article (yet), but it seems to me that Rich is advocating fighting fire with fire.

Their #1 overarching goal is to keep Obama to one term (citing Mitch McTurtle) yet he gives them everything they want, takes nothing we are asking for, and they still rail on him for being a "socialist" for implementing their ideas.

Up is down, left is right and good is evil these days.

[saras]

3. In some conflicts, one side is just wrong and doesn't deserve any consideration.