I'm not a fan of David Frum, but a couple of weeks ago he wrote Blame Yesterday’s Reforms for Today’s Gridlocked Congress which had some interesting insights into the ways Congress is broken. E.g.,
"Candidates consumed by fundraising? Two generations ago, candidates barely raised money at all. Once nominated, a candidate would turn to his party apparatus to provide the money and expertise needed to contest an election. But the maximum contribution by a party organization was capped in the 1940s, and it has not been raised significantly since. This cap was supposed to clean up politics by weakening party bosses. Instead, it has forced every individual member of Congress to spend the bulk of his or her time begging for funds — the very opposite of clean politics."
I think he's down playing the previous problems that the reforms addressed but I still found it interesting.
Bruce Barlett commented on it in What Broke Congress?. " While I don't disagree with David's specific points, I think he is ignoring the proverbial elephant in the living room: the demise of the conservative Southern Democrat." Matt Yglesias concurred and offered some graphs in Civil Rights, Polarization, and Gridlock.
4 comments:
Interesting position of Frum's, but it's like so much of our sociology and culture. We have replaced politics, such as it was, with money. The more money that wealthy individuals and corporations have (as a result of the massive transfer of wealth upwards) the more they can spend on campaign financing, and even more importantly on lobbying.
Of course, now they are hooked after seeing how cheaply our federal legislators can be bought. It's so cheap to buy congressmen and Senators, as compared to developing new products or dealing with regulatory oversight, that to not do it, is to be irresponsible to shareholders.
Clearly money is a big problem but now that the Supreme Court equates money with free speech, so it's hard to see how any type of serious campaign finance reform will be implemented.
With all deference to Bruce Bartlett, I think he omitted a critical moment in the national political history. The republican and democratic parties switched identities in 1948, when the Democrats adopted a pro-civil rights platform. The republicans wanted to adopt a pro-civil rights platform too, and why not, they are the party of Lincoln after all. But the Northern Liberal Republicans were stopped by the conservative elements in the party. Those two simultaneous events have changed the national political landscape for several generations, and we still are living with the remnants.
So, against all odds, in 1948 Truman wins the election, Strom Thurmond switches parties from Democrat to Republican and the rest is history.
Over the next 20-30 years southern democrats become the base of the Republican party, and northern educated liberals, the former base of the republican party, are now the center of the democratic party (which has no base).
If you could post the red state/blue state maps of the 1948 and 2008 presidential elections, I'd bet they are mirror images.
As for the dixiecrats, it's all still simply about race, and the republicans have been running on it ever since.....
Nixon's law and order, Reagan's welfare queens, Bush I's Willie Horton ads, and Bush II;s good ol boy routine.
It will take another generation or two until the latent racism finally fades away.
Given that the democrats control the White House , and have large majorities in both the House and Senate, I can only conclude tha Congress is currently gridlocked because the Republicans are very disciplined and Democrats are not.
TT
Not a difficult challenge and not all that identical:
1948 and 2008
Thanks for the graphs.
However, I didn't say they were identical.....I said they were mirror images.
What were Republican strongholds in 1948 (the Northeast and an Upper Midwest cluster) are in 2008 democratic centers of strength (NE and Upper Midwest and California).
The south went from a clear democratic stronghold (include Thurmond as a recently departed Dem, and the interesting fact that the Republican candidate couldn't get more than 5% of the vote in any of the Thurmond states in the south.) to a clear republican center.
It's like the whole country just switched parties.
TT
Yes I know you meant mirror images. While there is the general trend, still there are 17 states that stayed the same, including large ones like California, Ohio, Illinois, Florida.
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