Im-Politic: Did Trump (and Trump-ism) Really Lose Big in the Healthcare Fight?

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border adjustment tax, Congress, conservatives, Freedom Caucus, healthcare, Im-Politic, Immigration, infrastructure, Obama, Obamacare, Paul Ryan, Peggy Noonan, Republicans, RyanCare, tax reform, Tea Party, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, Trump

The list of realities, considerations, factors – call them what you will – that President Trump either forgot or overlooked as he pushed for House passage of the Republican healthcare bill is long, impressive, and pretty obvious according to the Washington, D.C. conventional political wisdom. On the off chance you haven’t heard it or read it, it includes the difference between cutting deals among real estate tycoons and negotiating with ideological politicians; his own voters’ tendency to rely heavily on the kind of government healthcare aid that the GOP legislation either eliminated or sharply curbed; the powerful vested stake developed after years or working with it in the current healthcare system – however troubled it might be – by major participants in the system; and the dangers to Mr. Trump’s own credibility and political power of choosing to tackle first a highly contentious subject (like healthcare) instead of a priority that’s reasonably uncontroversial (like infrastructure spending).

All those points seem valid to me, but I would add two more that seem at least equally important. Then I’ll present an interpretation of the healthcare story that hasn’t appeared anywhere else yet but that shouldn’t be overlooked – if only because it ties the otherwise puzzling story together in ways that are admittedly byzantine, but that make eminent sense in a Machiavellian (and therefore quintessentially political) way. In fact, this analysis dovetails exceptionally well with the president’s clear (to me, certainly) determination to remake American politics by rejecting the doctrinaire conservatism embodied by the Republican party for decades, and thereby increasing its appeal to independents and moderates.

The first such consideration that should be added to the overlooked list: how much more difficult it is both politically and substantively to take away government assistance used by economically stressed Americans (like those who backed Trump in droves) than it is to enable them to thrive without the assistance via other major planks of the Trump platform – chiefly immigration and trade policy overhaul.

One of the secrets of Trump’s success, after all, was his recognition that vast numbers of working and middle class Americans no longer buy the mainstream Republican argument that they could greatly increase their economic self-reliance through the wealth that would trickle down to them through shrinking taxes and government. He understood that this promise would always ring false as long as so many good jobs and so much income were being sent to foreigners through offshoring-friendly trade policies and mass immigration.

So it’s easy to understand why the Republican healthcare legislation registered so little support from even Republican voters – no doubt including many Trump backers. He seemed to be putting the cart before the horse not when it came to the kinds of government programs touted by liberals that Trump-ites viewed as bupkis, but with a program that had become central to their lives. (For a terrific analysis of Main Street views of healthcare at the usually ignored gut level, see this column by The Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan.)

The second neglected consideration flows directly from the first: President Trump’s election shows that the Republican party has moved significantly in his more populist and particularly less ideological direction, if not at the interlocking think tank/donors/Congressional level, at the far more important voter level. As a result, there was no apparent reason for Mr. Trump to defer to the more ideological Congressional Republicans on the healthcare front.

More specifically, even though the national party’s leadership did indeed treat Obamacare repeal and replacement as a defining principle and promise to its grassroots, and even though candidate Trump expressed strong opposition to his predecessors’ signature achievement, healthcare was never the defining principle of the maverick movement he led. That’s why he so frequently spoke of achieving healthcare goals that have been so widely rejected in Republican and conservative and leadership circles, like ensuring universal coverage.

So why did the president lead off his legislative agenda with orthodox Republican-style healthcare reform? Here’s where the story gets Machiavellian to me – but in ways that should be entirely plausible to anyone familiar with how successful political strategists think. Further, it’s a narrative that fully takes into account the hyper-partisan nature of Washington and legislative politics with which Mr. Trump needs to deal. And it goes like this.

The president recognizes that even though he’s remade much of the Republican base in his own image on the issues level, he also must realize that the Washington Republicans – which include the party’s mainstream conservative Congressional leaders and its more ideological Tea Party wing – remain hostile on the highest profile matters on his own agenda. I imagine he also recognizes that they might be powerful enough to undermine his initiatives on trade, immigration, and/or infrastructure – especially if Democratic leaders remain in their adamant “resistance” mode.

