Short Stories, Long Odds

I was directed by a Denton Dem to an article by one Robert Kuttner entitled “Bush and Frist got what they wanted.” I’ll give you two guesses which Senate compromise it is about.

A lot of Democrats seem upset about the deal. They feel sold out. They aren’t as enraged as the Republicans I’ve talked to, but plenty of us feel as if we got the shaft.

I have three words for everyone who feels betrayed by their elected officials: Welcome to politics.

>politics
n 1: social relations involving authority or power

Many places will define politics as “the management of government,” and this is wrong. Politics is the act of deciding who gets what and how much. The management or administration of a government or a state is governing. They are different.

Politics is about who gets what and how much, and politics at its core is about deal-making. The power to persuade, the power to sell, the power to convince everyone that what you want is what they want. And, since its what we all want, if I brought it up, I can quarterback it, right?

:: Everyone emphatically says yes ::

This is how it works. The Senate deal we saw on C-SPAN the other night happens every day – the public interest in this particular case brought it into the collective consciousness, and rightfully so. No one got exactly what they wanted, and that’s how it works.

You never get all of what you want. Sure, you try to get as much of what you want as you can, but you very very rarely get it all. Yes, maybe you aren’t comfortable with the idea of your favorite Senator having brandy and cigars with the enemy, but he didn’t get to where he is by being a member of the warrior caste. Effective legislators are legislators that can get people on board their LawTrain.

This isn’t to say that they don’t make some attempt to represent us or our interests – they do. But they realize that when I call and say “you have to get money for my town for more cops because my gramma got mugged,” he can’t make it appear out of thin air. He has to schmooze and offer some other guys a favor or two to get the appropriation in on this or that amendment. He can’t just write it into a bill and say “Grammas are getting mugged!” on the Senate floor and expect everyone to take money from their programs and give it to him with nothing in return. And everyone won’t do that because – you guessed it – they have their own towns in which grammas get mugged.

So we didn’t get an accurate definition about what an “extraordinary circumstance” is. We didn’t kill the nuclear option forever. So what? We have no chance of killing it forever in this session. Period. If Frist forced a vote and didn’t have the numbers, he would sit on it and harangue people until he DID have the numbers, and then we’d be screwed anyways. Precedents aren’t usually set in the negative.

So what happened instead of Frist calling the vote (and either winning or losing but no matter what, eventually winning) is that some Republicans came out and implored everyone to be reasonable, derailing Frist’s LawTrain before it even made the first stop. His momentum will be significantly harder to reassemble without engaging in some serious bridge-burning. This deal will end up being a more effective muzzle on the nuclear option and the extreme Right Wing than Frist losing a vote would have been.


I mean, Christ, it isn’t like this is Europe and legislators resign when they screw up hardcore. They stick around here. Sometimes for what seems like forever, unless they politically kneecap themselves. Anyone old enough to remember Gary Hart’s challenge to the press and the ‘Monkey Business’ will understand what I mean.

I am a professional, after all, so I can admit that what Kuttner lays
out isn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility. I have a hard
time following the theory all the way down into the Red State base,
which is why I don’t entirely buy it.

If this were all part of a grand plan, Senate Republicans and Frist
would have had to appear sabotaged by people other than Democrats.
Instead, Frist looks ineffectual, Dobson’s calling him out in the
press, and the internet is ablaze with the usually rank-and-file
NeoCons losing their damn minds, renouncing the party, and even
better, swearing that the GOP gets no more money from them.

If the base and the grass roots were quiet, or pledging faith in their
leaders, or brazenly claiming that this is all a grand plan on behalf
of their boys, I would be more inclined to side with Kuttner and his
disaffected ilk. But it doesn’t make any kind of political sense to
alienate that huge slice of the electorate they worked for 30 years to
lure in and that is now totally enraged.

The problem a lot of Democrats are having with the deal is that they
want absolutes, just like the other guys get. The big secret is that
while elections are very much a zero-sum game, there are no
categorical absolutes in American politics, even though it seems like
there are for the Republicans.

Notice how many moral issues are championed during the election years
and then quickly abandoned in favor of the requisite pro-business,
pro-power, pro-supply-side, Straussian agenda usually embraced by
Republicans since 1994. These are presented as absolute binaries and
then quickly abandoned in favor of the the real workings of politics -
the deal-making, the compromises, and the hard fact that you only ever
get 25% of what you start out demanding.

I think that the Republicans are probably less comfortable with the
new religious-right agenda that’s been foisted upon them by the people
who enabled their majority than anyone is admitting. Because they
played to this crowd so hard for so long, now they are beholden to
them as a party, and someone should have had the political smarts to
sit up and notice how impossible things would get when their newly
energized base started painting them into a corner.

So we didn’t get an absolute, and neither did the Republicans, and the
immediate pending doom for somebody was averted. When McCain said that
it was a victory for the Senate, he wasn’t kidding. Politically, it
was a victory for everyone but the people without the sense to realize
what a big mistake the whole idea had been in the first place.

Now everyone will say the way they would have voted, but the truth of it is this: Frist was unable to wrangle enough Senate Republicans into his corner, and the nuclear option, unless Frist loses his mind post-Press Conference and calls for it tomorrow, has failed.


Frist and Dobson overreached, and this is a pride-obliterating wound for the majority party.

Not only did the moderate Republicans nail Frist and the other extremists to this one, they’re only gonna get 3 judges, and the filibuster remains for Bush’s Supreme Court nominees.

I still wish Frist had forced the vote. He thought that by setting a timetable, he could bring the moderates around to Neocon demands. He was wrong, and it would have been hilariously embarassing for a vote to fail, which it would have.

This may not be over, but I can guarantee one thing: Frist’s hopes for being President just went in the toilet. Even people who don’t care about the Senate are mildly annoyed with him, and everyone I’ve talked to about the filibuster issue, especially Republicans, has been upset about it.

The more I think about it, the more I think that this deal carries more political weight than actual weight on the Senate floor.

I think this may spark a civil war within the GOP. The NeoCons / Religious Right are totally losing their minds right about now, and the party is getting ready to eat itself. You will see the death of all Republican moderates, and I would bet good money on Dobson’s Konservative Krew running ads and campaigning hard against any Republican who decided to be reasonable in this situation.

UPDATE: OH MY GOD. Harry Reid just called out Bush and Cheney’s powergrab, but not only that – it appears that moderate Senate Republicans not only pushed for the deal, THEY WENT OVER FRIST’S HEAD. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I know Lott and McCain were pushing for a deal, but I’m totally floored they subjugated his authority.

I was getting my pants all in a wad to write my official condemnation of the White House’s treatment of Newsweek and the press in general, and then I happened across Frank Rich’s Op-Ed in the Times while doing some research.

As a result, I decided that my write-up was not all it could be, and thus I implore you to see what Frank Rich has to say because it is terrific. It is what I was going to say, but his is in the New York Times.

If you think the political center in America is disappearing, you are correct. I just spent about an hour reading arguments about everything from huge issues to pointless minutiae. Everything said by both plebe and media mogul can essentially be boiled down to this: