“In another era of American history, Tom Paine is reported to have said, ‘Lead, follow, or get out of the way.’ Well, Mr. President, you were elected to lead, you chose to follow, now it’s time to get out of the way.”

The quote is misused, since “following” is, per the quote, a fine option. You can’t find out its context to see what Paine actually meant, because he well may not have said it (which is surely why Romney’s careful team inserted the word “reportedly”); it’s popular, but uncitable from any of Paine’s copious writings, and came back into currency when Patton paraphrased it into “Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.”

Those are the minor offenses. What really bugs me is Romney going out of his way to quote the most radical of the American revolutionary pamphleteers. Isn’t distorting Jesus enough for him? Is he going after Marx next?

You tell me just what of Paine’s thought Romney wishes to hold up to the American people:

“When shall it be said in any country of the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance or distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggers; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because i am friend of its happiness; when these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and government.”

Paine railed against aristocrats, and warned about the danger of the unhealthy power of corporations. Paine was a poor man, who openly eschewed property. The only home he ever owned was bought with the (controversial) $3000 honorarium eventually bestowed upon him by the American Congress for his procurement of $3.5 million in loans and gifts from the French king, half a million of which he personally brought back in silver bars. (This extravagance contributed significantly to the fiscal crisis of the French monarchy that led to the French Revolution, during which Paine repaid Louis XVI by moving to Paris to lend his support—to the Revolution.)

“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.”

Paine was an avowed enemy of organized religion. His professed religion was deism, the only religion spelled with a lower-case first letter. It was an intellectual movement from Europe that held that the only expression of God on earth was through nature. (Unitarianism is its direct descendant.) Its proponents (notably Paine’s close friend Franklin, as well as Madison and Jefferson) were considered atheists by the religious establishment, and its thought is responsible for the constitutional separation of church and state. Paine himself was ostracized from the church and refused a religious burial; only six people dared to show up at his funeral.

He also was something of an anarchist, and his “The government that governs best is the one that governs least” is a Republican/Libertarian favorite (though rarely attributed). If this tortured speech insertion is any sign, the Romney team has more Paine appropriation in its sights. (Already the Republicans have had to go dubiously back more than a century to Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln to find any Republican presidents beside Reagan they’re proud of.) Keep an eye out during the remaining (I fear not much longer) primary, and then post-primary campaign: Paine, the father of the American Revolution, the father of the Mitt Romney Republican Party.

Dave Blake

Dave Blake, book designer and community activist, is an elected member of Berkeley’s Rent Board. He grew up in Hollywood, where he first got in trouble putting out an underground newspaper at the same time he was an editor on the Fairfax Colonial Gazette.

The 2012 State of the Union offered a vast contrast to the picture of the nation the Republican candidates running in the GOP primaries have painted. The President offered a different picture of the nation’s political and social realities than the Congress has held up. The American people don’t know what to think about the state of its nation and the mental state of its leaders because they get a different spin from all directions. Nothing is good enough. Nothing is right. The other party is always wrong. Reality is never real. And as the nation witnessed in 2011, the Congress is delusional.

However, the week…the nation got a true dose of reality. Now, I’m not saying that I agreed with everything the President laid out…particularly about the Iran piece. I believe he’s being walked into a trap on that tip…but I do believe he is trying to construct a virtual reality for the type of government we currently have and the limitations its poses when you have ideologues and millionaires running the government who have distorted realities about the socio-economic conditions in which most people live in our nation.

The President held up a mirror to Congress this week. Hopefully it was as ugly to them as it has been to the rest of us. Congress has painted itself into a corner, largely because the ideologues don’t understand the role of government beyond self-interested motives and rhetorical retraction.

Rhetorical retraction simply means they think they have to move backwards to take the nation forward. We know its empty rhetoric. They know its empty rhetoric and the President showed it was empty rhetoric.

The politics of political gamesman was really the subject of the State of the Union. That is the state of the union, virtually. In a very literal sense, the President laid out what has been, what is, and what could have been had Congress not played with the lives of the American people.

