Politics dictates that there are very few times when it pays to get into a fight you can’t possibly win and now is not such a time.
Reason number three has to do with Pelosi and Reid holding their gains and pulling off a Democratic presidential victory in 2008. As we have all been painfully made aware, the 2008 presidential election has broken out of the gate embarrassingly prematurely There are yet some 497 days to elections. That marathon in process, along with glazing-over the eyes of the nation in general, will prevent any sort of business as usual within the Congress.
Every decision will be declared partisan by one candidate or another, every investigation blasted as a witch-hunt, every Democratic bill facing a veto. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are in the unenviable position of heading up majorities that are so thin they are unable to overturn a veto. In normal times that would speak well for the administration and a possible return of the House and Senate to Republican control. But these are not normal times.
This president and his war are so unpopular that the political climate is as difficult to forecast as the environmental climate. Republicans and Democrats alike are in uncharted waters. Republicans up for re-election in 2008 (which includes 202 seats in the House and 22 in the Senate) are as afraid to alienate their conservative ‘base’ as they are to support continuing policies the country has renounced. For their part, Democrats are desperate to turn things around as they promised, yet unable to turn back a veto.
Catch-22 on both sides of the aisle.
What else did Americans vote for that is not going to happen?
* We are not going to be out of Iraq until another president takes office.
* We are not going to come anywhere near to balancing the budget.
* We are not going to have substantive progress on either health care or social security.
* We are not going to see a change in the financial relationship between lobbyists and legislators.
* We are not going to bring the halves and have-nots any closer to economic equity.
* Nor are we going to see any substantive lessening of the fear-based society that this administration has made of us.
We are substantively less secure, less well off and less satisfied with our government then we were in 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned the office of the presidency in the face of threatened (but likely) impeachment. The paradox is that Nixon was, by every measurable quality, a more able and effective president than George W. Bush. The foolish break-in at Watergate, ostensibly to rifle through Democratic records, was a sign of paranoia. But that offense was absolute child’s play compared to the wholesale destruction of constitutional checks and balances within this administration.
The architect of that deconstruction is Dick Cheney, enabled by a weak and basically lazy president. The effect upon the nation won’t be seen fully for decades and its impact, for all the reasons outlined, is unknowable these nearly five hundred days before our next general election.
What is knowable is that there will be no impeachment of the principal actors upon our national stage.
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