Not in practice, mind you, but as a codeword sop to the masses as justification for defending the status quo.

The end result of bipartisanship is paring down a bill until it changes next to nothing of import.  And then selling it as if it were the greatest thing since the last bucket of lukewarm spit to pass this way.

This is nothing new in politics. The money has always been on the side of the status quo, since change can be costly to one’s bottom line. 

And the status quo has perennially been about "I’ve got mine.  Screw you," now hasn’t it? 

One only need watch the FDR Fala speech (Youtube above) to get that. Or read a little history, you can pretty much pick any era.

What is new? That there is no real voice for change and the little guy capitalizing on this moment in our nation’s history.

And it shows.

Jean Edward Smith has a fantastic op-ed in the NYTimes today talking about FDR, the false sop of bipartisanship and the real value of a little more backbone:

. . .this fixation on securing bipartisan support for health care reform suggests that the Democratic Party has forgotten how to govern and the White House has forgotten how to lead.

Roosevelt understood that governing involved choice and that choice engendered dissent. He accepted opposition as part of the process. It is time for the Obama administration to step up to the plate and make some hard choices.

He cites numorous examples of Roosevelt New Deal reforms which were enacted in spite of entrenched interests, and not because they’d been pared down to mere windowdressing to win their support.

Was Glass-Steagall passed in a bi-partisan fashion with entrenched interests on Wall Street given a seat at the negotiating table? Hell no. Social security?  Are you kidding me?!?

Were there membes of Congress consorting with moneyed interests trying to block the bill, much like Max Baucus’ lobbyist-filed anteroom? Undoubtedly.  Although, as Krugman points out, there’s a lot more of that lobbyist payola floating around these days.

But the real difference between then and now?

FDR sold the need for change at the grassroots by making that change actually happen.  And without selling the public’s interest down the river in the process.  Which made his grassroots support all the stronger, and enabled him to fend off opposition by painting them as being against the public, fueling more public support in the process. 

FDR drew his power for change from the people, not just from the people around him inside the Beltway.

Better political leadership in the Democratic party would help.  So would those leaders actually believing in the need for change instead of giving it political lip service and then undercutting it with their actions.

Can the Obama administration still make needed changes? Absolutely.

Will they? Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it?

Crashing wave; Curaçao – N.Antilles via lapidim.

Here is my biggest current fear in a legal nutshell.  It’s laid out succinctly by Jonathan Adler of Case Western Reserve Law School:

If a Senate with sixty Democrats would be wary of confirming an overt and unapologetic liberal — as this Senate has thus far been regarding the confirmation of Dawn Johnsen to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — does this mean there is little political support for a progressive constitutional vision? It seems conservatives are winning the larger war over the judiciary, even if losing the battle over this nomination. President Obama’s nominee will be confirmed, but not because she embraced his philosophy of judging. Indeed, it seems she will be confirmed, in part, because she rejected it.

It’s all the more disheartening because, having read a number of her cases, I was fairly happy with how she reasoned through the results in many of them.

But we rarely got a glimpse of that Sonia Sotomayor.  Partly, it’s because the questions focused on Ricci, the 2nd amendment and "wise Latinas" by design to obscure and blur the political lines on both sides of the aisle. 

Which is exactly what worries me in terms of the Democrats and the Obama Administration’s legal strategy. Something Digby tapped into as well talking about the pitfalls of bipartisan kumbaaya.

You can win an individual battle, yet cede the larger war.  And I worry we are doing just that, as Adler says.

Liberals should not be afraid to stand up and say they are liberal. Nor should we cower in fear over speaking in unabashedly liberal terms or fighting for the ideals that made us turn toward liberal politics in the first place.

Robyn Blumner made that exact point in a feisty op-ed regarding choice recently. It was an article that made me really stop and think about compromises and courage. (more…)

- And what have they ever given us in return? 

– The aqueduct?

– What?

– The aqueduct.

– Oh. Yeah, they did give us that. That’s true, yeah.

– And the sanitation.

– Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?

– I’ll grant you the aqueduct and sanitation, the two things the Romans have done.

– And the roads.

– Yeah, obviously the roads. I mean the roads go without saying, don’t they? But apart from the sanitaion, the aqueduct and the roads…

– Irrigation.

– Medicine.

– Education.

– Yeah, yeah, all right, fair enough.

(more…)