For even if Democrats are ultimately winnable on trade and infrastructure, they have no interest even in these areas in giving the president the kind of quick victory that would greatly strengthen the odds of turning his first term of office into a success that would boost the odds of his reelection. They have even less interest in helping Mr. Trump further strengthen his appeal to many of big Democratic constituencies.

So the Washington Republicans needed to be at least neutralized – and sooner rather than later. And appearing to fight the good fight for their healthcare reform proposal was an ideal way to demonstrate his loyalty to their objectives and strengthen his case for demanding concessions from them in return in areas he valued much more highly. This calculation looks especially shrewd since the Republican bill was so draconian that even had it squeezed through the House, the Senate was bound to prevent its reaching his desk in anything like its current form.

As a result, now that the “RyanCare” legislation is dead, Mr. Trump can say to both the House Republican leaders and even to the hard-line Freedom Caucus something to the effect, “We tried it your way, I carried lots of your water, and I paid a noticeable price. Now we drop the healthcare effort, pivot to my priorities, and I expect your votes, even if you won’t pull front-line duty. And when we do address healthcare as Obamacare’s failures multiply, you’re going to do right by your own constituents and drop the free market extremism. P.S. Anyone remaining obstructionist comes into my social media cross-hairs with your reelection bids coming up.”

I have no inside information here, and my reasoning could certainly be too clever by half. Moreover, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my professional life is that just because an analysis seems logical or commonsensical, doesn’t mean that it’s true. But even though it’s only about a day since the healthcare bill was pulled from a scheduled floor vote for the second and final time, I derive some satisfaction in seeing the president is making nice with both House Speaker Paul Ryan and the Freedom Caucus members, and making clear that it’s tax reform time (which could bring a tariff-like border adjustment tax). Which could mean that Donald Trump’s presidency is highly conventional in at least one respect – temptations to dismiss it as a failure should be strongly resisted.  

Im-Politic: Where Do the Social Conservatives Really Stand on Trade?

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1992 election, 2016 elections, conservatives, Donald Trump, Gary Bauer, George H.W. Bush, Iowa, NBC News, New Hampshire, Pat Buchanan, Pew Research Center, Phyllis Schlafly, Republicans, social conservatives, South Carolina, Tea Party, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, {What's Left of) Our Economy

A new Wall Street Journal feature comparing the beliefs of Donald Trump’s supporters with those of backers of other leading Republican presidential candidates deserves high marks for graphic ingenuity. For accuracy? I’m less sure about that. Not that anyone should have excessive expectations of opinion polls’ accuracy, but this particular exercise seems off-base in describing how social conservative voters view American trade policy – which is shaping up as an important issue in this election year.

The Journal‘s analysis groups Republican voters into three categories: Trump-ites, fans of “establishment” candidates like former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and the social conservatives. So far, so good. Ditto for the findings that by a 55 percent-45 percent margin Trump voters consider “free trade” to be “bad for the U.S.” and the establishment-arians viewing such trade as beneficial by 72 percent to 28 percent.

But The Journal‘s claim that 59 percent of social conservatives hold positive views of trade and only 41 percent oppose it contrasts with years of survey data on the issue, as well as with my personal experience in trade politics – which isn’t negligible.

The political world first got wind of social conservatism’s take on trade issues in 1992, when former Nixon White House speechwriter-turned-pundit Pat Buchanan challenged incumbent President George H.W. Bush in that year’s Republican primaries largely due to Bush’s ardent support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Uruguay Round global deal that ultimately created the World Trade Organization.

In 1997, opinion data appeared indicating that the Buchanan revolt was no passing fad. That year, the respected Fabrizio-McLaughlin firm issued a fascinating study that examined most of the major fissures then rending (and continuing to roil) the Republican party. Unfortunately, I can’t find it on line, but I wrote about it in detail, and one of the main findings was strong social conservative opposition to the main thrust of American trade policy.

Moreover, during my involvement back in the 1990s in many of that decade’s big Washington trade battles, social conservative organizations and their leaders were always among the staunchest opponents of these deals. In addition to Buchanan, their ranks included Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum, Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, and most have stayed active on the issue ever since.

