This hasn’t been a good week for unity. First the Boren/Nunn Unityfest in Oklahoma disbanded with most of the participants refusing to endorse the concept of a third-party “unity government” presidential bid, and now Unity ’08, the much-mocked third-party post-partisan movement, is cutting off its head and sending it to a reputable cryogenics facility.
All is not lost, though: Unity ’08′s last gasp includes some genuine A-list material. In an email sent to members and now posted on the front page of the group’s web site, the organizers came up with this: “The past year has taught us that it’s tough to rally millions to a process as opposed to a candidate or an issue.”
It’s their own fault. There was ample historical precedent. The Unity founders, in a tone of self-discovery, cite Teddy Roosevelt’s and Ross Perot’s substantial but failed third-party bids and the successful 90-year fight against slavery as counter-examples to their own amorphous and fleeting effort at building a national hand-wringing movement; all they really need have done is ask themselves before the fact if Jerry Seinfeld’s show about nothing would have worked without Seinfeld.
At the heart of the Unity debacle is a fundamental misunderstanding of what and where the political center is in this country. Unity leaders complain that the primary system is held hostage by extremists of both parties, but that’s not true: the GOP has become an almost exclusively extremist party, and its candidates reflect that. The Democratic party has remade itself as a clone of the long-dead moderate wing of the GOP, and its candidates reflect that. Compare the positions of Obama and Clinton to those of Lowell Weicker, Jacob Javitts, John Chaffee and other centrist Republicans from the 1960′s-1980′s, and you’ll be hard pressed to find much daylight between them. John Edwards is the exception among the front-runners this cycle—and he’s paying the price in terms of press coverage and support from big-money Democrats—but he’s not much to the left of either those Republicans or Obama and Clinton on most issues.
The Nunn-Boren axis, with its insistence that Democrats provide Cabinet-level welfare to Republicans, is a different matter. Those two, whose grass-roots political constituency is dwarfed by Unity ’08′s, simply want to ensure that their conservative, corporation-centric platform is represented in a Democratic administration no matter what voters want, and they’re willing, in fact anxious, to torpedo the eventual Democratic nominee if they don’t get what they want. If you had to pick poster boys for the military-industrial-institutional juggernaut Dwight Esienhower belatedly warned against in his farewell address to the nation, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better pair than Nunn and Boren.
Maybe the strangest thing about the conceit that Democrats must include Republicans in their cabinets is that the Republican most often mentioned, Chuck Hagel, is distinguished primarily by not sounding like a Republican on foreign policy issues. In fact, he’s widely loathed by his Congressional colleagues as a traitor and prima donna. If the purpose of hiring him really is promoting bipartisan concensus, he’s the last Republican likely to accomplish that.
But of course cooperation between the parties, even if one makes the wholly unwarranted assumption that it’s an intrinsically good thing, isn’t a matter of bringing a few outliers in from out of the cold. Only one president during the past sixty years has appointed a member of the opposing party to a prominent cabinet position, and no halfway sane individual could argue that Bill Clinton’s appointment of William Cohen as defense secretary had the slightest impact on the Republican holy wars of the 1990′s, or that it softened Republican attitudes toward Democrats in the years since.
Since Nunn and Boren are halfway sane, one has to conclude that the desire to place Republicans in key positions in a Democratic administration has very little to do with engendering cooperation between the parties. They simply don’t like Democrats who aren’t them and might do un-them-like things, and apparently they aren’t all that fond of democracy either. Pocket nihilists, the pair of them.
When you’re filling your car with $3 gas and buying some $2.65 a dozen eggs, remember who is running on stopping deficit spending. The war for oil is what caused prices for anything that eats grain to skyrocket. When THOSE prices rise, the fresh fruit seller raises his prices again, now you have some nice $5 a pound grapes in the market. It’s YOUR money being spent. YOU’RE the one going to pay $250 a week for groceries. Still think Ron Paul sounds like a bad idea? He’s the ONLY candidate, Republican or Democrat that is running on reducing your cost of living. He’s the only one that’s WRITTEN books on economics, not just read them. Austrian economics are favorably mentioned in this month’s Scientific American. Maybe you have plenty money. Me, I just can’t afford to be boss of the world – and I’m thrilled to know that I’m actually getting to choose something other than business as usual.