Mostly, during the Presidential election, I found Chuck Todd's insight to be spot on. He was never clearly partisan but he seemed to have a pretty good handle on where the country was headed politically and was not given to using the elaborate double think of the DC punditry to explain away differences that mattered.
But I have to admit his recent question after the House definitively passed the stimulus package without a single Republican vote was rather breathing taking.
Chuck Todd asked White House press secretary Robert Gibbs if Obama would veto the bill because it wasn't 'bipartisan'.
Let's unpack some assumptions that come ribbon wrapped in that query:
1)Bipartisanship means you must have Republican support. But does it? Or should it? Nearly one third of this bill was a gift to Republican dissent. Offering tax cuts, a large portion of which were pushed through by the Obama Whitehouse at the request of the Republicans. But because the stimulus bill actually contained government spending that will help to bolster the economy the Republicans refused to vote for it: en masse.
They weren't opposed because it might help the country or hurt they country--they were opposed on purely ideological grounds--and beyond that, more likely, purely political grounds.
Moreover, it was their ideology--no good can come from Government, starve the beast Grover Norquist infantilism -- that actually led the way to the current depression. But because Republicans are acting like purely political hacks, or more generously, refuse to take off their ideological blinders and vote for aid to a country and a people that desperately need it, the bill is no longer considered 'bipartisan' and therefore, according to Todd, Obama might be moved to veto it?
2) Bipartisanship is a goal in and of itself and not a means toward an end --like the economic health of our country. But really, bipartisanship that destroys the country economically in its quest for cheerful 'getting along' is useless. Republicans suffer under the myth that Government must be starved, because, they don't think government can ever solve any problems. And yet, in the last 8 years, under Republican leadership, there has been pratically no government oversight of hundreds of financial transactions, and trillions--literarily trillions -- of dollars of value has been lost or stolen. Our infrastructure is on a disastrous footing, our health services are daily causing economic diasters for inviduals who can't pay the exorbitant costs---costs easily paid for under systems that have the sense to allow government to control the legder sheets of the health industry.
Every single area that the Republican ideology has touched and affected (one could say 'infected') has brought disaster. Who wants to be bipartisan with some of the demonstrably worst ideas of the 20th century?
It would be great if Republicans could forgo their political instincts and forget their jihad on Government long enough to vote for the single largest middle class tax cut in US History, or to help restore unemployment insurance to millions of unemployed Americans. But if they decide that maintaining doctrinal purity is more important than the men and women in their own districts--men and women who are having to make the hard choices now about how they are going to live without jobs and sometimes without houses--than one can only express surprise and sadness.
To think that anyone would expect the President to reject a bill because a set of ideologically and politically opposed idiots have not bothered to learn either economics nor simple lessons from their last two electoral losses has obviously breathed too long the toxic air of DC punditry.
I'm sad to see Chuck go the way of so many others, but it's well to remember that the District is built on a swamp, and those who make a swamp their home necessarily become innured to the more fetid odors of daily decay; brain-wise and otherwise.
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