In addition, numerous polls make as clear as possible that their grassroots are solidly with these figures. In 2007, The Journal and its survey partner, NBC News, released the results of a study that didn’t track social conservatives’ trade views explicitly, but attributed rising Republican opposition to status quo trade policies to “the changing composition of the Republican electorate as social conservatives have grown in influence.”

The Tea Party movement that energized so many Republicans and conservatives after the financial crisis has always been difficult to type economically, as a libertarian wing and a social conservative wing have both emerged. But despite this split, one 2010 poll showed strong support among avowed members of the movement for trade policy positions that strongly resemble those of organized labor, and another – again by The Journal and NBC News – revealed that a higher percentage of professed Tea Party-ers (61 percent) agreed that trade agreements had hurt the United States than Americans overall (53 percent).

The most thoroughgoing and valuable research on this front, however, has been conducted by the Pew Research Center, which since 1987 has recognized that the standard liberal-conservative typology is no longer remotely adequate for analyzing American politics. As early as 1989, Pew detected strong support among a category it labeled “Republican moralists” (along with “God & Country Democrats”) for increasing tariffs on Japanese goods to counter Tokyo’s allegedly unfair trade practices and grave concerns about the impact of foreign ownership of American assets.

Fast forward to 2014, and a Pew survey found that “Steadfast Conservatives,” who it defined as holding “very conservative social values,” were the most likely of the six major American political groupings it identified to believe that “free trade agreements are a bad thing for the U.S.” (Intriguingly, the same phrasing used by the latest Wall Street Journal survey.) In fact, these conservatives were the only category featuring majority (51 percent) agreement with this statement.

Of course, precisely because polling remains far more an art than a science, it’s entirely possible that the new Journal survey is right and all the other polls are wrong. But even for the public opinion business, that would be unusual. Meanwhile, we’re not likely to get much confirmation of these trends in the upcoming Iowa caucuses, since, as I’ve just explained, even though its Republican activist ranks are heavily social conservative, the state is one of the few in America that’s gained on net from the kinds of trade policies Trump in particular has assailed. A better test looks like South Carolina, which also boasts lots of social conservatives and which has suffered huge trade-related losses in recent decades.

Im-Politic: Why CNBC’s Bias isn’t Simply Partisan

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bailouts, Ben Carson, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, boardroom liberalism, capitalism, Clinton Democrats, CNBC, crony capitalism, Democrats, Donald Trump, free markets, globalization, Im-Politic, Immigration, Larry Kudlow, media, media bias, Noam Scheiber, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party, Trade, Wall Street

Many of those nice enough to comment on my post yesterday on CNBC’s awful presidential debate performance have attributed the often abusive questions posed by the moderators as evidence of liberal/Democratic media bias. And that’s what some of the Republican candidates charged as well. My response? I wish the fundamental problem was that obvious – and therefore that correctable, at least in theory.

Instead, what the network’s evident mindset represents is the much more insidious development of a national political class homogeneous enough to share fundamental values, assumptions, and positions (with all too superficial variations) and powerful enough to ignore and, when necessary, keep out of the governing system against-the-grain views.

Part of this analysis reflects my own experience as a frequent CNBC viewer – and not only as background noise during the workday. I think the network’s coverage of finance, business, and economic headline developments is acceptable, and it at least mentions major breaking news in other spheres. Yes, I could watch Bloomberg, or Fox Business. But as my father used to say, we’re all creatures of habit, and my sampling of the newer competition has not yet persuaded me to change the channel permanently. Nor have I yet found any other continuous sources of reasonably serious hard news.

And when I hear or see the letters, “CNBC,” my first reaction isn’t “Democrats.” Quite the opposite. Even with the blatantly partisan Larry Kudlow gone from daily programming, the network clearly is tailoring its material towards the investment community and the steadily shrinking pool of American retail investors – groups not known for progressive leanings. In fact, with the latter ever more skewed toward the upper income strata, it hasn’t been surprising to see CNBC broadcast more and more segments that openly celebrate the “lifestyles of the rich and famous.” That’s of course on top of the broader tendency of the business press to create and glorify the “Superstar CEO” – a practice that (amazingly? or not?) has survived the financial crisis and ensuing recession.

