By popular demand, a post about the David Broder/Harry Reid smackdown that was detailed in Politico last night. The short summary: David Broder has had his Depends in a twist for years about Reid and he recently wrote a column (dissected by Ezra here) telling Reid and other Congressional Democrats to get off his lawn. Reid then (accurately) described Broder as “a man who has been retired for many years and writes a column once in a while.”
Broder then took some more potshots at Daschle, comparing him unfavorably to a bunch of other Senate leaders from years ago (George Mitchell, Mike Mansfield). All of this prompted an impassioned defense of Broder from Moonie columnist Tony Blankley.
Broder, in Blankley’s opinion, has advocated for a “sense of decorum in town,” has a deep interest in process — how decisions are made in the halls of Congress — and has never been one for knee-jerk judgments, whether liberal or conservative. “My sense is that he finds lurching ideological expressions to be unappealing on either side,” Blankley said.
I actually agree with Broder that Reid is not a terrific Senate Majority leader. But it’s silly of Broder not to admit that American politics is not what it used to be, that things changed irrevocably in 1994 and that the Senate is not the genial old boys’ club it used to be. Harry Reid is not going to convince Jim DeMint to support health care reform over a mint julep.
In the end, this is what is so pathetic about Broder, Cokie, etc. It’s not just that what they’re repeating is warmed over conventional wisdom, it’s that it’s all been under the heat lamps for 25 years.
licensed to kill time
This seems like a good place to link an Ezra Klein post I was just reading:
It’s titled “Even LBJ would be stuck if he drew this hand”.
(my italics)
JK
Doug,
Harry Reid is as good a Senate Majority leader as Broder is a pundit. The two of them deserve each other and this country deserves senators and pundits who are head and shoulders above these 2 fucking losers.
Chuck Todd is filling in for Chris Matthews on Hardball tonight and is chatting with moonie Tony Blankley.
dr. bloor
@JK:
Thanks for the warning, not that I planned on watching anyways. I’m sure they’ll have a stimulating discussion about how Teh DFHs are a bunch of hot-headed morans who can’t tell a cocktail weenie from a canape.
burnspbesq
@JK:
Saints preserve us.
There is a weekly show on public radio here in SoCal called “Left, Right, and Center,” that features Blankley, former LA Times reporter Robert Scheer, and a certain Greek lady. I am convinced that it only exists to, umm, enhance the torture quotient of my Friday night commute.
What you are describing has the potential to be every bit as bad.
Doesn’t Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions cover this?
demkat620
Redi could be way better but Broder is pining for the fjords if he thinks the GOP is ever going to make nice on anything.
Did he miss the call for GOP purity tests? C’mon, you can’t negotiate with people like that.
JK
@dr. bloor: @burnspbesq:
MSNBC should cancel Hardball as part of a green intiative to reduce air pollution and Chris Matthews should be admitted to a sanitarium.
General Winfield Stuck
You do relish the eternal Village food fight DougJ.
demkat620
@demkat620: Reid. Reid. I need a typing tutor.
Zam
@licensed to kill time: Yea this new world of senatorial politics is just annoying. I was doing some research on Mike Mansfield recently and was just amazed at how different the relationship between republicans and dems were. I kinda think that all the old conservative southern dems turned into republicans and slowly dems have been gaining moderate and liberal republicans from the north. It might be eventually that what once was the majority of republicans in the 60’s and 70’s will soon be entirely part of the democratic party.
Zam
@Zam: Oh and I’d just like to add that until something like 1974 67 was the threshold to end a filibuster.
licensed to kill time
@demkat620:
fixt
General Winfield Stuck
@demkat620:
I work cheep, and you get what you pay for.
Calouste
David Broder, born 1929, age 80.
Harry Reid, born 1939, age 70.
Fill in the others.
The problem with American politics is that both the politicians and the commentors are so. fucking. ooold. and are stuck rehashing stuff from the past and refighting fights from the times they were young.
Zam
So I have CNN on right now and it looks like the Teabaggers are planning a convention. Looking like we might get to see a teabagging party soon.
WereBear
This is great.
And holiday timely, too.
Corner Stone
Why bother?
burnspbesq
As one who normally carries a Leatherman Micra and a little Spyderco knife on my keyring, all I can say in response to this is …
THIS!!!
Fern
@Calouste: Bit of an oversimplification there, I’d say.
