misguided liberal positions

I am getting rather prolific with these posts.

Frank Rich has a column in the New York Times today in which he points out that after the recent election, the number of people in an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll who thought the US was "on the right track" improved a whopping one percentage point, from 31 to 32 percent, suggesting that the election did little to change people's view of the government. He gives passing notice to the problems of the filibuster in the Senate, but his primary explanation of this persistent dissatisfaction is the role of "big money that dominates our political system, regardless of who's in power." At this point he loses me. Money has been a factor in our political system forever, and attempts to erase its influence have been futile. We have tried over the last hundred years with little or no success. Perhaps it is time to consider that money as such is not the locus of the problem.

Rich's comparison of the Great Depression with the present "Great Recession" shows this. He claims that in the Depression there were "major reforms in American government and business", whereas this time there have not been changes. He forgets to mention that in the Great Depression what was different was not the presence or absence of big money; it was the presence of a temporarily effective government, by virtue of the overwhelming partisan Democratic majority.

This relates to the other liberal shibboleth expressed today in a column by David Broder in the Washington Post, the idea that if we only had bipartisan agreements we would be able to do the things we need to do. Unfortunately our President believes in the chimera of bipartisanship. I would suggest that the decline in his popularity is precisely because he has tried so hard to be bipartisan. The people want the government to govern, to get things done. Bipartisanship is at best only a means to that end, and in fact a counterproductive and illusory means.

Both of these liberal positions, that it is money that is at fault, and that we should all be bipartisan, constitute in reality the willful disregard of the real problem, the structure of our government itself. Rich alludes to it, only to ignore it. The structure of our government forces bipartisan politics and the resulting gridlock. We need to eliminate or subordinate the Senate.