When it comes to policy – overwhelmingly economic policy, of course – CNBC is firmly in the free market camp. Minimal taxation and regulation are constantly touted, as are free trade agreements, un- or barely fettered immigration policies, and the supposedly iron, unchangeable, undeniable realities that make them necessities – the historically inevitable and beneficent globalization of business; the equally inexorable triumph of capitalism worldwide; and the resulting supreme imperative of participating in and growing foreign market opportunities. And when the focus is domestic, CNBC therefore places on a pedestal “business-friendly” states, which unlike their more neanderthal (usually Democratic governed) counterparts are supposedly wise enough to spare companies of nearly all the costs of public goods and services – and to discourage unions.

It’s true that much else that’s central to CNBC’s worldview isn’t very consistent with free markets. But institutions like activist central banking are accepted not so much as regulatory exceptions to a more liberal rule, but as fixtures without which the economic landscape would be unrecognizable, and therefore literally inconceivable. Similarly, although the bailouts of non-financial companies were positively scorned, the bailout of Wall Street was (a little sheepishly) accepted because, well, it beat global destruction.

These exceptions to free market norms have convinced many that CNBC is extolling not genuine market capitalism, but crony capitalism, in which the biggest, most politically connected businesses manipulate government to serve their own selfish purposes and especially to marginalize newer, less influential competitors or even prevent them from forming. I agree that the network isn’t inclined to assail this form of corruption. (Of course the pugnacious Rick Santelli is a prominent exception.) But another implicit assumption needs to be added here to flesh out the full CNBC worldview, and it concerns the ostensible virtues of what I’ve referred to as “boardroom liberalism.”

This is a school of thought identified by New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber, and he put it better than I ever could:

“It’s a worldview that’s steeped in social progressivism, in the values of tolerance and diversity. It takes as a given that government has a role to play in building infrastructure, regulating business, training workers, smoothing out the boom-bust cycles of the economy, providing for the poor and disadvantaged. But it is a view from on high—one that presumes a dominant role for large institutions like corporations and a wisdom on the part of elites. It believes that the world works best when these elites use their power magnanimously, not when they’re forced to share it. The picture of the boardroom liberal is a corporate CEO handing a refrigerator-sized check to the head of a charity at a celebrity golf tournament. All the better if they’re surrounded by minority children and struggling moms.”

Scheiber used the term to describe the outlook of President Obama, and obviously it holds for Clinton-style Democrats, too. Just as important, because the most powerful ideologies and worldviews can accommodate a fair amount of diversity, it’s easy to imagine a conservative version of “boardroom liberalism,” and in fact, between the two of them, they dominate the perspectives of the establishment politicians, senior bureaucrats, media figures, and so-called policy intellectuals that in turn dominate American politics and discussion thereof.

In my view, this is the perspective that reigns at CNBC, and throughout the establishment media. And although it’s surely closer to the Democratic Party mainstream than to the Republican rank and file, and reserves special contempt for the Tea Party faction (as well as religious conservatives), it doesn’t hold much affection for Bernie Sanders and the Occupy Wall Street crowd, either.  (History-induced guilt typically inspires more indulgence for Black Lives Matter.)

I’m sure it’s clear why an ideologically uniform press corps is as big a threat to a democracy worthy of the name as an ideologically uniform party system. But an even greater danger is posed when the same precepts unite those media and political worlds – along with their colleagues in think tank ranks and academia. Conventional wisdoms become completely ossified and the decision-making apparatus becomes almost impervious to fundamentally new ideas – even in times of crisis.

When powerful challengers from utterly alien universes do loom on the horizon (e.g., a Donald Trump or a Ben Carson, Tea Party-ers uninterested in politically convenient compromises), all the major occupational groups and ideological sects comprising this polyglot establishment rush to join forces against the invaders. And they employ all the (predominantly verbal) weapons they can muster, ranging from slanderous invective to loudly professed indifference to chortling condescension to outright ridicule. This counterattack, moreover, is conducted with unusual vehemence when the outsiders make perfectly clear that they have no use, much less respect, for the conventional wisdom-mongers.

