In a new column up on TNR, Jon Chait takes Mayor Bloomberg to task over his promises of non-partisanship:
“Any successful elected executive knows that real results are more important than partisan battles and that good ideas should take precedence over rigid adherence to any particular political ideology.” So declared New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg upon renouncing his membership in the GOP last week. The problem, of course, is that people don’t agree on what “real results” or “good ideas” are. Cutting taxes? Raising taxes? Funding stem-cell research? Banning stem-cell research? This is exactly why we have partisan battles in the first place.
Since when is partisanship synonymous with disagreement? Like Tom DeLay before him, Chait (and his party-happy buddies) seems quick to misconstrue just what “partisan” really means.
Politicians of the non-partisan stripe (Bloomberg, Obama, etc.) aren’t looking to do away with political disagreement (who would be? That shit would be undemocratic.) Like many Americans, they’re hoping to put an end to the ridiculous team-based political mindset—a debilitating process wherein a line is drawn in the partisan sand, on either side of which political players line-up and duke it out, concerned not with what’s working but more with who’s winning.
Pro-partisan gadflys like Chait (apparently) and Delay seem to enjoy this type of political “fighting” out of some sort of nerdy attraction to the gritty sport of it all (see Greg Sargent’s constant boxing terminology, and nauseating overuse of the verb “to slam”). But every sport has it’s own limited appeal, and the growing ranks of undeclared voters seems to indicate that a lot of Americans aren’t really into petty political bickering, especially not when such fights become less about differences in policy position and more on promoting party unity and winning one for the home team.
This type of misanalysis is especially puzzling coming from Brendan Nyhan, a guy who throws a weepy hissy fit anytime a political pundit tows the party line rather than speaking truth to ideological party power.
And what prompted Jon Chait to go from knocking the liberal blogosphere for its insistence on ideological purity to knocking Bloomberg for his insistence of not adhering to ideological purity?
5 Responses to “CRYING WHEN THEY WANT TO”
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on 06 Jul 2007 at 12:56 pm # Shawn Macomber
On his absolute worst day, Chait is hardly as partisan as Obama. What he’s objecting to is this idea that because someone says something doesn’t mean we need to accept and repeat it as truth. Obama claim to be the Mayor of Purple America, but I’ve read both his books now–for work, not pleasure…thank God I’m not that desperate–and if there is a single position he’s taken that won’t meet the utter and complete assent of the average upper middle-class liberal, it has completely escaped my attention. And Bloomberg? The junior league nanny state enthusiast? Christ, he could not be easier to pigeonhole. There is absolutely nothing brave about these men. All they do is pretend to take both positions into consideration and than take a completely predictable DNC liberal position. I’m not always a Chait fan but he is completely right on this one.
on 06 Jul 2007 at 1:00 pm # Shawn Macomber
I should clarify, I’m using your definition of partisan here, i.e. Chait is much more likely to go against the establishment than Obama.
on 06 Jul 2007 at 1:23 pm # papasquid
The ironic thing about Chait’s column is that he hasn’t shown himself to be a partisan, yet here he is defending (or I should say, misconstruing) partisanship out of some sort of belief that it’s integral to Democracy. Disagreement is, party-line ideology is not.
And if you haven’t noticed either Bloomberg or Obama going against prevailing party establishment then you must not have been paying very close attention. Just yesterday Obama touted merit pay at an NEA conference (which is about as ballsy a thing a Democrat could do in the middle of a primary). Last year he refused to rule out partially privatizing social security, right at a time when vice-like Democratic party unity insisted privatization wasn’t even an option.
Bloomberg, too, will go from touting gun control and pissing off the NRA, to bashing unions and ripping the MTA a new one over their “illegal transit strike.” Neither one of these guys is a Chuck Schumer-Mitch McConnell type partisan, who live and breathe their respective party platforms, and to whom party unity is the ultimate goal.