The Healing Process

by digby

Following up on my post below, I noticed that the transcript of last night’s Shields and Brooks was available and I think it deserves a little bit more attention:

JIM LEHRER: A divided nation, Mark. Can Nancy Pelosi be a healer, in the context we were talking about earlier, about Gerald Ford and others?

MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: Probably not. I mean, she can be speaker of the House. She can certainly start a healing process.

You know, I think, if Gerald Ford were the speaker of the House, he probably wouldn’t preside over a House where only he’d bring legislation that had a majority of his own party before he brought it. He would seek across the aisle.

I think that’s the test of healing, in the process and the good faith … I think how well she does perform — I mean, she presided over a Democratic Party, it was the most united — according to Congressional Quarterly, which keeps tracks of these things — of any party in the Congress in the past 25 years, but that was in opposition to George W. Bush.

JIM LEHRER: You’re talking about when she was House minority leader.

MARK SHIELDS: When she was House minority leader.

JIM LEHRER: Right.

MARK SHIELDS: I mean, but it takes great discipline to do that. It’s a lot different when you’re in the majority, I mean, to hold that same kind of discipline in your ranks.

And she’s got to prove in the next two years that the Democratic Party is capable of governing, of moving the country, and of moving legislation that people see is in the benefit of the nation.

[…]

JIM LEHRER: How do you see the prospects?

DAVID BROOKS, Columnist, New York Times: Well, not for healing. That’s not what she is.

JIM LEHRER: Not for healing?

DAVID BROOKS: She’s smart; she’s tough; she’s political effective and certainly energetic. Those are her upsides.

Her downside are she’s a wooden speaker. She’s a poor television performer. When it comes to new policies, I think she’s overshadowed by other people in her own party. That’s sort of not where her emphasis is.

But I think her main drawback is that she is — and her main drawback and success, their flip sides — is that she is a Democrat to the bone. And she is a very partisan figure. She’s grown up with a tremendous loyalty to the Democratic Party and tremendous partisanship.

And so, whatever her talents are, spanning the partisan divide is not one of them. I think she’ll reinforce the partisan divide, which is not to say that Tom DeLay was not a hyper-partisan before her. But she is a hyper-partisan.

And to me, one of the problems with Washington now is loyalty to team takes precedence over loyalty to the truth. And I don’t think that’s going to change with her there.

JIM LEHRER: How liberal is she?

DAVID BROOKS: The rap that she’s sort of a San Francisco extremist, I don’t think that’s fair. I think she is a pretty much mainstream liberal Democrat, but not a “San Francisco progressive,” as her opponent in the Democratic primary said.

She has spent a lot of her time in San Francisco with enemies on the left, with a primary force of criticism coming from her left. She was a fund-raiser. She was a fund-raiser and a very successful fund-raiser in the Democratic Party; that meant she spent her time with rich Democrats.

Rich Democrats are not on the fringe. They’re not extremists. They’re liberals. And so I think that’s about where she is, and that’s where her record has been.

And her record in Congress has been sometimes policing the liberals, sometimes telling them to shut up for the sake of political electability.

JIM LEHRER: Can she govern just with the Democratic majority?

MARK SHIELDS: No. And that’s where I disagree with David. I think that, yes, she is a partisan. There’s no question. She was California’s State Democratic Party chairman. She tried to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee even before she came to Congress and lost.

But I think she’s smart, and I think she understands that the Congress has become a balkanized institution, where Republicans only talk to Republicans, and that the people are looking to see that…

JIM LEHRER: But is she going to do it differently?

MARK SHIELDS: … a sense of — she has to. She has to.

[…]
JIM LEHRER: Practically, how does she do that, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: She’s got two tests. She’s got product and process, all right? There’s got to be a product that comes out of this, but it has to come, and people will judge her by the product.

JIM LEHRER: You mean a piece of legislation?

MARK SHIELDS: Are there fewer uninsured children two years from today? Has she worked with George W. Bush? She can save George W. Bush’s presidency; she really can.

I mean, if George W. Bush’s only legacy is Iraq, he’s a dead man, politically and historically. If he wants to reach something on Social Security collaboratively or to do something on any number of issues — the environment, on energy — and she could be his most valuable partner.

But there has to be a process that she includes Republicans. Republicans can’t be excluded as Democrats have been under the Republican leadership, from offering amendments, from participating. You can’t have conference committees meeting with never inviting the minority, letting them have votes.

JIM LEHRER: Do you see that happening?

DAVID BROOKS: It’s possible, but so far we don’t see it. So far what we see are stories suggesting the first 100 hours, which is their first burst of legislation, they are not going to be bipartisan. They are going to move quickly, sacrificing any sense of bipartisanship.

And you can understand it legislatively. I think it would have been tremendously effective to say, “We’re not only going to pass different legislation; we’re going to run this place differently,” I mean, does something ostentatious in the first few days that was bipartisan. They elected not to do that.

But the second one is, in the next week, she’s on a publicity tour, which is a bit self-aggrandizing, making her the center of attention rather than her party, rather than the Congress itself. And I think that’s a political mistake.

JIM LEHRER: Do you?

MARK SHIELDS: I think David — I think that there’s a certain over-the-top quality to the inaugural event, the big…

JIM LEHRER: The coming of the speaker of the House.