On the one hand, it’s comforting that a lively alternative media-verse has emerged in recent years – precisely in response to the power, intolerance, and resulting arrogance of the establishment. On the other hand, the establishment still seems firmly ensconced – in journalism and in both parties. Since it’s still early in the 2016 presidential cycle, this year finally being different can hardly be ruled out. But as Yogi Berra once said, “It gets late early out here.”

Im-Politic: Where We Stand So Far with Trade and the 2016 White House Race

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2016 elections, Bernie Sanders, Carly Fiorina, Democrats, fast track, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, manufacturing, Martin O'Malley, Mike Huckabee, Populism, Rand Paul, Republicans, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Tea Party, TPA, TPP, Trade, Trade Promotion Authority, Trans-Pacific Partnership

“Something” is definitely going on with the politics of international trade in the United States these days – I just wish I knew exactly what it is. But in the last few weeks, as the national and Congressional debates over President Obama’s trade agenda have heated up, any number of apparently conflicting and potentially important developments in this area have broken into the news.

The chief inconsistency seems to involve presidential candidates in both parties on the one hand, and some new poll results on the other.

If you were just following the 2016 presidential campaign so far, you’d think that support for new trade deals like the president’s proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has become absolutely toxic. Among Democrats, declared candidate Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is dead-set against them, as is former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, whose announcement is imminent. Front-runner Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has a mixed trade policy record, but even though she pushed the Pacific Rim trade agreement as Mr. Obama’s Secretary of State, she’s evidently so wary of alienating voters that she refuses to take a stand either way now.

Opposition to new trade agreements is just as pronounced – and in many ways much more startling – among many Republican contenders and hopefuls. The GOP’s Congressional leadership has become a bulwark of the president’s hopes for fast-tracking such deals through Congress and thus greatly enhancing their chances of approval. But lots of the current Republican field is marching to a much different tune.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was a trade policy skeptic when he last ran in 2008, and still is.  Rick Perry has no such history. In fact, he was last seen as governor of Texas welcoming with open arms investments in his state by Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications manufacturer that’s viewed as a likely threat to U.S. national security by the executive branch and the Congress. But despite supporting TPP, he’s expressed major reservations about its transparency and about entrusting it to Mr. Obama.   

And then there are the cases of Carly Fiorina and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. The former, when she ran Hewlett Packard, defended her record of sending jobs and production to China with the (widely blasted) statement that “There is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore.” More revealing, she accused trade policy critics of naively seeking to “build walls around America” and “running away from the reality of the global economy.” Now she says she’s “very uncomfortable” with TPP.

Paul, of course, has been a darling of libertarians, but voted against fast tracking trade deals like the TPP through Congress. (Paul’s father, former Texas Congressman and presidential contender Ron, opposed many such agreements also, generally due to fears regarding American sovereignty and Constitution-related fast track concerns.)

The most interesting conversion, however, might be that of former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. As I’ve written, when he last sought the GOP nomination four years ago, Santorum was the only Republican who spoke seriously about the importance of strengthening American manufacturing. But he also upbraided his rival Mitt Romney for risking a “trade war” with China by supporting currency-related sanctions and generally during his years in both the House and Senate was a reliable “Aye” vote for new trade deals.

But this time around, Santorum is showing signs of recognizing that credibly championing manufacturing isn’t possible without opposing the trade policies that have done so much to weaken its production and employment levels – along with its innovation capacity.

I can imagine that many readers will respond by noting that many Republicans are so hostile to President Obama that they would naturally oppose enhancing his authority in any way – and doubly so since there’s such widespread anger regarding his other alleged unconstitutional power grabs. But Fiorina for one has also hit America’s poor record of monitoring and enforcing trade deal provisions against cheating-minded governments and noted that one of the most notorious – China – could be added to the TPP without any Congressional input. In addition, as I’ve previously noted, opposition to current trade deals has dovetailed with other major elements of Tea Party platforms and the movement’s values since its birth.

Yet despite the trade skepticism throughout the field in Campaign 2016 so far, polls keep showing that Americans have become more receptive to new agreements. Typical is one just released by the Pew Foundation. It finds that 58 percent of U.S. adults “say free trade agreements with other countries have been a good thing for the U.S., while 33% say they have been a bad thing.” Moreover, according to Pew, this level of support is ten percentage points higher than in 2011.