He asked Congress what reality are they looking at – what reality do they really see? Is it the same one as the American people, or is it a contrived reality for the privileged and the socially impolitic. Both, of course, represent what the GOP is presenting as their best options to Obama in Romney and Gingrich. The President called for Congress to be fair to the American people. The GOP wants to just be fair to the rich. What they are calling “class warfare,” as the President noted, the rest of the nation calls “common sense.”

For most us, common sense is virtual reality, what is in the here and now…not a contrived one. What Americans need, here and now, is a more responsive government to address problems specific to the needs of its citizens. Hopefully, the nation heard the President and will return to its virtual senses and a common reality of what’s best for all of us. Not just a few of us.

Anthony Samad
Black Commentator 

I’m almost at a loss for words. Who knows whether or not Reagan actually meant what he was saying when he made the statement. My guess is that he didn’t. That was during the campaign of 1980. Candidates say a lot of things they don’t really mean. Less than a year later when as president he fired the air traffic controllers, he pretty much hammered yet another nail into the coffin of collective bargaining in this country. Still, it tells us a lot that thirty-two years ago a Republican candidate could say such a thing and not lose support of “the base”. It perfectly illustrates the devolution of “the party of Abraham Lincoln” as well.

Thirty-one years ago this coming Friday, the American people sent to the White House a corrupt, feeble-minded, failed “B” movie actor. Do you wanna hear the punchline? The Republican party has sunk so deep into the ideological cesspool since January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan is starting to look like Theodore Roosevelt! As Jack Parr was fond of saying in his day, “I kid you not.”

Isn’t life strange?

During Ronald Reagan’s reign of error I was living in New York City. I was really into writing song parodies then. I would occasionally perform them on guitar at a place I loved which was right around the corner from where I lived – Ye Olde Tripple Inn on West 54th Street – directly across from the fabled Studio 54, a place I never frequented. One of the songs I lampooned was called “And Nixon, I Miss You”. It was sung to the tune of Bobby Goldboro’s 1968 hit, the delightfully maudlin “Honey”

One time I thought that Richard Nixon’s Presidency
Was the worst thing possible
But that was many years ago
And nowadays that sentiment seems laughable
In nineteen-eighty somehow
The electorate coughed up a brain-dead movie star
I never had faith in the voters
But I never realized how dumb they are

And Nixon I miss you
And I’m feeling blue
I’ve lost all of my senses
I’m nostalgic for you

That was then. This is now.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in any way reformulating my opinion of Reagan or his presidency. As I’ve said too many times to count, the damage that the hideous old freak did to this once great nation is so immense it will never be accurately assessed. It is incalculable. After all, it was the insane policies of deregulation championed by Ronald Wilson Reagan that set us upon the road toward the economic mess we find ourselves in today.

He told us he could increase spending, cut taxes and balance the budget – and that he would do it by 1982! Anyone with a remedial grasp of arithmetic knew what utter bullshit that was. The reason his successor George H.W. Bush was defeated in his reelection bid by an unknown named Bill Clinton was because he was forced to raise taxes (“revenue enhancers” he called them) in an attempt to clean up the mess he inherited from Reagan.

And I’m also not implying that I “miss” Ronald Reagan anymore than I was missing Richard Nixon when I wrote that parody in 1988. It’s just that (Jeez Louise) the two of them are starting to look pretty good – at least when placed in comparison to the insanity junkies who now populate that party. Imagine that you’re a kid who’s just arrived home from kindergarten. You switch on the TV to find that Bozo the Clown has been replaced by John Wayne Gacy. It’s kinda the same thing.

And see the debt how big it’s grown
But friends it hasn’t been to long it wasn’t big
In early nineteen-eighty one
The debt that’s now a redwood tree was just a twig

What a difference three decades makes.

This is sheer speculation on my part but I imagine that even a dirty old dingbat like Ronnie would be horrified to see where the so-called “Reagan Revolution” has taken us. Then again maybe not. It was always hard to figure out where Der Gipper was coming from. His own children could never figure the old bugger out. He was always an aloof and distant figure to them, even when he was present. I just learned something this morning that floored me. On the day his kid Michael was married, his dad and Nancy opted out of the festivities and went instead to Tricia Nixon’s wedding at the White House! It makes one seriously wonder about the man’s inner character.