General Winfield Stuck
@Calouste:
Those fights at least had some substance. The new guys would be slinging shit based on Obama’s terrorist ties, and Michelles nekked arms. Pretty soon that is all we will talk about, bare none.
licensed to kill time
@Zam:
Here’s another interesting historical difference in the filibuster
via Steve Benen via Ezra (lots of vias!)
mk3872
Can anyone here help explain to me why & how the washed-up DC Villager pundits do not understand the point Doug made here: today’s GOP congressional leaders are not willing to compromise nor are they taking America’s problems seriously because they have no interest in actually legislating (i.e. congressional bills are just too darn looooong …) ??
And how can they possibly not understand that this all changed under Gingrich, DeLay & Limbaugh, NOT under Obama and Reid ??
beltane
The idyllic Washington of Broder’s imagination, if it ever existed at all, was surely dead by the time of the Clinton impeachment. If Broder isn’t happy with today’s politics, he should take the issue up with Newt Gingrich.
burnspbesq
@mk3872:
Mencken once said something about the difficulty of getting someone to believe something when their livelihood depends on not believing it.
Parakeeta
This is a really good post —
kay
What’s wrong with this is Border’s violating his own stated “principles” and showing himself to be a facile fraud.
Reid’s bill is bipartisan. It’s a compromise. It focuses on cost, in a fairly brave way. It’s the only serious effort to look at health care costs in my adult lifetime.
Broder can hate it, but he has to attack the substance. He’s not doing that because he hasn’t really looked at or understood the issue. He’s repeating the same surface complaints that he always repeats.
Reid is offended, and rightfully so. This was difficult to achieve. It deserves serious analysis.
soonergrunt
One wonders if Broder and Cokie feel any sense of responsibility for the way things in Washington are. They were both leaders of the pitchfork brigade that went after Clinton from the day he entered office because he wasn’t one of them. They both cheered on the Whitewater bullshit. As Broder once explained “He came in here and he trashed the place … and it’s not his place.”
Well, thanks to Broder and the village idiot brigade, the Republicans have been trying to blow up the place since 2003.
Media Matters does a great take-down of Soggy here.
demkat620
@kay: But to Broder, bipartisan means Democrats bending over and letting Republicans have everything they want.
Especially now, when they are in the minority.
freelancer
@JK:
This.
But as long as we’re tweaking msnbc, can we agree to never have Howard Dean guest host a show again? I love Dean, but couldn’t get through the first 5 minutes of Maddow’s show last night, he was that awful.
justawriter
@Calouste
I think the actual problem is that these pundits weren’t paying attention while they were young. I wrote a column on civility in Congress bemoaning the fact that these guys think the War Between the States was a polite tea party because after all, it had “Civil” right in the name.
bayville
Line of the month Doug, and a great way to send the kids off on a four-day weekend.
JK
David Broder’s headstone should contain this quote which best exemplifies his intolerable arrogance and Grand Canyon size ego.
“He {Bill Clinton] came in here and he trashed the place, and it’s not his place.”
Chuck Butcher
Harry Reid is Senate Majority Leader, not Sultan or 5* General. You will only see what Harry Reid is up to when he talks about it or after it is done and even then you’ll have to guess. What Reid does has to stay behind closed doors or it can’t be done.
Whatever arm twisting or bribery or other forms of persuasion that are used blow up in everyone’s face if they’re public. Landrieu’s price got public and you see how that goes. Arm twisting is even more subject to failure in public.
I am not in the least satisfied with the current track in the Senate, but I also know I have some huge holes in my knowledge.
Corner Stone
@freelancer: That was slit your wrists awful.
ellaesther
I know — I mean, I really know — that it does not come down to the will of the voters for the Senate hold-outs, but still:
If you live in the states of these four Senators, perhaps you could give them a call or drop them a line? All you have to do is call and say “I’m so and so, and I live in such and such. I wanted to let the Senator know that I very much hope that he/she will vote with the Democratic Party and support health care reform.” They’ll take a note, and you can go on your way!
Here’s the contact info: http://www.senate.gov
kay
@demkat620:
I have another complaint.
I feel as if they romanticize and sugar coat their own personal period of history, because that reflects well on them. It’s true of both Cokie Roberts and Broder.
“In my day, Senators were heroic, towering figures…blah, blah…”
He’s ignoring the nuts and bolts of both policy and process as they are , today, to do this self-indulgent easy, sappy reminiscing.
My father’s older than Broder, but not by much. He doesn’t do this. He doesn’t look back all misty-eyed. He doesn’t delude himself that he was part of some “better America” or “greatest generation” when he was a younger man. He’d be appalled by that.
He says people were always stupid and mean, and anything difficult and worthwhile was achieved in spite of that :)
JK
@freelancer:
Howard Dean guest hosting last night is the tip of the iceberg as far as I’m concerned.
