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.