When even some “liberals” are expressing a sense of teary-eyed nostalgia for the likes of Ronald Reagan, that’s all the proof you need to understand that the political wheels have come of the planet. And the fact that a Casper Milquetoast moderate like Barack Obama is viewed by many as a left wing radical is further proof that the American people have lost their bearings – to put it as mildly as possible.

The fact of the matter is that the dead conservatives of another era – Barry Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan – could not get nominated to run as sewer inspectors in the current environment of the grand old party. At the end of his life Goldwater had turned his back on the right wing movement – a movement he helped bring into being when he was nominated by the Republicans at the convention of 1964. And remember, this was a man who in his day was known as “Mr. Conservative”! That speaks volumes, doesn’t it?

Unless they succeed in stealing a whole lot of elections this November (Don’t put it past them; they’re working on it as I write these words) 2012 is not going to be a particularly good year for the Republican party. It’s a fairly safe bet that the Democrats will be able to take back the House in spite of themselves. Not that I’m jumping with joy over that little prediction. The best that can be said of these present-day Dems is that they’re not quite as incompetent as the GOP. Certainly they’re not one/tenth as corrupt as them. We can only hope that the new batch of freshmen won’t be in the pockets of corporate America. We can also pray they remember that they are in fact the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yeah, right.

Did you ever think you’d live to see the day when this once-great nation would be reduced to such a sorry and pathetic state? Hold onto y0ur hats, kiddies! The worst is yet to come! Somewhere, Ronald Reagan must be laughing.

Tom Degan
The Rant 

Yes, 5 percent of Americans think Congress is doing a good job. Which means 5 percent of those polled didn’t understand the question.

Right after taking his comically oversized gavel, Speaker of the House John Boehner stated, “Hard work and tough decisions will be required of the 112th Congress. No longer can we fall short. No longer can we kick the can down the road. The people voted to end business as usual and today we begin to carry out their instructions.”

Translation: All the other Congresses have fallen short. We are going to be better than all of them. Hilarious foreshadowing ensues.

Boehner’s first act was to have (parts of) the U.S. Constitution read out loud on the floor and the entire (non-amended parts) of the document put into the public record for the first time. Why hasn’t it been done before? Maybe because it took 90 minutes of precious session time to not accomplish anything. Sense a theme?

On that same day incumbent Congressman Pete Sessions (R-TX) and freshman Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA) took their oaths while watching C-SPAN at a fundraiser. They had to be sworn in later since it violated the Constitution to just raise your hand at the TV.

So this devotion to the founding document was all for show – a way to waste time giving lip service to patriotism while giving real fidelity to money. That’s the theme.

A theme consistent with pizza being a vegetable because Congress is an over-boiled, over-processed, unappealing lump.

The 112^th Congress is at its halfway point. And even if you don’t care about opinion polls and refuse to believe more people approve of scabies in principle – look at their track record: This Congress is only responsible for passing 80 laws so far. That’s it. Eighty. And 13 of those “laws” were naming courthouses and post offices. Other Congresses have passed five times the amount of legislation in their tenures. The 108^thCongress with Republican majorities in both houses wrote 498 laws in their two years. The 111^th with Democratic majorities made 383 public laws.

We’ve had to endure the threat of a government shutdown every three months. Think about it: April the government was going to shut down over defunding Planned Parenthood. Again in August over the debt-ceiling. In September it was to hold up disaster relief. And another shutdown was barely averted in December with a spending bill attached to the payroll tax cuts. As a direct result of this Congress’ squabbling our credit rating was downgraded by Standard and Poors. That is, in fact, “ending business as usual.”

If we take out all the partisanship – all the pontificating of what Congress should or should not do – the facts are they’re doing NOTHING but filling space, waiting out the clock and still threatening a work stoppage. Basically the worst of public salaried workers is the 112^th Congress on a productive day.

And this “nothing” is not appealing to Republican voters. It’s not making Democratic voters happy. It’s not making Independents overjoyed. In fact it’s uniting us all to a solid voting bloc – 95 percent of the country – who thinks this Congress has failed to do its job.

