A Little More Perspective

Conventional wisdom suggests that, barring a big surprise or partisan implosion in the next few weeks, Democrats stand to win big this November, as Americans grow tired of a seeming lack of answers from the Republican administration.

Now, while I am definitely no fan of the current administration, and with the GOP’ers who were in power through 2006, I am also troubled by the prospect of seeing incumbent Dems bolstered by the shift in attitude.

Consider, for example, this reminder offered by Deon Roberts at the New Orleans CityBusiness Blog:

But for every accusation aimed at Republicans, there’s one aimed at Democrats. Here’s an excerpt from a piece of commentary published Sept. 22 on Bloomberg.com. The excerpt is about a 2005 bill.

For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.

But the bill didn’t become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn’t even get the Senate to vote on the matter.

So, folks, allow me to reissue my plea: could we please turn this into an anti-incumbent election, rather than an anti-GOP election?

True, human nature being what it is, it wouldn’t be too long before partisan polarization reemerged.  I could naïvely hope for an emergence of third party strength, but sadly most talented pols gravitate to one or the other of the major parties (for obvious reasons), leaving minor parties generally rather nutty.

However, I suspect that now more than ever, Washington could stand a good housecleaning.  Nuking the status quo and rebuilding probably would be at least no worse than a simple realignment of a few seats while most of the jokers remain in place.