Cable news is an oxymoron. It’s entertainment masquerading as news. A week’s worth of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal contains more actual news than a week’s worth of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News combined.
The CEOs of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News should be sued for journalistic malpractice and for dumbing down our culture to death.
demkat620
@kay: Yes. People were always stupid and mean. It’s just better documented these days.
Broder had nothing to say about the mess Bush left us. He was one of the WAPO’s biggest cheerleaders for that assclown.
Now all of a sudden he has concerns. Well Dave, take your concerns and blow ’em out your ass.
Retire for good already.
MattR
@Chuck Butcher: Maybe it was the recent Dana Perino thread, but the Cuban Missle Crisis immediately popped into my head. Can you imagine how that would have ended if Kennedy’s communications with the Soviets were made public in real time?
demkat620
Oh look! The Great Orange Satan’s on my tv. Now it’s Thanksgiving.
Napoleon
The TPM piece on the Reid/Broder thing was amusing. They reported Broder responded to Reid’s assertion that he was retired with a “I am not retired.” The first commentator in the thread noted that his parents live in a retirement condominium community in Alexandria, Va and when he goes to lunch with them at the on site cafeteria/restaurant he sees Broder there with his wife because he lives in the retirement community.
kay
@demkat620:
I would be pissed too, if I were Harry Reid. He gets this horrendous thing drafted, gets past the first hurdle, and he has to listen to how he isn’t A Historic Leader. What?
Yeah, yeah, okay. What about the work?
Pundits can’t write history without first looking at what is actually happening. I know the fake-history part is easier, but they’re really skipping a step.
freelancer
@MattR:
Imagine Wolf Blitzer reacting in realtime to Castro’s revelation that he had orders to launch the operational nukes he did have in response to any airstrike:
youtube.com/watch?v=k5QtvmyPdII
It is a miracle that we are here.
JK
@freelancer:
I wish Keith Olbermann could be questioned about those comments he made concerning Hannity. If Olbermann was quoted correctly and truly believes that Sean Hannity is an okay guy, then he is a goddamn fucking asshole and every liberal and progressive should stop watching Countdown. Hannity is a malignant media carcinogen who has polluted the well of civil discourse with his venous bile and bottomless cesspool of lies.
If the fact that Hannity is a Yankee fan is enough to wipe the slate clean for all of the garbage he’s spewed on air during his career in the eyes of Olbermann, than Olbermann is one of the dumbest fuckers on this planet.
The Godfather and The Godfather Part II are my 2 favorite films, but I have no use whatsoever for Rudy Guiliani even though he’s a big fan of the Godfather films.
Zifnab
@licensed to kill time: The filibuster of 1967 ended all Senate business. Now, when the Republicans filibuster, there is a bunch of work-around. Harry Reid rearranges a few votes and makes sure no one else is inconvenienced by it.
The filibuster is supposed to be the ultimate inconvenience for the entire country. That’s why it failed in 1967. Eventually, southern Senators wanted to get their agendas handled too.
Modern Republicans have no agenda. If the entire ship of state crashes into an ice flow and sinks to the sea floor, they’ll just cheer. Drown it all in the bath tube and whatnot.
Anne Laurie
. And they’re all companionably clumped together in the same tray, so the ones on the bottom are soggy & pasty, and the ones on the top are crusted a horrible shade of orange, like Boehner.
(Insert your own suggestive jokes here; I gotta go finish packing. I hate packing.)
General Winfield Stuck
@Chuck Butcher:
So does everyone else, including the Senators and ML Reid. I have watched the senate closely for ten years now, and there are general patterns of how legislation kabucki plays out, but this one is so big, even existential to a degree, for both parties, it is hard to gauge intermittent steps to getting a final vote in the senate. Which regardless, is not the one being hashed out now. The only big surprise to me was Reid including the PO in this upcoming vote. And it is really impossible to know what he is thinking yet. I thought they would pass a weak bill with no PO just to get the thing to conference, and then make the final bill with a PO in it for the blood fight on the senate floor for a final vote.
But you are right that the senate is a finicky body, that operates largely on a stasis of decorum and protocol till the end process begins with final debate. Right now delicate egos and sensibilities of fairness and discretion is about always the rule, and Harry Reid is good at this, WHEN HE WANTS TO BE. I just can’t tell right now if he does or doesn’t.
But the facts of consequence are fairly clear. First, he is up for reelection in 010, and any failure to placate the base and in general, even in Nevada, will be big trouble for Harry. Just passing any old thing won’t do this time, as has been Harry’s MO as ML so far. Just to get something accomplished. He has been more accommodating to wingnuts than need be imho. Especially on dealing with GOP filibusters.