It’s failed America.

How do you get a Congress that is unanimously reviled? It’s simple: get voted in by the American people only to adhere to the needs of lobbyists and moneyed interests justified with cockeyed ideology passed off as “principles.” Oh and do it during the worst economy in several generations.

How’s that working out?

Tina Dupuy
Taking Eternal Vigilance Too Far 

Rick Perry popped his cowboy boot in his mouth anew the other night.

The uber-conservative Texas governor is for building (doubtless non-union as much as possible) that oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. “Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil we don’t have to buy from a foreign source,” he vowed.

Liberals jumped all over Perry. “Does he not know that Canada is a sovereign country?” MSNBC’s Ed Schultz crowed.

A lot of liberals think the nuttier these tea party-tilting Republicans talk, the more likely they are to turn off John and Jane Q. Public.

I hope my fellow lefties are right.

But gaffes from righties like Perry seldom send tea partiers running for the Rolaids. Indeed, when the likes of Perry get lampooned by the likes of Schultz – one of my favorite TV talking heads — tea party true believers see them as “martyred” yet again by the “liberal media elite.”

Tea party types are always cool with Perry types because they love the same things the tea partiers do, guns and the Good Lord, for instance. And they disdain the same folks, too — for instance, immigrants, workers like me who pack union cards, gay people and the “Communist Marxist Socialist Islamic Terrorist” in the White House whose “PLAN,” according to a tea party sign, is “WHITE SLAVERY.”

We Americans in the political mainstream – liberals, moderates and, yes, conservatives – think elected officials ought to know their stuff – like geography. We believe people we vote to represent us in Washington should be smart.

Yet “smart” seems to translate as “smarty-pants” and “elitist” to Perry, the tea party and the rest of the loopy right-wing political and media roost.

Of course, ultra righties – from neo-Confederates, nativists and gun crazies to homophobes, union haters and the you-can’t-be-a-Christian-and-a-Democrat crowd – have been giving their political heroes a pass on bloopers and flat out falsehoods for years.

Ronald Reagan said “trees cause more pollution than automobiles” and that “facts are stupid things.” No matter, the faithful doted on the Gipper. Tea partiers think he belongs on Mount Rushmore .

Oh, liberals roasted Reagan. Mark Green wrote a book called Ronald Reagan’s Reign of Error. He filled it with the Gipper’s famous flubs and fibs, all of them documented.

The Reaganites didn’t care how many times the Gipper got things wrong or stretched the truth. He spoke in subtexts they understood.

It’s called “dog whistle politics” today. It means the use of coded words and phrases calculated to fire up the faithful.

Reagan partisans heard the dog whistle when he opened his 1980 presidential campaign in Mississippi by telling a bunch of whooping and hollering white folks he was for “states’ rights,” the old white Southern code word for slavery and segregation.

The Reaganites kept on believing his bogus welfare queen story because it reflected their own bumper sticker prejudices. “I Fight Poverty, I work!” comes to mind.

Its the same today. The tea partiers aren’t bothered when their candidates say dumb things. But they perk up their ears when their favorite pols dog whistle them to “Take Our Country Back!” and “Save Our Constitution!” They know from whom these pols mean.

Berry Craig

It was against this background that I found myself talking with a candidate for citywide office who had just welcomed a newborn child into his home two weeks ago. Surrounded by the din of political aspirations and machinations, we ended up comparing notes on our experiences with the nocturnal feeding habits of our infants, firmly putting the travails of the world in perspective.

As I traded “new father” anecdotes with one of the most powerful men in Los Angeles, I realized that our experiences contained within them the lessons that could move LA forward.

Here are five things I’ve learned as the proud father of a newborn baby boy:

• Pay Attention: A heightened state of awareness can be an exhausting experience, but it actually results in greater energy and productivity. “More effort takes less effort” may seem counterproductive but it works!

• Keep Close: Babies raised in cultures that favor contact over separation cry less. It’s true no matter how old we are, social connections are the key to happiness.

