After my last diary, The Obtuse Chris Matthews, there was a comment on the show to the effect that, well, bloggers don’t have to govern. The implication was that if you weren’t in Congress then you are free to argue any solution because you don’t have to get your colleagues to go along.
This would carry a lot more weight if Congress were actually solving problems and moving the country along. On a host of important issues from climate change to managing the economy virtually every solution offered on the Internet beats what Congress has actually done. Perhaps bloggers don’t need to get forty-one members of the Tea Bag Party in Congress to sign up for their legislation, but that’s doesn’t help the country progress. It’s time for those in Congress to open up to the solutions that the bloggers (and many others outside of their club) have to offer.
Today, Matthews followed up his comments with a segment promoting centrism, pulling in two former (centrist) Senators (John Breaux and William Cohen) as guests. This led to an excellent discussion based on a faulty premise.
Guest were John Breaux (a Democratic former Senator) and William Cohen (former Defense Secretary and Republican former Senator), who both agree that the center is not holding in Congress. Matthews started this segment with a clip of Evan Bayh making comments after the announcement of his resignation.
From Hardball, today:
Evan Bayh: I don’t feel that the Senate, or Congress in general, is working as well as it should. I think it’s in desperate need of reform. I think you’ve got a lot of good people trapped in a dysfunctional system, right now. And, with regard to the left-wing bloggers, you know, I believe in the First Amendment. They’ve got a right to criticize me. Sometimes it gets a little personal. You know, you’re only human; you don’t like that. But, you know, you’ve got to accept that in our society. So, I do.
I do think that what people are yearning for, and I do think—and you and I have discussed this before—what our party needs to understand: the people want practical progress. They’re tired of the two extremes. They’re tired of people that focus on short-term tactical, political advantage rather than getting the job done. You know, some progress is better than none. [Later, Bayh adds, “Sometimes half a loaf is better than none.”]
Chris Matthews: Well, the Senator really took a shot at the left-wing bloggers, as he calls them. And, the question is: Is that part of the difficulty of being a U.S. Senator. You get hit from your extremes, from the liberal side—the left—and the right if you try to work a deal in the center.
First, the obtuse part. Let me just set the record straight. There’s nothing that Senator Bayh said here that I would disagree with. “Sometimes it gets a little personal…[b]ut, you know, you’ve got to accept that in our society. So, I do.” This is not the equivalent of the Senator taking a shot at us. I don’t feel shot. Do you? And, I would absolutely agree that when you can get limited progress, then that is usually better than no progress at all. As long as it’s progress.
But here’s the problem with the centrist message. Getting a compromise is not always progress. In fact, it is often regress.
Look, if someone called me up from Iowa and asked how to get to New York City, I might tell them to travel east. Someone else might suggest they go west. It is not a better solution to compromise and go south. When you cut off two ends of the extremes and force them together in the center you don’t automatically get a better deal. In fact, this is precisely the problem that all these men decry as they complain about Republicans refusing to raise taxes and Democrats refusing to cut spending.
Cohen: The public is justifiably outraged, in terms of what has happened. Now, they look at the long-term deficit of this country in terms of what that long-term pain is going to be inflicted upon their children and grandchildren. And, I’ve said before, and I said when I was in the Senate, we are engaging in fiscal child abuse because we are not paying for the programs we are adopting. So, we need to have some fiscal discipline. I think the Republicans are right on that. And, the Republicans who are campaigning in that theme ought to measure up in terms of their actions. But, both parties have been giving the public more and more. And, the public has a responsibility, here, too, to understand that they can’t keep asking for more without paying for it. And, so, what we need to do is have some kind of a resolution here saying, “Here are the big issues: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, environment, also our infrastructure, which is crumbling. And, we need to take action on this.” Or, else, we’re going to find ourselves being shifted to second- or third-world status over a period of time.
This unwillingness to cut through the issues and set our fiscal house in order is the result of a compromise in Congress. The compromise is, “I won’t raise taxes and you won’t cut programs. We’ll just borrow the money.” It is exactly the centrist (compromise) nature of the way we conduct Congress that is the problem. We can see that if we took either the “liberal” solution (raise taxes to pay for programs) or the “conservative” one (cut programs) that we’d be better off in terms of solving the problem (balancing the budget and reducing deficits). The order of successfulness of these proposed solutions is:
(1) The liberal proposal, which gets us solutions to much needed problems without raising debt.
(2) The conservative proposal, which doesn’t get us solutions to society’s problems but at least is fiscally responsible.
(3) Nothing at all (which doesn’t reduce debt, but at least doesn’t actively increase it).
(4) The centrist proposal, which leads to higher deficits, and higher debt, without going all the way to solution on critical needs.
These people are in a box. The box is that they think they must work out their deals with each other in Congress. You can see this in Breaux’s answer here to Matthews:
Matthews: What do you say to your extremes when they get all the noise on TV; they got nothing to lose?… What would you have said if, say, just take someone who’s on these shows, Katrina vanden Heuvel, a woman of the left, The Nation magazine; she gets a lot of air…Arianna Huffington, they get a lot of air time. They blast away at people in the middle. They don’t like them. They think they’re rotten. They think they’re crooked. They think they’re bought.
Breaux: I would say to the people on the far left and the far right: you don’t represent the majority of the people that are in this country. And, this is a government by a majority. And then when you become the majority, then your view can be the dominant view. …
There’s a lot wrong with this. First of all, the people on the left already represent a majority on many issues. Take healthcare. The majority of Americans favor a public option. But this doesn’t guarantee that it passes Congress. The problem isn’t whether progressives represent a majority. They do. As on many issues, progressives already have a solid majority. The problem is with Senators (specifically) that don’t respond to the well-known majority by enacting majority desires into law.
Second, they need to get out of their box. Politicians need to forget about making their deals with the other party and start making their deals with the American people. Getting a compromise in Congress means nothing. Leaders must convince a majority of Americans that their proposal is the best solution to the problem, enough so that the people demand of their representatives that they enact this proposal.
Let me make one final point. This is nothing personal about Chris Matthews. In my opinion, he does a great job with a difficult job. (YMMV) This is nothing personal about Evan Bayh (or Breaux or Cohen). My opprobrium does not go to centrists for being centrists. If that is their ideology, they are entitled to it. It is not bad to be wrong, per se; it is not bad to be stupid, per se; it isn’t bad to be uninformed or off on the wrong track. I’m not holding Matthews and these others up as “rotten”, “crooked” or “bought”.
But, the country cannot go down the wrong path because good people are wrong. We must find and deliver on the right course. We are indeed, as Cohen said, headed for third-world status. So, it is critical for those in Congress to put aside their ideology, as necessary, and see the solution. It is important for them to forget about compromise, which implies some kind of rough equality, and go to solution on the country’s essential problems. It is necessary for the President to reach beyond Congress to the people and present solutions (however progressive they might be), educate the public, and defend those solutions. If this makes anyone in Congress uncomfortable, then perhaps they should check out whether they are “rotten”, “crooked” or “bought”.