The second thing is the existential threat to dems majority, or at least it’s size, and to Obama’s approval numbers, which are always critical in getting future bills passed. It is also even more existential to the GOP to let another New Deal type institution be created by the government. But they can only hem and haw and lie to project power.
It has always been unlikely a government involvement in general health care insurance gets passed, even with a 60 vote majority in the senate.– IMO, Lieberman was always going to scuttle it if he could, partly out of being bought off by big insurance, but mostly because he is a vindictive little shit pining to stick a fork in the dem party.
Reid and other dems cannot, or should not publicly declare their intentions to do this by reconciliation. Politically, they need to play it out as the last resort to circumvent obstruction from wingers and recalcitrant blue dogs for something most Americans want. And we won’t see it happen or promoted until the last 2 minutes of the game. Because the stakes are so high for dems and the country, I am still hopefull. But surely not sure by any means that this will get meaningfully done.
Zifnab
@JK:
Man Coulter and Bill Maher used to date. Just to put things in perspective.
None of the cable news jockeys are serious journalists. It’s all just a show. Sean Hannity doesn’t believe half of what he says, not because he’s some secret liberal, but because he just doesn’t give a fuck. They’re paying him millions of dollars to make an ass of himself on TV, and he takes it all willingly.
These guys are about as legit as an on-air Steven Colbert (that’s just one more reason his show is such an excellent parody).
The Sean Hannity you know is an illusion. He’s not a real person. He’s a personality. When he goes home to his wife and kids or when he’s drinking at the country club lounge or when he’s out catching a baseball game, he’s not Real American(tm) Newscaster anymore. He’s just a dude with a day job.
Don’t get sucked up into the wingnut hero worship / vilification game. These guys aren’t any better than Wolf Blitzer or Chris Matthews. They’ve just stepped into the crazy end of the political swimming pool.
freelancer (itouch)
@Zifnab:
That was the other example I was going to mention. Cable news = Pro-wrestling. I’m sick of cheering them on.
eemom
Broder is a useless hack, and I reiterate my request that someone leave the door of the retirement home open so that he can wander off into the Beltway traffic.
People dump on Harry Reid all the time, but I personally was impressed as hell with the speech he gave before the vote on Saturday — the way he emphasized the mind-boggling outrageousness of the fact that these fuckers don’t even want to DISCUSS one of the most important issues to ever come before this so-called “world’s greatest deliberative body,” etc. Sounded like he really meant it.
JK
@Zifnab:
Cable news is a cesspool from which I have decided to make a clean break. If I want to check out news on tv, I’m either tuning in to C-SPAN or The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.
Chuck Butcher
@General Winfield Stuck:
I made a post the other day stating that if the Senate can’t get this done, I’m done. I wasn’t kidding. I don’t need the fucking aggravation for zero results. I expect to not get what I want done, but I’ve reached the point on this where zero or a wreck is not acceptable.
Ash Can
@Zam:
This. Things really were different back in the day, and I don’t say that just because I’m an old fart (although not nearly as old or quite as farty as David Broder). That’s why, for example, when Peggy Noonan had the fucking gall to complain about W being a lout, I wanted to pour a bucket of ice water over her head and slap her hard enough to wake her the goddamned hell up. These people blithely and enthusiastically deep-sixed Republican statesmanship under Ronald Reagan, and the situation has only gotten consistently worse since then. In light of this, Broder’s ramblings about “bipartisanship” simply reek of senile dementia. Poor thing.
General Winfield Stuck
@Chuck Butcher:
I hear ya. Like I said, my only real hope is that the good dem senators know how strongly we feel about this bill. I think they do. I hope they do. We shall see.
danimal
@Zifnab:
Here’s my question: These days, the Senate is able to work around the filibuster and get other things done on the legislative calendar. But Harry Reid is the Majority Leader and has the power to set the legislative calendar. Is there a reason he can’t clear the entire Senate calendar to work on health care reform? Make obstruction costly to senators…”pork barrel project A is the next item on the agenda, but first we must complete work on health care reform…”
As I understand it, the filibuster is an inconvenience to the majority party, because they need to keep a quorum (50 persons present), while the minority just has to keep a speaker and maybe a backup (1-2 people present). But the majority party does have the ability to force uncomfortable votes and highlight obstructionist tactics. It’s not the genial, senatorial way, but most things worth achieving are worth the fight.