• Give Thanks: To hold a newborn baby is to hold the powerful of thankfulness. I count my blessings as I look as his perfection and as I experience the support of our community of friends and family.

• Keep Moving: Nothing brings a smile like going for a walk, even if it’s just a small journey around the neighborhood, and it’s a reminder that we were born for action.

• Be Positive: Our energy is contagious and to see a baby mimic our attitudes and emotions is to experience the incredible responsibility that demands our optimism. After all, it’s our only choice, that and then delivering on our promise to make it come true.

As for the party, I’m sure the food was good and that lots of good work was done, but from where I stood, it all faded into the background as two fathers slowed down, just for a moment, and connected with the power of optimism and its place in our immediate future.

Stephen Box
CityWatch 

Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

The Number 1 issue next year will be that President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Democrats will be fighting for working people while Republicans will be fighting for millionaires who they believe should make no sacrifice for America.

Immediately after Congress passed the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits extension, Harry Reid renewed the battle for a surtax for those making a million bucks a year to join the rest of America in being part of the solution.

Reid made his move fast, strong and hard with his immediate call for action.

Meanwhile, the airwaves are full of Tea Party members of the House whining and complaining. They are willing to throw 160 million American workers under the bus in order to prevent the most wealthy millionaires from making even the tiniest contribution to helping our country become economically stronger.

When Reid came out swinging today he was telling the Tea Party, like Clint Eastwood told the crooks: Go ahead, make my day.

There are smiles today throughout the Democratic base because the fighting spirit is back for the Dems.

There are smiles today throughout the heartland of working-class America because the Democrats are back fighting for them, and winning.

Brent Budowsky
The Hill 

In December 2010, a month after elections had given Republicans control of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, soon to be the new House Speaker, told 60 Minutes host Leslie Stahl that he would try to “find common ground” with the president but not compromise. When pressed by Stahl why he rejected the word “compromise” he said that when you say it “a lot of Americans look up and go, ‘Uh oh, they’re gonna sell me out.’ And so finding common ground, I think, makes more sense.” When Stahl pressed him further, asking why he would not admit he was “afraid of the word” compromise, he responded “I reject the word.”

Rather than using his leadership position as House Speaker to help educate new House Republicans and others, including American voters, about the noble history of political compromise, he succumbed to ignorance, displaying a lack of leadership. Here is what he could have stated, if not on 60 Minutes, then soon after assuming his House Speakership:

A distinguished American and author of a Ben Franklin biography, Walter Isaacson, recently wrote that “we like to think of our nation’s founders as men with unwavering fealty to high-minded principles. To some extent they were. But when they gathered in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 to write the Constitution, they showed that they were also something just as great and often more difficult to be: compromisers. In that regard they reflected not just the classical virtues of honor and integrity but also the Enlightenment’s values of balance, order, tolerance, scientific calibration and respect for other people’s beliefs.”

In another essay Isaacson wrote that for Franklin “compromise was not only a practical approach but a moral one. Tolerance, humility and a respect for others required it. The near perfect document [the Constitution] that arose from his compromise could not have been approved if the hall had contained only crusaders who stood on unwavering principle. Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies.”

A contemporary of Franklin and member of the British Parliament, Edmund Burke, agreed on the nobility of compromise. Urging conciliation of the American revolutionaries, he declared: “All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights, that we may enjoy others; and we choose rather to be happy citizens than subtle disputants.”

Russell Kirk, who died in 1994 and was sometimes labeled “the Father of American Traditionalist Conservatism,” liked to quote Burke and also emphasized the importance of compromise. In his essay on the “Errors of Ideology,” he wrote that “Ideology makes political compromise impossible: the ideologue will accept no deviation from the Absolute Truth of his secular revelation. . . . Ideologues vie one with another in fancied fidelity to their Absolute Truth; and they are quick to denounce deviationists or defectors from their party orthodoxy. . . .[but] the prudential politician . . . is well aware that the primary purpose of the state is to keep the peace. This can be achieved only by maintaining a tolerable balance among great interests in society. Parties, interests, and social classes and groups must arrive at compromises, if bowie-knives are to be kept from throats. When ideological fanaticism rejects any compromise, the weak go to the wall.”

