Hate & Discontent Inside the Beltway

You turn on your television set, or surf your favorite news site...and you wonder.

You wonder why the Democratic Party, after defeating their Republican opponents handily in 2008, are seemingly unable to accomplish those "simple" things that they said they would do, during the campaign.

The blogoshpere is abuzz with excuses, mostly pointing fingers at the Republican Party for orchestrating sometimes-bloody free-for-alls at local "town hall" meetings, where Democratic Congresspeople and their occasional Republican supporters are frequently shouted down by groups of "John and Jane Q. Public's" upset over...something.

At the core of the disconnected Democratic response to these vehement protests is a bizarre refusal to accept reality; to extrapolate from James Carville's famous mantra: it's not just the economy, stupid - it's everything about how Washington, D.C. operates.

The culture of the professional politician does not allow for unscripted outsiders to upset talking points. The "town hall" concept has as its real base the desire to present the professional politician with a "feel-good photo-op". As a result, most professional pol's on both sides of the line are completely unable to function as effective public speakers in the face of determined and focused opposition.

While this may seem strange at first, it is important to remember that the days of Congressmen beating each other senseless with walking sticks is long gone. When a Congressperson steps up to the podium to "address their colleagues", they are usually speaking to a mostly-empty room; their spoken words are dutifully entered into the Congressional Record, but the Record is not for Congressional votes, so much as to have something to point constituents at as them actually "doing the job they were elected to do"...And, if they're too busy to actually read it out loud, they can usually have it entered into the Record, anyway.

Part of the problem is size: there are 435 Representatives. If every Representative were to exercise their right to speak on a given issue, it would be nearly impossible to accomplish anything, because if each Representative took just 2 minutes to speak, it would take 15 hours to work all the way through the list - without breaks for food or "necessaries". As a result, Congresspeople quickly find that they need to speak only when they have to, and that most of the process for getting something done happens over lunch or golf.

The problem with this approach is that speaking and debate skills atrophy, causing the professional pol and their Party to increasingly rely on professional "spin-doctors" to "get the word out" on Issue 'X'...and the problem there, is that too many of the professional spin-doc's think in terms of going on the attack against criticism, going for the biggest bang in the shortest possible amount of time...

...Which is where the "Mainstream Media" (the so-called "MSM") enters the fray.

The MSM in recent years has effectively abandoned the "Edward R. Murrow" style of journalistic integrity that had catapulted news reporters like Walter Kronkite to positions of high trust and almost-unwavering confidence in the eyes of the public, trading this integrity for screaming, advertising-driven headlines designed to shock, terrify and enrapture in less than 30 seconds - the embodiment of the concept that "if it bleeds, it leads".

The MSM started realizing the full extent of its power potential in the early 1990's - that it could, in effect, become a directly-impacting, major determining force in American politics.

The 2008 election was their first real test-drive: the various engines of the MSM (in seeming agreement that, if not formally inked, was certainly the result of consensus ) pointedly lined up to present Barack Obama as the Best Possible Choice Of All and the Democratic Party in general as the Saviors of the Economy, while pointedly constructing a view of the Republican camp as disorganized, "red neck" rube's completely out of touch with America in general...

...Even though the campaign was razor-thin on substantive plans for the aftermath of victory (oddly, rather in tune with the out-going Bush Administration's lack of planning for post-Saddam Iraq), and even though disturbing events began to occur - namely, the gross and brazen character assassination of Samuel Joseph "Joe The Plumber" Wurzelbacher, apparently for having the temerity to actually ask a question of then-Senator Obama with a news camera present.

That would have been bad enough - it was already proving to be a nasty campaign - but it got worse. Much worse.

As 2009 began, amid crowing from the Left that "capitalism", "conservatism" and the GOP were all deader than the proverbial doornail, details started coming out about President Obama and the Democratic Party's proposed solutions to the economic meltdown, a groundswell of opposition began to arise. Disorganized at first, and not really having any coherent agenda, the so-called "Tea Party Protesters" (from a term coined apparently on the spur of the moment by CNBC market analyst Rick Santelli) seemed to suddenly go from "zero" to a major force in American politics, a force capable of not merely severely disrupting President Obama's leadership of both the nation and the Democratic Party, but also negatively impacting his public approval rating.

And here, we have the heart of the issue: the "attack ad".

One of the interesting aspects of the Tea Party phenomenon is that the avowed "Left Wing" in American has been seemingly-unable to fathom the notion that their supposedly "pin-headed" opponents are unable to fully utilize the Internet in the same manner as more "forward-thinking progressives" (an interesting notion, in and of itself, considering the heavy Internet presence of Al Queda and Taliban supporters).

Infinitely worse, however, was the MSM's response to the "great unwashed".

In a concerted series of attacks remarkable for their crass viciousness, the MSM went all-out to denigrate the protesters as "Tea Baggers" - pointedly and brazenly using deviant college-frat-boy sex jokes that the FCC would have leveled billions in fines for just ten years ago - in an attempt to demonize the protesters into obscurity.

Not only did it not work, it seems to have backfired.

It didn't work because the MSM and the Democratic Party have apparently forgotten the one vital rule of the 21st Century:

You're Not The Only Game In Town.

The more disconnected the MSM and Democratic Party become from the swelling numbers of angry Middle America, the shriller both their rhetoric and their attempts at policy-making become, eventually overloading and imploding, as all but their most blind, lock-step supporters find themselves unable to understand just exactly what their leader's plans are.

The sad thing, if you're a Democrat, is that the Party's leadership may have dug themselves so deep a hole that they will not get out in time for the 2010 mid-terms, which if held today, would likely dismiss most of the House, and a good portion of the Senate, out of hand...

...It may, perhaps, be time to rethink the concept of the two-party system of government - the United States was never intended as a "two-party" country, nor was it ever codified into law.

The reasons should be crystal clear, even to the most lackadaisical of observers.