Myopia of Historic Proportions
The House health reform vote is being tentatively planned for next weekend. It might be a close one. There’s some fence-sitting going on; there’s some vainglory; some monomania, megalomania, and solipsism. And there are plenty of pols who are so concerned about being politically successful that they are forgetting to be politically successful.
Matt Yglesias puts the vote in perspective, says smart stuff, and is a little funny, too:
If reform passes and is signed into law, then immediately Barack Obama’s position in history is secured. When people look back from 2060 on the creation of the American welfare state, they’ll say that FDR, LBJ, and BHO were its main architects, with Roosevelt enshrining the principle of universal social insurance into law and Obama completing the initial promise of the New Deal. Members of congress who helped him do that will have a place in history. Nobody’s going to be very interested in a story like “Mike Ross [D-Ark.] served a bunch of years in Congress and people were impressed with his ability to win a relatively conservative district; he didn’t achieve very much and one day he wasn’t in Congress anymore.”
Which is just to say that nobody lasts in office forever, no congressional majority lasts forever, and no party controls the White House forever. But the measure of a political coalition isn’t how long it lasted, but what it achieved. From the tone of a lot of present-day political commentary you’d think that the big mistake Lyndon Johnson made during his tenure in the White House was that by passing the Civil Rights Act he wound up damaging the Democratic Party politically by opening the South up to the GOP. Back on planet normal, that’s the crowning achievement of his presidency.
Maybe it’s difficult to recognize or see clearly the historic dimensions of your choices when you are in the middle of making them. But you’d expect most politicians to be fairly well attuned to opportunities for greatness. Then again, future people don’t vote. I mean—ah, you know what I mean.
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I love the lbj/civil rights analogy. so true. I think this kind of shallowness comes from cable news, although I was reading somewhere about how few Americans, percentage-wise, actually watch cable news. And yet it has such an influence because people in politics watch it and seem to assume everyone else does too.
this is worth reading:
http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-treatment/avoid-contingency-plan