Electing the Party of No

This will be short.

I find the whole "Party of No" meme to be insulting beyond belief. Let's take a small look at the facts as they sit.

Politics is normally predicated on compromise. It still is today. There has been a significant difference, though, between the sort of compromise we have seen in the first two years of this administration, as opposed to what one might normally observe.

With huge majorities in the House and, for an entire year, a filibuster-proof Senate, there was no real incentive for compromise with Republicans. Instead, compromises took place within the Democratic Party between the far left, the left and the Blue Dogs, among others. If Republicans happened to be needed for particular votes, the usual people Democrats checked with were Maine Senators Snowe and Collins, Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, or John McCain (on certain issues). Otherwise, compromise was kept in party.

Given the majorities, all bills started significantly to the left of center, and with no real power to influence bills back to the center, Republicans found the choice singular. If the more liberal Republicans went along on anything, legislation could stay farther left. The only hope to pull legislation right toward the center was a united front. What this meant in practice was twofold. One, it was refusing to compromise with what the party absolutely believed would be bad ideas put into law. If the Democrats wanted to go there, fine, but the GOP would not provide cover. And two, having to deal with the centrist members of their party meant that Democrats could not get a public option, or cap and trade, or a good many other things that their members couldn't sell at home, which was also fine, because GOP fingerprints weren't on that, either.

In other words, saying no was both a moral imperative (you should not go along to any degree with what you believe to be wrong or stupid), and a sound, tactical movement.

The reason President Obama rails against Republican "obstructionism" is because he wants to do more of what he had been doing, but can't, and because he is presiding over a country where Democrats are being held primarily responsible for the bad news over the past two years, and he doesn't want the blame. Tough. As he famously said, when confronted with a Republican seeking compromise, "I won." And he did. And now, he gets to be the poster boy for everything that has gone wrong, economically and otherwise. Democrats broke it (or it was broken on their watch), and they own it.

As it sits, Democrats own health care (for all the good it does them), the stimulus (ditto), and the failure to re-enact the Bush tax cuts.

Good luck with that this fall.