More reasons why bipartisanship is largely dead, as appropriate
by David Atkins
I’ve explained before the core reasons why bipartisanship is dead (hint: it’s racism and corporatism. Surprised?)
That’s the so-called disease. But the symptoms make it even more pronounced. One of the closest Congressional races in the country was right in my backyard, in which Democrat Julia Brownley defeated Republican Tony Strickland. (Disclaimer: I’m the chair of the County Democratic Central Committee here.) A tightly competitive district should make for centrist, moderate politics, right? Well, not exactly. Former Republican-turned-indepedent Supervisor Linda Parks ran in the primary, essentially on the Simpson-Bowles ticket. She even declared that “restoring the nation’s bond rating” was essential to creating jobs and improving the economy, a statement as laughably wrong as it is Village centrist orthodoxy. But she lost the open primary to a Tea Party Republican and a progressive Democrat despite being largely popular in the county. How did that happen? Well, the Ventura County Star’s Timm Herdt has the tale of the tape:
California’s independent redistricting process enabled this state to produce a few districts that are genuinely competitive — not because they are politically moderate, but because they encompass multiple communities in which the sorting by education, income, ethnicity and other factors has produced conflicting political results. That is the case with Ventura County’s 26th Congressional District. It is a competitive district not because it is politically moderate, but because it is politically schizophrenic.
I wrote yesterday about the city-by-city results, and how they show the extreme differences among communities within Ventura County. But on a micro level, the sorting is even more extreme.
Poring through precinct-by-precinct results I came upon a few that stand out for their political homogeneity.
Consider two precincts in Downtown Oxnard that encompass homes and apartments on A, B and C Streets. In precinct 4342, Democrat Julia Brownley beat Republican Tony Strickland 745-158, or with 85 percent of the vote. In neighboring precinct 4361, Brownley won 406-58, which was an even bigger landslide, with 87.5 percent.
Meanwhile, up in the residential palaces around Lake Sherwood, at precinct 7050, Strickland trounced Brownley 563-180, winning 76 percent of the vote.
This is the polarized political world in which we live. Is it really any wonder why our elected representatives have problems with the concept of compromise?
No, it isn’t. But that’s not a bad thing. Republicans are incredibly wrong on every issue, and morally bankrupt to boot. But at least they have a semi-consistent worldview that makes some internal sense: free market good, poor people lazy and bad, tax cuts good, investment dollars create the jobs, therefore cut social services and taxes on the rich, and a utopia of deficit-free libertarian yet militaristic paradise will result. Progressives, of course, have a worldview based in reality.
But Simpson Bowles? The notion that both raising taxes and eliminating social services during the middle of a recession will “solve” a long-term problem instead of make it worse? The notion that S&P’s downgrade is more important than the unemployment rate? That’s not only stupid beyond words, there’s also no political constituency for it. Not in the Oxnards of America, and not in the Thousand Oakses, either.
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