THE PARTIES THAT BIND : In America’s Political Tango, Neither the Democrats Nor the Republicans Can Lead

Cast your mind back to the Clarence Thomas affair. You know, Phyllis Berry, Anita Hill, Long Dong Silver--that whole crowd. During the week when network standards and practices guys were crying in their manuals, and in the days after, the most frequently used word was process. Everybody and his senator, whatever their position on The Question, agreed that the process stinks. It was left to Joe Biden, the inheritor of the Richard Nixon inappropriate smile gene, to defend the proceedings, and he did so with the caution and tentativeness that the Democrats think of as fervor.

No one dared say the really ugly truth about the process because it challenges those whom politicians of every stripe are committed to flatter publicly--the American voters. For more than two decades, the electorate has been splitting up the government--letting Republicans control the White House and giving Democrats an iron grip on Congress. Locked in a semi-permanent tango in which neither side really leads, the two parties have turned normal political functions--an election campaign, a confirmation hearing--into Philippine cockfights.

What we end up with is what improv groups call the mirror game, except with distorting mirrors. The voters, not trusting the political class, hedge their bets by dividing the power. The pols, frustrated at this forced co-habitation, become steadily more contemptuous of the citizens who set up this situation. Believing us to be sad and ignorant types, they devise increasingly stupid campaigns to appeal to our presumed bovine intellects. The ensuing display further disgusts the voters, and we get ever lower election turnouts and still more divided government. We are passengers on a carousel of mutual contempt.

Give the Republicans a little credit. They’ve at least tried to change the situation. Newt (Bad Checks) Gingrich and his allies have pushed for hardball tactics, in legislating and campaigning, as a way to break the stalemate and get a right-wing Congress. The Democrats take their banishment from the White House with an odd equanimity, content to put up joke candidates for President as long as they can maintain their committee chairmanships. No Democratic nominee has had, or will have, the nerve to say, “If you don’t elect me along with your Democratic congressman, vote against us both, and let’s find out what the Republicans really have in mind.”

Now take a White House crowd schooled in Lee Atwater scorched-earth politics, mix in a dollop of the frustration that each side feels at being leg-ironed to its foe and you’ve got the delightfully spicy gumbo served up as the Thomas hearings, resulting in the lowest ratings for any playoff game in baseball history.

The process can be tinkered with ‘til the cows come home, and nothing important will change. We love to tinker with the process. It’s politics as a weekend fix-up project, John Madden asking Ace Hardware what to do about confirmation hearings. The Democrats have been fooling with their nominating system since 1968, and it’s done wonders for them. And horsing around with “advise and consent” will be momentarily satisfying but will solve nothing except the problem of how to fill a minute on the news. A Democratic Congress getting hardball Republicanism shoved down its throat by a White House full of Sununus will get at least sporadically nasty in response. The process spirals unappetizingly, like a pubic hair on a Coke can.

Other democracies have logjam problems of their own (see, for example, Israel, where the fate of governments rests on a couple of Parliament members who take orders from a rabbi in Brooklyn), but only here do we set up a long-running stalemate and then act outraged and disgusted at the results. It’s always a good plan to be skeptical of government, but we veer wackily between frenetic belief and lazy cynicism.

“The process” is something that Kraft does to cheese. The way we deal with our government, and vice versa, is what needs fixing. Hey, John, let’s ask Ace about that.