Andrew Ferguson, the best writer at The Weekly Standard, has a good column up. He writes:
Much to the DLC’s disappointment, [Bill Clinton’s success] was only temporary. Like many large political figures — Churchill, Thatcher, Reagan — Clinton failed to bequeath to his party a true successor.
Democrats after Clinton are so weak they have failed to profit from a Republican presidency that’s been sunk low by an inept, spendthrift domestic policy and a fingers-crossed, starry-eyed policy abroad — two of the very weaknesses that crippled the pre-Clinton Democrats. Even Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton’s partner if not his successor, seems at a loss on how to turn George W. Bush’s disasters to partisan advantage.
Ferguson also gives us his knack for pointing out what should be obvious but isn’t at the end:
The great unspoken truth (until now!) of U.S. politics is that, in domestic policy, the major ideological questions are more or less settled.
With a divided electorate, neither party will increase or reduce the national tax burden substantially. Neither will nationalize health care nor privatize welfare, despite wild claims to the contrary. Environmental and other regulation will expand at a prudent pace, whoever mans the federal apparatus.
It’s not despite this but because of it that partisanship is so ferocious. As they say about disputes among college professors, the fighting is so fierce because the stakes are so low. Washington is consumed with the “narcissism of small differences.”
Posted by Hubbard in Philosophy, Politics