MARK SHIELDS: … the coming of the speaker of the House. However, I think it makes sense for her, coming from where she comes from and given the enemies, the Newt Gingrichs of the world, who stand up there and say “San Francisco Democrat” with a snarl and a sneer, for her to point out that she’s going to Trinity College, a Catholic school here in Washington, D.C., in which you graduate, go to mass, go back to Baltimore to the neighborhood from which she graduated, that there is somebody here, that she wants to shatter the negative stereotypes before they set in.

I do think that perhaps the third day of the inaugural might be…

JIM LEHRER: Might be different.

MARK SHIELDS: … too far.

[…]

JIM LEHRER: What do you make of Mark’s point that it’s possible that Nancy Pelosi could save George W. Bush’s presidency?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, she could do it in two ways. One is by really messing up.

But the second way is by saying, “We’ve got in the House a working majority, but in the Senate a razor-thin majority. And therefore, we really do need to work with the president. We need to rediscover that Democratic-Republican relationship that existed in the first six months of the Bush administration.”

I think that’s possible, and I think the Bush White House is a more skilled White House than any time before. I think they’ve had talent upgrades in chief of staff, in treasury secretary…

JIM LEHRER: Talking about Josh Bolten particularly?

DAVID BROOKS: … and up and down the line. So it’s more possible now than it was in the past five years.

There are so many things in that little exchange that I find apalling I don’t know where to start.

First of all, the idea that Nancy Pelosi has to reach across the aisle, work with George W. Bush and pass legislation that benefits the American people to prove that the Democrats are capable of governing is balderdash. The Republicans will pull every trick in the book to ensure that doesn’t happen and they will probably succeed. They are very good at being a minority and they have absolutely no intention of ever doing anything that will benefit the democratic party. At this point they don’t even have any intention of doing anything that will benefit George W. Bush.

Pelosi has two things she has to do. She has to keep the Republicans on the deefensive throughout the next two years and set the table for a Democratic win in 08. There is no “working with” George W. Bush. He is poison and his political advisors are doing nothing but trying to keep him from being chased out of iraq before he leaves office. Period. They have no other agenda.

And the idea that everything was peachy during the first six months of the Bush administration is laughable. Jim Jeffords was so outraged by the Republican’s behavior he left the party! The first six months were characterized by the 50/50 Senate and tha bare GOP majority in the House riding rough shod over everything as if they’d had a ’64 style landslide instead of a Supreme Court gift from daddy’s Supreme Court judges. (And the shell shocked red state Democrats gleefully passed those goddamned tax cuts to their party’s and the country’s major, long term detriment.) God help us if Pelosi and Reid go that route. It was a disaster.

Then there is Brooks’ new designation of the “good, rich, mainstream, liberal Democrats” which he contrasts to some unnamed extremists. At first I thought he was contrasting these “good” liberals with the WTO protestors or PETA or something until he went on to say that Pelosi had successfully reined in these “extremists” in in congress. There are no WTO anarchists or “eco-terrorists” in the congress so he was obviously talking about some other liberal extremists. Who do you suppose he was talking about? (Pssst. Don’t worry everybody, she’s not gonna let the schvartzes or the Mexicans take over. Whew!)

But that’s not all. Shields and Brooks both feel that the first female speaker of the house is being a little bit “over-the-top” by having a celebration. It’s unseemly, you know. (I don’t know how many of you recall when Newtie took over the congress in 1994, but his ascension was considered so historic they metaphrically had him riding through the streets of DC atop an elephant being fanned by Nubian slaves.)

This is a straight-up GOP talking point:

Mike Murphy, a Republican political consultant and former adviser to Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the four-day extravaganza is excessive.

“What? No fireworks?” he said. “I’m glad they canceled the tickertape parade. They probably couldn’t find biodegradable tickertape and a hybrid convertible.”

(One wonders what kind of howl would be raised if Trent Lott or George Bush’s regional culture were similarly mocked by a Democratic strategist — “they probably couldn’t find enough confederate flags or rusted out pick-up trucks.” Yuk yuk.)

For fifty percent of the population it is very meaningful that Mrs Pelosi is the most powerful elected woman in American history. These bestpectacled boyz can demean it all they want, but it’s a major milestone that many millions of American citizens are very proud to finally see. It’s a big deal.

I know I am rather ridiculously obsessing on this short, and ultimately meaningless, interview, but I believe it’s emblematic of the problems we are going to face in the punditocrisy in these next two years. George W. Bush is a very lame duck and all the righties just want to forget he ever existed. So they seem to be setting the clock back to 2000 — the Democrats are out of control liebrals who are screwing up the country. We desperately need the grown-ups back in charge!

Too bad Jerry Ford is dead — from what they’ve been saying for the last interminable week he is the only man who can save us from the evil partisanship that seems to have sprung up since the Democrats won in November. Then again, GOP zombies always come home to roost, so I fully expect that the 2008 election will be all about who can heal the nation. And just as only Nixon could go to China, it’s going to take another Republican Jerry Ford to silence the dirty hippies once again.

Update: I should say that I think the best thing for the Dems to do is be quite ruthless out of the box. They can do it with a smile on their faces, but they should do it. The Republicans created these prison rules and the Dems will either survive and be respected or they will continue to be the Republicans’ and the media’s prison bitches. I’m encouraged so far. The pundits are already heading for the fainting couch.

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