The System is Not Broken. This is How It’s Supposed to Work!

The System is Not Broken. This is How It’s Supposed to Work! by The Elephant's Child

February 20, 2010, 9:08 pm
Filed under: Capitalism, Economy, Progressivism, The Constitution | Tags: Democrat Corruption, liberalism, Obama, Politics

Even Democrats recognize that things have gone wrong in this last year.  They have two excuses responses.  The first is that America has become “ungovernable.” Charles Krauthammer responded to that yesterday.

In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president’s own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.

Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.

The tyranny of entitlements? Reagan collaborated with Tip O’Neill, the legendary Democratic House speaker, to establish the Alan Greenspan commission that kept Social Security solvent for a quarter-century.

A corrupted system of taxation? Reagan worked with liberal Democrat Bill Bradley to craft a legislative miracle: tax reform that eliminated dozens of loopholes and slashed rates across the board — and fueled two decades of economic growth.

Later, a highly skilled Democratic president, Bill Clinton, successfully tackled another supposedly intractable problem: the culture of intergenerational dependency. He collaborated with another House speaker, Newt Gingrich, to produce the single most successful social reform of our time, the abolition of welfare as an entitlement.

It turned out that the country’s problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn’t. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills, and an ideological compass in tune with the public’s, the country was indeed governable.

The excuse that this is a communications problem — interesting for a president who has made more speeches in his first year than any other — is denied by Charlie Cook, mild-mannered Democrat pollster:

This is a reality problem. And I think they just made some grave miscalculations and as it became more clear that they had screwed up, they just kept doubling down their bet. And so I think, no, this is one of the biggest miscalculations that we’ve seen in modern political history.

He also says that” it’s hard to come up with a scenario where the Democrats don’t lose the house.”

There remains not the slightest indication that the Democrats have any intention of changing their approach, or even doing a little soul-searching.

The two-party system was designed to promote discussion and dissension so that the problems of policies could be worked out in debate before being enacted into law.

It wasn’t intended that one domineering party should rule by bullying and closing down argument, and meeting behind closed doors to make secret agreements.    Hard to convince those who are determined to get their own way.

2 Comments

2 Comments so far
Leave a comment

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI