Watching the impasse between the Republicans and Democrats over the debt ceiling as the August 2 deadline looms brings to mind the 1955 movie “Rebel Without a Cause,” starring James Dean. If you’re old enough to remember the movie, teenager Dean and his antagonist Buzz, decided that the way to prove who was tougher was to race their cars towards a cliff and whoever jumped out first was a “chicken.”
Predictably, of course, it ended in tragedy as Buzz’s sleeve gets caught when he tries to jump free. Teenagers do silly, dangerous things like that because they don’t think of the possible consequences, but we should expect Washington politicians to act differently, shouldn’t we? On second thought, that might be presumptuous in light of what the late Meg Greenfield once observed about the Washington culture.
In her wonderfully insightful book, called simply “Washington,” the late Washington Post’s editorial board editor wrote that the Washington political culture is just like high school, and she makes a scarily compelling case for her argument.
Acting like an adolescent in high school is one thing, but acting like that when a national priority is at stake is quite another. Yet, here we are once again watching the two sides rev up their engines and head toward the cliff. Make no mistake, the cliff is not a default on the debt. No matter what happens in the next couple of days or weeks, neither side will let the U.S. default, and you can bet Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has a contingency plan in his back pocket that will give us more time if the first deadline is missed.
This is a political cliff and the aim of both sides is to make sure the other side jumps first. The interesting thing is that the majority of those who now oppose raising the limit voted to raise it eight times during the Bush years when spending and the national debt were soaring into the stratosphere. But, now strictly because of partisan politics they’re willing to play brinksmanship and elevate this issue to a national and international crisis.
The President seems to be the only one publicly willing to compromise, but, to be fair, he has a lot more political wiggle room than the conservatives whose Tea Party base has them locked in to a no tax increase position. No thinking person believes we can get ourselves out of this hideous deficit situation mess simply by cutting spending and that’s why Obama is in a better position to deal, although he has had to keep his far left liberal base at arms’ length in the process.
It was encouraging to read that Speaker John Boehner met privately with the President to discuss increased tax revenues as part of an overall package, but House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell got him back in line once he left the White House, reminding him that the ultimate goal of all this is to make sure Obama doesn’t get a second term.
It’s hard to believe I am saying this because I remember when “politics as the art of compromise” was a sign of strength and maturity. But, no longer. Now it’s a sign of weakness, just as it was in high school, and a sign of the times, not just in politics but elsewhere. In both the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, owners and players are apparently willing to give up the next season rather than give in – regardless of what this would mean to the fans, the concessionaires, and others whose livelihood depends on games.
We’ve got a whole lot of growing up to do around this town and around this country and we’re still mired in high school at about the sophomore level. And it’s not just the politicians who need to grow up – it’s primarily we who made them possible.
Gerald E. Lavey
