SOMETIMES I WONDER AND SOMETIMES I WORRY!

By Edwin Cooney

“Shame on you” is what I often imagine people are thinking or saying to themselves every time I assert that I like politicians. The truth is that I don’t feel the least bit of shame.

You and I elect people to office because of what we want, don’t want, hope for, or fear. Thus, how can we reasonably complain that they so often pander to us? After all, we vote them out of office if they tell us what we need to know rather than what we want to hear.

The problem, as I see it, is that in recent years the “old style” politician, for whom compromise was once as vital as mother’s milk, has been replaced in the public’s notice by ideologues the most influential of whom aren’t working politicians.

Two ugly incidents involving President Obama occurred this week that emphasize this reality. The first was the vast overreaction on the part of right wing talk show radio and television hosts to the president’s planned address to school children upon their return to class. Their complaint seemed to be that President Obama was about to indoctrinate America’s school children to socialism. As it turned out, all the president had to say was that kids everywhere will be better off if they stay in school rather than wasting their lives away on the streets. The message was suspiciously “red-blooded American,” if you ask me.

The second incident was the angry public outburst by South Carolina GOP Congressman Joseph Wilson during the president’s much anticipated healthcare address on Wednesday night, September 9th, 2009.

“You lie!” shouted Representative Wilson as the president asserted that medical treatment for illegal aliens will not be included in the House health care plan. Congressman Wilson’s bad manners were immediately followed by more traditional bad manners when Democratic members of the House promptly booed him. Congressional booing of presidents began back in 1993 when the newly elected William Jefferson Clinton, during his first State of the Union Address, cited congressional budget figures concerning the national deficit that were at variance with GOP figures. On three other occasions (1995, 1997 and 1998), GOP Congressmen showed their contempt for Bill Clinton during his constitutionally required reports on the State of the Union.

Democrats during George W. Bush’s administration demonstrated that they could be as rude as their Republican cousins. In 2003, President Bush was booed when he asserted that not only was there proof of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, but also that yellow cake uranium was being obtained by Saddam Hussein. Again, in 2005, President Bush was booed by “guess who” while urging the privatization of Social Security because the system, he insisted, would soon be bankrupt. Each time these incidents occur, presidential opponents invariably excuse the behavior while presidential proponents express their outrage.

As President Obama labors to fashion a workable health care reform bill in Congress, he is being set upon by left wing and right wing broadcasters, print journalists and internet bloggers. These ideologues insist that they know more about what works than the president. They themselves seldom seek election for their domain is opinion. Opinion is never subject to the riggers of accountability and workability, but only to the less demanding whimper for plausibility.

Hence President Obama’s dilemma. Right wingers want him to admit that he’s a socialist after which he should shut up. Left wing bloggers and commentators want him to first shut up and then take orders. He must (they insist) name call and dehumanize as they do rather than invite practical cooperation. Rightist and leftist opinion makers insist that their world of conjecture and theory is the real world. They believe that their world of ideological prefabrication and doctrinaire-oriented self-reinforcement is where it’s at.

As for Congress, it, like the president, is accountable. Members of Congress represent a hodgepodge of heterogeneous constituencies, most of whom face day to day challenges which do not respond to canned solutions. Often it takes longer than is convenient to find workable answers, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t working at it. Patience, not rudeness or panic, will ultimately get it done.

A generation ago, it was largely the Liberal ideologists who choked the political life out of Jimmy Carter hoping to replace him with the questionably electable Ted Kennedy. The result was Ronald Reagan, two Bush presidencies, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and so on.

Every time ideologues of either the right or the left seek to dehumanize one another, they weaken the authority on which their hoped for political power may rest one day. That authority is ultimately constituted in the Office of the President of the United States.

If Liberals won’t get behind President Obama’s genuine attempts to bring forth progressive government over the next three plus years, be assured that Sarah Palin waits expectantly in the wings.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY