“Compromise” is not a four-letter word

I’ve beefed about Obama recently, about how he has no idea how to deal with as an intransigent an opposition in Congress as the one he faces.

Now I’d like to complain about the opposition.

Proceeding on a hypothesis formed by a casual familiarity with recent Congressional shenanigans, I Googled “GOP + no compromise” and got over 3 million hits.

Here’s the first page:

Always seeking to be fair, I then Googled “democrat + no compromise” and got even more hits, below, mainly because it also includes tons of stories about DEMOCRATS who folded like cheap lawn chairs because of the Republicans’ NO COMPROMISE stand, etc.

Every pundit and pollster agrees: These are times of crisis! Times that call for statesmen, not gamesmanship.



But in addition to his own political baggage, our feckless Commander-in-Chief has a Tea Party-guided GOP to work with; legislators who think that compromise is a dirty word, not one of the words used most often by the founding fathers they claim they adore, but about whose actions and opinions they clearly know nothing.

Because American history is littered with compromises. It was built on them; they are the mortar that has held our society together for more than two centuries.

There’s the Great Compromise of the Constitution, which gave us a deliberately bifurcated Congress to begin with; the Missouri Compromise; the Compromise of 1850; the Compromise of 1877…

A Google search doesn’t reveal a trace of any historical Great Intransigences, however.

Compromise is supposed to be unpleasant. It’s supposed to leave egg on everyone’s face. Lincoln famously said, early in his presidency, that he would free either all of the slaves or none of the slaves if either action would put an end to the Civil War.

Compromise has been an essential element from the birth of our experiment in Democracy, through its baptism by fire, a Great Depression and two World Wars.

And now it’s being abandoned by a Boomer generation that’s never had to sacrifice a damned thing to keep the good times rolling. Newly-minted politicos who believe the only way to make their mark on history is to raze the government and rebuild it in their own image, rather than fix the one that already exists.

So on the one hand, we have the former Constitutional scholar, palavering endlessly about compromise to an empty gallery; and on the other hand, we are blessed with the alleged leaders of the GOP, who are in lock-step behind the anarchic Tea Party, and on the record that their number one legislative priority is to block the President from getting anything passed and send him packing in 2012. Unemployment, two wars (three?), financial unrest... every other objective is Number Two or less.

To be fair, that’s always been the tacit political goal, to limit the oppo prez to one term, and I get that. But in the past, this beltway tomfoolery was played out against a background of a functioning central government, a luxury we no longer enjoy.

Serious times call for serious, responsible behavior. Uh oh! 

Due to the myopic, politically dug-in House of Representatives currently sitting, the President is indeed screwed, job-prospects-wise; mission accomplished. But because Congress has been focused exclusively on impeding the President instead of working with him to solve the country’s problems, every other jobless American remains screwed, too.

Except for the Tea Party. They’re sitting pretty. At the moment, the sky’s the limit for Tea Party candidates.

Because every falling empire needs its fiddlers.