In what will be heartening news to GOP presidential trade skeptics, only 53 percent of avowed Republicans view trade deals so favorably – a majority, but a much lower share than for either Democrats or independents. Of course, by the same token, the results raise questions about the Democratic hopefuls’ so-far unanimous opposition to new agreements absent major changes.

Since primary voters – which comes from each party’s hard-core base – are more partisan and ideologically fervent than the electorate as a whole, it’s likely that for that reason alone, attacking current trade policies will remain a big feature of Election 2016’s first half, and that few candidates will send much time defending them. That’s essentially what labor unions and environmental groups want to hear from Democrats, and what movement conservatives want to hear from Republicans.

But the Pew findings themselves are odd in several respects that makes their political interpretation less obvious for the general election. For instance, the poll reported both substantial and growing overall agreement that free trade agreements have benefited the nation, and less impressive (43 percent) but still growing overall agreement that such trade deals have helped their personal finances. Yet it also shows that by 34 percent to 31 percent, the public believes that these deals have slowed rather than sped up economic growth. By 46 percent to 17 percent, respondents said that they have fostered job loss instead of job creation. And by 46 percent to 11 percent, that they have reduced rather than increased wages. Also noteworthy (especially given the personal finance result above), nearly as many Americans (30 percent) blamed free trade agreements for raising consumer prices as credited them with lowering them (36 percent).

I can think of many possible explanations for these apparently paradoxical results. All polls suffer from the tendency of respondents to tell researchers what they think the latter want to hear as opposed to what they actually believe. Further, Main Street Americans can’t be expected to understand fully how trade policy effects the economy, in part because the Mainstream Media does such a lousy reporting job on this front. At the same time, a case can also be made that the Pew survey underscores consumption’s dominant role in both the U.S. economy overall and on Americans’ economic priority scales. Why else would they be so keen on the agreements, while believing that they depress growth, employment, and wages? Unless most Americans don’t believe that trade deals really affect them much personally at all? Or that they themselves are reaping the benefits while largely escaping the costs?

So it’s anything but clear how trade issues will affect the next presidential election on net. But if they stay in the spotlight, as seems distinctly possible given that the TPP itself is still being negotiated, that itself would be a big change.

Im-Politic: Elizabeth Drew Remains the Consummate Insiders’ Champion

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Beltway, bipartisanship, chattering class, Cold War, conservatives, Elizabeth Drew, ideologues, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, pragmatists, Republicans, Ronald Reagan, stagflation, Tea Party

You don’t have to be thrilled with Tea Party Republicans to recognize that Elizabeth Drew’s genteelly sneering new article on the faction and its role in American politics these days superbly illustrates many of the biggest problems of the nation’s public life and especially of the Mainstream Media that cover it.

In a very important sense, Drew is no longer a pillar of the national journalistic establishment any more. At 78, she’s not cranking out copy frequently any more. But she does still write periodically for The New York Review of Books and, according to the Washington Post, she’s a “recent discovery of a new generation of journalists” who view her as a mentor. (Yes, that was meant as a compliment.) And starting in the 1960s, her detailed chronicles of political and policy battles for The Atlantic and The New Yorker were considered must-reads by the chattering class.

It’s not that Drew hasn’t done some insightful reporting and analyzing (though none of it comes to mind). But her latest piece betrays a blind spot regarding previous eras of American politics, including in her prime, that were more greatly and dangerously flawed than she remembers – and possibly than she realized at the time (which would be remarkable, considering all of her reporting on the Watergate years). And her rose-colored glasses have produced ongoing prejudices that mirror those of entirely too many of her colleagues today.

According to Drew, the Republican party today is “Divided and Scary.” And the Tea Party is largely to blame.

Its members are “purists” who “oppose any expansion of the federal government.” They are therefore the bane of the “pragmatists” in the party and throughout the capital who recognize that “without compromise there cannot be governing.” They are simply concerned with “making a statement and keeping their supporters fired up.” “[L]ike the NRA, they’ve figured out that absolute obstruction, outrageous as it may seem to others, can be a winning strategy.”

