Lugar Concession Speech Tells All About Polarization
By Ezra Klein - WashPost, May 9, 2012
“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional,” wrote Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in the Washington Post. “In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”
In Washington, “Mann and Ornstein” are a brand. Mann works at the centrist Brookings Institution; Ornstein at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Over their four- decade partnership, they have established themselves as the two most respected, committed scholars -- and defenders -- of the U.S. Congress. They never tire of pointing out that the way the Founders designed the federal government, Congress came first, and it was intended to have an “institutional identity,” not a partisan identity. It’s that institutional identity, they now say, that is under threat, and more from one party then the other.
Their cri de coeur hit a nerve. The column, published two weeks ago, was recommended more than 241,000 times on Facebook. It generated more than 5,000 comments. It was tweeted more than 3,000 times. It made many Republicans very, very angry. But if you want to see why Mann and Ornstein wrote it, look no further than Senator Richard Lugar’s concession statement Tuesday night, which showed, in its wan effort to make the two parties sound equivalently extreme, just how much further the Republican Party has gone, and how right Mann and Ornstein were.
(More here.)
“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional,” wrote Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in the Washington Post. “In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”
In Washington, “Mann and Ornstein” are a brand. Mann works at the centrist Brookings Institution; Ornstein at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Over their four- decade partnership, they have established themselves as the two most respected, committed scholars -- and defenders -- of the U.S. Congress. They never tire of pointing out that the way the Founders designed the federal government, Congress came first, and it was intended to have an “institutional identity,” not a partisan identity. It’s that institutional identity, they now say, that is under threat, and more from one party then the other.
Their cri de coeur hit a nerve. The column, published two weeks ago, was recommended more than 241,000 times on Facebook. It generated more than 5,000 comments. It was tweeted more than 3,000 times. It made many Republicans very, very angry. But if you want to see why Mann and Ornstein wrote it, look no further than Senator Richard Lugar’s concession statement Tuesday night, which showed, in its wan effort to make the two parties sound equivalently extreme, just how much further the Republican Party has gone, and how right Mann and Ornstein were.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
Klein must define compromise as when a Republican goes along with whatever Democrats want. As the saying goes, “All good things must come to an end” except in this case, the start of a return to limited government is a good thing.
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