Jonathan Todd

My Father-in-law, Walter Urbanek, has recieved a letter from John Kerry. My Father-in-law isn’t a top level politician. (Though, he was school friends with Peter Welch). It is a letter that asks him to donate to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. 

Kerry begins:

“I have never seen anything like this: as President Obama works to dig us out of a deep hole and build our country back up, the Republicans in Washington at the highest levels have adopted an entirely different goal: force his failure. It disgusts me every time I see it.”

He later argues:

“Since the Democrats lost the super-majority, Republicans have even more power to obstruct every initiative President Obama puts forward, and they’ve shown an unyielding willingness to continue to do just that. Republicans said no to health care reform. They said no to regulating the big banks whose recklessness nearly sank our economy. They said no to the economic stimulus bill that has created or saved over two million jobs and provided immediate tax relief to 95 percent of working Americans.”

Republican senators have been no more co-operative with Democrats on the legislative response to the BP oil spill. “You’ve got a situation where the Democrats control both houses of Congress as well as the White House, and even then, they’re finding it extremely difficult to move forward,” Jerry Taylor, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told the New York Times.

“They figure”, claims Kerry’s letter, “if they can kill a few more bills, it’s smooth sailing in November, Democrats will fall and President Obama will fail.” They expect voters to say to Democrats “you’re fired”, as Sarah Palin encourages a Tea Party audience in the video below. (Incidentally, Palin refers to bumper stickers in this speech, prompting people to approach drivers with Obama bumper stickers and say, “how is that hopey changey thing working out for you?”) 

But will voters do this?

If they do, it will be taken as a rejection of agenda of change that Obama and the Democrats have tried to take forward. However, in the absence of a super-majority, it can be very difficult for a party to achieve what it wants to achieve even when in control of both houses of Congress and the White House, especially if the other party makes a determined and co-ordinated effort to stop them, which is what the Republicans have done.

Their strategy would blow-up in the Republicans’ faces if the American people, instead of saying “you’re fired”, say “the Republicans have failed to act in the constructive and bipartisan spirit that our political system is based upon. As a direct consequence, major issues, such as immigration and climate change, have not been acted upon. We cannot reward such irresponsible behaviour and will, therefore, be voting Democrat.” 

This seems the fundamental question at the heart of November’s mid-terms. The deeper structural questions are how broken and what can be done to fix a politics that is institutionally based upon bipartisanship but whose parties, especially the Republicans, have abandoned bipartisanship. Essentially, as Jonathan Chait has asked, is America ungovernable? This structural question won’t be answered by November but we will know a lot more about whether America still wants to stick with the change agenda that swept Obama into the White House.