They fail to appreciate the solid conservatism of the likes of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner – although she upbraids these GOP mandarins for not acting like “the Republican congressional party of the 1990s, much less the 1960s….” Their main sin? Rather than genuinely “wanting to work with the president and show themselves as ‘positive’,” they have focused on efforts to “repeal, revise, and overturn a great deal of what Obama has achieved through laws and regulatory actions and executive orders.”

Among priorities considered by Drew as beyond the pale are attempts to:

>“roll back some of the president’s immigration initiatives, a move that could end in the deportation of millions….” (Presumably all Democrats are okey dokey with Obama’s exeutive amnesty and dedication Open Borders);

>”impose more sanctions on Iran that would undermine the administration’s current negotiations on nuclear capacity.” (I guess no Democrats supported the legislation?);

>and propose “a number of bills to overturn regulations adopted during Obama’s first six years, particularly those of the Environmental Protection Agency curbing carbon pollution.” (Of course there are no serious Constitutional issues at stake here.)

What a far cry from the Golden Age of the 1990s in particular, when “During the Clinton presidency, ten to twenty Senate Republicans were willing to work with the White House to try to negotiate deals on shared goals.”

But in fact, Drew is just getting warmed up. She charges that Republican efforts to transfer some power over programs from Washington back to the states, especially those that “allocate benefits,” contain “a trace of the old championing of ‘states’ rights’—code for fending off federal efforts to impose equity in the treatment of the races.” Indeed, the Republicans have become even worse than in their Nixon-Agnew law and order days, and are now addicted to “playing to anti-black and anti-minority sentiment in order to maintain their electoral strength.”

In Drew’s eyes, almost needless to say such despicable views lie behind the entire Republican party’s shift to “perfervid opposition to liberalization of immigration, combined with antipathy toward and fear of the growing numbers of minorities in this country. Not only racism but nativism is alive.”

Drew is correct on some points. Too many Republican Senate candidates in 2012 in particular were indeed “screwballs” (at best), harboring particularly hateful views towards women. Capitol Hill Republicans’ focus today on the Keystone pipeline and on rolling back even weakfish Wall Street reform is, respectively, bizarre and reprehensible.

But most of Drew’s critique is so one-sided that it’s clear she simply opposes most right-of-center positions on major issues. That’s her right, but why doesn’t she have the honesty to come out and admit her biases? (The same of course goes for so many of those younger mainstream journalists she’s reportedly been mentoring.)

More disturbing is Drew’s apparent obliviousness to the Tea Party’s belief that many of the nation’s worst problems today and recently stem precisely from the bipartisan, compromising impulses that she so reveres. She of all people should remember the bipartisan Cold War consensus that led directly to Vietnam. How well, moreover, has the federal government really served the economic interests of blacks and other minority Americans, especially once the great and needed battles of the Civil Rights era were fought and won? And what of the completely bipartisan creation of an economy based on binge-borrowing and consuming, which triggered the financial crisis and all of its painful aftermath?  

Nor does Drew evince any awareness that the taxonomy she (and others of her ilk) use to describe the conflict between insiders and outsiders is exactly the same that was used to describe Washington battles in the 1980s. Then it was commonplace for the commentariat to view former President Reagan’s most conservative supporters as “ideologues” and “cowboys” who threatened to endanger the nation and even blow up the entire world with their primitively radical and hawkish views. Their opponents within Republican (and often White House) ranks were supposedly the “pragmatists,” who luckily recognized the limits that domestic and foreign realities imposed on American actions, and who were determined to neutralize their less sophisticated rivals. Drew certainly displays no awareness that the Cold War might not have been ended and stagflation not cured (or at least not so quickly) had the “realists” and their conventional wisdom prevailed.     

I could go on. The main point, however, is not to insist that the Tea Party – and other outsiders – have always been right, and that Drew and the insiders have always been wrong. It’s to observe that Drew, the avowed pragmatist, and too many of her journalistic colleagues who are supposed to chronicle Washington and similar controversies with some degree of objectivity, won’t even consider them legitimately debatable. They’re smugly convinced that they hold a monopoly on truth, and unthinkingly equate their own strongly elitist prejudices with sweet reason itself.

Drew reportedly likes to recall her humble, outside-the-Beltway beginnings, when she was “Little Lizzie Brenner from Cincinnati.” Her latest piece is a sad reminder of how little of real importance she seems to have learned since those days.