Post-partisan depression

The News Virginian / News Virginian
Published: February 11, 2008

Half the presidential dance card is filled. John McCain, the feisty Arizona senator, is the Republican nominee in all but the official sense. New York Democrat Sen. Hillary Clinton has the edge on Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. Now to the more intriguing question: Is the two-party system on the verge of breathing its last-

Conservative angst over McCain and his substantive want of red cred is thick, and historic. Consider the foibles of Daddy George and Little Dubya. The first Bush shattered his read-my-lips vow not to raise taxes, a sure-fire ticket to roiling righties. Bush the second, knave of the neoconservatives, marched us off to war, inflated the size of the federal government almost to the bursting point (if only there were one) and spent money like he'd stolen it.

Nonetheless, conservatives, albeit with considerable grumbling, dutifully lined up to support father and son as ones of their own. Not so McCain. Recent campaign castoffs Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani along with back-of-the-packers Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul have received the lion's share of conservative support, according to exit polls.

Thus, as Donald Rumsfeld might put it, the conservative party goes to war with the nominee it has, not one conservatives might want or wish to have. The same has long been true in California, where the state is governed by a Republican whose conservatism bears the relative might of the 97-pound weakling of Charles Atlas fame.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is an emerging champion of post-partisan politics. The thinking is that we are nearing the end of the partisan era and entering one in which party politics are cast aside in the name of unity.

Obama is considered a model of post-partisan politics, with his so-called fresh thinking and reputed willingness to venture outside party lines. Go ahead, try to identify the place where Obama actually does the latter. We would be satisfied to find concrete details about what precisely Obama plans to do if elected. We hear mostly airy euphemisms about change that excite people like Oprah Winfrey but do nothing to fill the void between rhetoric and action.

If, as we suggest will ultimately be the case, the race is one between Clinton and McCain, it will be the case of one side of the coin battling the other. Clinton's most significant deviation from McCain might be on universal health care, a concept Clinton adores and which is destined for a trip to the trash heap. Clinton and McCain differ little on Iraq, and Clinton might even be the real hawk on Iran.

Truth be told, presidents already have been practicing the post-partisan approach. The other Clinton and former prez took up conservative initiatives, such as budget reduction and welfare reform, like he owned them. Bush the second did the same on the liberal side with his penchant for government expansion and intervention.

Those who brand partisanship as the problem in American politics miss the point. Not since Reagan - nor perhaps FDR before him - has a president held fast to his party's ideology. What ails the body politick is not, as the Clintons would have us believe, the politics of personal destruction but the politics of pragmatism over conviction.

The post-partisan spirit, as evinced by Republicans such as Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg, represents a concession to liberalism. It wears the look of a power grab on the part of the left. Competition in the realm of ideas as well as in the marketplace has been a foundation of American strength. Post-partisanship so far has produced compromisers rather than leaders. We need more of partisanship's competitive spirit, not less.