Good Work If You Can Get It

Nick, here's your positive, bipartisan future:

Not to belittle Obama's gifts as an orator, but to take him at his word (and as Blue Girl says, we should) all it takes is some sweet talk and compromise and everything inWashington will be roses and peppermints.

Bloody-fucking-horseshit.

That chart up there shows how interested the Republicans are in compromise.  The spike in filibustering (abetted by Harry Reid, duly and dolefully noted) coincides with Democratic control, wherein they obtained enough power to introduce legislation, but not to ram it through in Republican fashion.

The Republicans respond to the hand of conciliation by chewing it off.  Compromise is viewed as weakness; concession on the Left only allows the Right to dig their heels in deeper.

Partisanship DOES serve a purpose, contrary to what the talking heads keep bleating;  it allows for contrasting viewpoints and goals to be thrashed out.  People disagree and that's part of why the system exists the way it is.

Pundits only promulgate the myth of some earlier, animus-free Congress because the arguments make their own, cocktail-party Beltway-centered lives uncomfortable; it's hard to draw up seating charts when there's all this ugly disagreement floating about.  They've found it's so much more civilized, dahling, when you allow the oligarchs a majority to run things.

So now, NOW, when the Democrats (and democrats) are poised to gain some leverage, and activism at all levels are pushing them to act as an Opposition Party and OPPOSE the shortsighted, destructive policies of the Right, Bush and Cheney and other Republicans find a new Religion called Polity.  Bipartisanship! is the new cheer!  And we'll put all this oh-so-dreary animosity behind us.

Until, of course, the Democrats try to actually move the country in a non-corporate direction.

don't get me wrong;  I like Obama and am totally psyched that the Democrats are floating an African-American as a serious Presidential contender.  And he is nearly sure to be a better President than any Republican floated as a candidate in the last thirty years or so.

But I think what he's told us about his tactics and plans for actually governing, as opposed to rabble-rousery, are far short of what will be required in this dreary post-millennial, post-Bush disaster.  He will need far larger cojones than he's shown so far, a Churchillian willingness to go toe-to-toe with his Republican opponents, and, as is so depressingly true for Democrats, a total spine transplant.

Look; Nick, as a Builder, I'm inherently optimistic.  But one thing that can be learned in painfully quick lessons as a Small Business Owner is that optimistic words and cheerful outlook are NOT accepted by the IRS or your employees on payday.  Those words need to be backed up with no-nonsense DEEDS and, preferably, a bank account.  And when the whole building has exploded, burned down, fallen over, THEN sunk into the swamp, it's foolish to pretend there's nothing wrong just because it's uncomfortable to hear.