General Winfield Stuck
Think of the Senate as two nukular powers, repub and dems, or majority and minority. Even with a 60 vote, or higher majority, a single senator from either party has the nuke to grind the senate to a halt, in effect destroying it’s ability to function, if they so chose. So the battles are largely scripted and played out with considerable restraint by both sides of the ideological spectrum.
It kind of reminds me of the old Star Trek episode, or maybe TNG, I forget, where the Enterprise comes across two nearby worlds who have been at war for ages. And somewhere along the line decided actual fighting with all the blood and destruction was no longer acceptable. So instead, they were doing it by computer selection of victims who just stepped into a room and were vaporized, to keep an equilibrium and keep fighting without actually fighting.
This is kind of what the filibuster is about, and a lot of other rules. They do it bloodlessly with a supermajority vote, and a number of other polite rules that any senator can employ to be heard to address his or her problem, to prevent them from getting pissed enough to stop the whole show, until he/she gets what they want.
Before the filibuster was implemented, I think around a hundred years ago, and other procedural rules to unruffle feathers and keep everyone at least somewhat satisfied, the senate often couldn’t get what needed done done, with all the bickering and shenanigans that arose from it.
It’s kind of what the founders intended, for the senate to slow things down and thwart a tyranny of the majority mob rule, by putting the “extended debate” clause in the constitution without a lot of definition, and leaving it up to the senate to make it’s own rules to keep functioning, but with affording minority blocks of senators to get some satisfaction.
I think it could use some adjustment, especially the part of requiring an affirmative 60 votes for the majority to prevail, and instead put the onus on the minority to meet a 40 vote threshold. And also the quorum requirements like you say that makes the majority keep so many members nearby, while letting the minority only have 1 or 2. That change might make things more fair democratically and allow the majority more rightful say in what gets passed.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
The personal dynamic between Harry Reid and David Broder would normally be something I would save for a soporific, but for some reason I read the article. It’s amusing to read this single, tepid insult from Reid, followed by a half dozen or so much harsher put-downs from Broder, then read that Gene Robinson accuses Reid of a cheap shot. Astoundingly, I think journalists are even more insulated from reality than politicians are, and that’s saying something.
Enceladus
I think Broder is just venting because he imagines Harry Reid is responsible for his retirement home’s current shortage of chocolate pudding.
chrome agnomen
@Chuck Butcher:
and i wanted to reply that i am 100% with you, but i had all kinds of aggravation trying to sign on. i have proudly worn the liberal mantle my whole politically sentient life, even during the 15 years i spent in that red bastion wyoming, where people would actually move down a few bar stools when they heard that i wasn’t in the long line to suck the cheney schlong. i can retire from the sphere, and coincidentally excise a shiiteload of stress from my life.
Steve Balboni
I urge you to go re-read “The Boys On the Bus”
You’ll see that Broder hasn’t changed in 45 years. His shtick now is the same as it ever was. Anyone whose outlook on American politics hasn’t changed a singe iota in 4+ decades is an imbecile. Plain and simple.
Self linking ahead,
steampoweredopinions.blogspot.com/2008/11/david-broder-4-decaddes-of-wanking-and.html
Brien Jackson
I really don’t understand the need for the requisite Reid-bashing. Not that I’m a huge fan or something, but what modern Majority Leader has been markedly better at the job?
Notorious P.A.T.
That reminds me of Al Franken’s run-in with Hannity:
You can choose to believe that people who push Fox News’s snake oil aren’t necessarily bad. I don’t.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Sorry but I have to disagree with this. Colbert is legit and anyone who watches his show knows it by the simple fact that it’s on Comedy Central. Fox is passing Hannity off as a serious reporter who is reporting factual news on a real news channel when any sane person can see that insHannity and the rest of Faux News are full of shit.
Just a small nitpick. :)
Broder is a retired hack who is supplementing his retirement income by hiring himself out the the RNC. He doesn’t even try to write anything worth reading, he just recycles the bullshit to keep it circulating.
He’s a shit pump and his job is to keep the RNC shit circulating so it doesn’t get too stale and ripe.
Comrade Kevin
@JK: If you want to see what he actually said, it is here. Basically, if they’re both at a Yankees game, they don’t try to strangle each other. They don’t “hang out” together.
soonergrunt
@Comrade Kevin: All that means is that they both want to watch a baseball game.
maus
Very apt. If politics was a real effort to make things better and not a “game”, the jobs of pundits would not exist.
Geeno
@Zam:
Nope – it was 2/3 of senators present
If no one did a quorum call, you could technically hold a session with 3 senators, and two would end the filibuster.
That’s why the filibuster forces always needed one present – to demand a quroum count if nothing else.
Comrade Kevin
@soonergrunt: Exactly.