Born a year before Kirk, someone on the opposite side of the political spectrum, John Kennedy, also praised compromise. In his Profiles in Courage, written while still a senator, he wrote:

We should not be too hasty in condemning all compromise as bad morals. For politics and legislation are not matters for inflexible principles or unattainable ideals. . . . legislation, under the democratic way of life and the Federal system of Government, requires compromise between the desires of each individual and group and those around them. Henry Clay . . . said compromise was the cement that held the Union together. . . .
Some of my colleagues who are criticized today for lack of forthright principles—or who are looked upon with scornful eyes as compromising “politicians”—are simply engaged in the fine art of conciliating, balancing and interpreting the forces and factions of public opinion, an art essential to keeping our nation united and enabling our Government to function. Their consciences may direct them from time to time to take a more rigid stand for principle—but their intellects tell them that a fair or poor bill is better than no bill at all, and that only through the give-and-take of compromise will any bill receive the successive approval of the Senate, the House, the President and the nation.

In his autobiography, An American Life (1990), Ronald Reagan criticized “radical conservatives” in the California legislature while he was governor. For them “‘compromise’ was a dirty word,” and they “wouldn’t face the fact that we couldn’t get all of what we wanted. . . . They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. If you don’t get it all, some said, don’t take anything.” Reagan went on to say, “I’d learned while negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933: ‘I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average.’”

In recent decades good politicians and commentators, both Republican and Democrat, have recognized the need for compromise. Former Republican Missouri senator John Danforth noted, for example, that “if legislators want to legislate—and not just appeal to a rabid group of supporters come hell or high water—that’s going to be in a system that involves compromise.” In such a system, he added, “It’s very helpful to believe that your program is not immutable. And that the other people you’re dealing with have something to say and something to add.”
Perhaps the best twenty-first century example of working together across the political aisle was that of Senators Orrin Hatch and Edward Kennedy. After Kennedy died in August 2009, Hatch stated the following:

America has lost a giant in politics and public policy. I have lost a close personal friend. People called us the “odd couple,” which was certainly true. . . .

We did not agree on much, and more often than not, I was trying to derail whatever big government scheme he had just concocted. We did manage to forge partnerships on key legislation, such as the Ryan White AIDS Care Act, State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and most recently, the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. Ted was a lion among liberals, but he was also a constructive and shrewd lawmaker. He never lost sight of the big picture and was willing to compromise on certain provisions in order to move forward on issues he believed important. . . .

We can all take a lesson from Ted’s 47 years of service and accomplishment. I hope that America’s ideological opposites in Congress, on the airwaves, in cyberspace, and in the public square will learn that being faithful to a political party or a philosophical view does not preclude civility, or even friendships, with those on the other side.

When reflecting on my dear friend’s life, my thoughts continue to turn to the future of this great nation. With the loss of such a liberal legislative powerhouse who spoke with conviction for his side of the aisle but who was always willing to look at an issue and find a way to negotiate a bipartisan deal, I fear that Washington has become too bitterly partisan. I hope that Americans in general and Washington politicians in particular will take a lesson from Ted’s life and realize that we must aggressively advocate for our positions but realize that in the end, we have to put aside political pandering, work together and do what is best for America.

In the spirit of Senator Hatch, let me close by once again quoting his friend Teddy Kennedy’s brother; in his Profiles in Courage he wrote: “We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. But these will be, or should be, compromises of issues, not of principles. We can compromise our political positions, but not ourselves. We can resolve the clash of interests without conceding our ideals. And even the necessity for the right kind of compromise does not eliminate the need for those idealists and reformers who keep our compromises moving ahead. . . . Compromise need not mean cowardice. Indeed it is frequently the compromisers and conciliators who are faced with the severest tests of political courage as they oppose the extremist views of their constituents.”

Granted that the long statement made above might have been unwelcome to many of Speaker Boehner’s newly elected Tea Party Republicans, and perhaps he might have lost his Speakership, but it would have been an act of political courage—the kind John Kennedy wrote about in Profiles of Courage. How many more fiascoes like the House Republicans’ initial rejection of the Senate bill do we have to face before they learn the meaning of true compromise from some of their more astute political predecessors?

Walter G. Moss

Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University. For a list of his recent books and online publications, click here. He has previously written on mass culture, along with other topics, in his An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces (Anthem Press, 2008).

President Barack Obama talks with Chief of Staff Bill Daley in Honolulu, (White House Photo by Pete Souza)

It’s no secret that Republicans don’t like the idea of President Obama exercising his power to make recess appointments. As we noted earlier this year, they’ve repeatedly used a procedural move to block the president from making this sort of temporary appointment, even though it’s a presidential power laid out in the Constitution. (Of course, the tactic isn’t specific to Republicans — Democrats used it too under the Bush administration.)

But now, as winter recess approaches, Senate Republicans have been trying a different tactic: holding up other appointments as a bargaining chip. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has pledged to block the confirmation of three uncontroversial nominees for key banking regulator positions. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal described those nominees and what positions they’d fill:

As President Obama and Democrats battle during this holiday season to enact a tax cut for the 99 percent of Americans who constitute the heart of the nation, House Republicans are making a seismic political blunder reminiscent of the self-destructive overreaching of then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) that rejuvenated the Clinton presidency during the 1990s.

The GOP House should pass the bipartisan Senate compromise to continue the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits that was supported by President Obama, 89 senators — Senate Democrats, Senate Republican leaders, a strong majority of GOP senators — and House Democrats.

The House GOP payroll tax fiasco comes at a critical inflection point for the American economy and for the 2012 campaigns.

Recent economic data points suggest a potentially important uptick in economic growth and job creation. Failure to extend the payroll tax cut and jobless benefits will cause an economic setback and would be the equivalent of an attack against economic growth, job creation, consumer confidence, business confidence and public confidence by a House GOP that acts like the prisoner of a far-right faction at the expense of the nation as a whole.

It would be economically destructive and politically disastrous for Republicans to tell jobless Americans that their benefits will not be continued after the holidays, and to tell 160 million American workers that their taxes will rise at such a precarious moment of economic hardship.

Republicans should have agreed to extend the payroll tax cut for the full year and accepted a very modest surtax on wealthy individuals with incomes above $1 million.

This equitable solution is supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans. It was rejected by GOP legislators who vehemently oppose even minimal sacrifice by the wealthiest 1 percent, who damage the well-being of the other 99 percent of the nation and who promote grossly unfair and highly unpopular economic disparities that are now the hallmark of Republicans in Washington and the calling card of their campaigns in 2012.

It is hard to conceive of an economic policy more harmful to the country, or a political strategy more damaging to the GOP, than the spectacle of hard-line ideology and partisan obstruction being imposed by House Republicans and endured in real time by Americans today.

President Obama and Senate Democrats made substantial good-faith compromises in the package that passed the Senate. Senate Republican leaders, and a large majority of GOP senators, had the good sense and good good faith to join with Democrats supporting the package that passed the chamber with 89 votes.

I have been willing at times to disagree with the president and Democrats. But I must say there is a political and economic cancer that is corroding the behavior of the House majority, which fails to learn either the lessons of the mistakes of Barry Goldwater in 1960, when he said that extremism was no vice, or the wisdom of Barry Goldwater, when he later became a great American statesman.

President Obama is gaining support because he is being favorably compared to Republican candidates who are hostage to rightist factions that are extreme by standards of historical Republicanism, and to a House GOP majority that is extreme and out of touch with mainstream America by historical standards of Republican leaders in Congress.

The president is trying in good faith to address the nation as a whole, while his partisan opponents are so obsessed with destroying him, and so consumed with their ideology, that they appear to be addressing only a faction that is a small slice of the nation rather than the big tent Americanism that Ronald Reagan and other presidents have historically sought to address.

My advice to House Republicans is to avoid repeating the mistakes made by Newt Gingrich when he overreached against Bill Clinton. Cut your losses, pass the Senate compromise, continue the battle next year and let Americans come together during this holiday season for a brief shining moment of good will, good faith and good sense.

Brent Budowsky
The Hill