As readers may have discerned, if only from the Harry Reid “Negro Dialect” furor, the big whoop in Washington during the last few days has revolved around Game Change, a 2008 campaign chronicle by DC press veterans John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.

The people flacking this book have done a brilliant job of trickling out “juicy” insider anecdotes in which major campaign figures do and say deeply embarrassing things. The most notorious example is the Reid quote, but there are others: in particular, an excerpt published by New York Magazine that provides a hellish account of the Reille Hunter saga as seen from within John Edwards’ presidential campaign. The excerpt is getting particularly large play because of its unusually negative portrayal of “St. Elizabeth” Edwards, displayed as an erratic and abusive control-freak who used her knowledge of her husband’s infidelity as a weapon for leverage in the campaign.

You read this stuff and cringe, but in the end, wonder how much it really adds to our knowledge of the Edwards campaign, much less the 2008 elections generally. If you look very closely at the New York excerpt, buried in all the “juicy” bits, you can discern the real story of the Edwards campaign:

To Edwards, the pathway to the nomination seemed clear: beat Clinton in Iowa, where his surprising second-place finish in 2004 had catapulted him to national prominence; survive New Hampshire; then kill her off in the South Carolina primary, which he’d carried the last time around. Over and over, he proclaimed to his aides, “I am going to be the next president of the United States.”

To put some flesh on these bare bones, the Edwards campaign was a strategic gamble which heavily influenced everything the candidate did after 2004: his faithful adoption of the “crashing the gates” netroots narrative of the corrupt DC Democratic establishment, epitomized by the Clintons; his hiring of netroots veterans like Joe Trippi; his highly consistent anti-corporate rhetoric; his repeated assertions that only a southerner could win a tough general election; and his slavish devotion to nurturing his organization in Iowa.

It never worked out, of course, in part because he fatally underestimated Barack Obama, and by Caucus Night, the fiery populist was reduced to hoping for a low, senior-dominated turnout.

Now maybe it’s just me, but I find this story, which seems to get little attention in Game Change, to be as interesting and even dramatic as all the internal maneuverings around Rielle Hunter. Other accounts have suggested that Elizabeth Edwards played an outsized role in shaping the strategy for her husband’s campaign, and perhaps their weird relationship made that possible. But otherwise, aside from speculation about the explosive impact the Hunter scandal might have had if Edwards had actually won the nomination, it’s not that clear why it much matters to anyone other than the unfortunate immediate participants. And that may be true of other “revelations” in this book.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The big toxic political news coming out of the weekend was the revelation, retailed in a new 2008 campaign book, that Harry Reid once speculated that Barack Obama might be electable as president because he was “light-skinned” and didn’t speak with a “Negro dialect.” Republicans immediately started demanding that Reid resign as Democratic Majority Leader, with many claiming his reported remarks were the equivalent of Trent Lott’s infamous wish-he-had-been-president praise for Strom Thurmond in 2002.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has the most sensible comment about Reid’s remarks and particularly the comparisons to Lott:

I think you can grant that, in this era, the term “Negro dialect” is racially insensitive and embarrassing. That said, the fair-mind listener understands the argument–Barack Obama’s complexion and his ability to code-switch is an asset. You can quibble about the “light skin” part, but forget running for president, code-switching is the standard M.O. for any African American with middle class aspirations.But there’s no such defense for Trent Lott. Lott celebrated apartheid Mississippi’s support of Strom Thurmond, and then said that had Thurmond won, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.” Strom Thurmond run for president, specifically because he opposed Harry Truman’s efforts at integration. This is not mere conjecture–nearly half of Thurmond’s platform was dedicated to preserving segregation. The Dixiecrat slogan was “Segregation Forever!” (Exclamation point, theirs.) Trent Lott’s wasn’t forced to resign because he said something “racially insensitive.” He was forced to resign because he offered tacit endorsement of white supremacy–frequently.

Claiming that Harry Reid’s comments are the same, is like claiming that referring to Jews as “Hebrews” is the same as endorsing Nazism.

All I’ll add is a guess that Reid’s use of the word “Negro” probably represented a clumsy effort to find an adjective to modify “dialect,” which isn’t exactly the same as calling African-Americans “Negroes.” Frankly, I haven’t heard a white person use the term in close to three decades; racists don’t bother to clean up their own favorite slur, and everybody else generally follows the rule of adopting whatever a particular racial or ethnic group chooses to call itself.

But in any event, this idea that one race-related gaffe is equal in offensiveness to any other is plain stupid. Lott was expressing continued solidarity with the racist political system he grew up with and didn’t abandon until the last possible moment. Reid used offensive language to make a almost universally-recognized objective point about voter attitudes, in the process of encouraging an African-American to run for president. That’s hardly the same.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Mark Blumenthal’s post the other day noting continued strong support for Obama among self-identified “liberal Democrats” attracted a nuanced dissent from OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers.

Bowers notes that there’s evidence liberal non-Democrats have soured on Obama pretty strongly, and that even among liberal Democrats, levels of support as compared to 2008 voting percentages have dropped more than for any other major voting category.

Blumenthal responds today by arguing that the levels of liberal disaffection from Obama are far too small to constitute a “revolt” by the “base,” and also suggests that approval ratings are a misleading barometer when it comes to liberal voters who would never consider pulling the lever for a Republican.

Aside from reporting the substance of this exchange, I would note that its tone represents something of a model for intraprogressive debates. Both Bowers and Blumenthal are respectful of each other’s opinion, try to stick to empirical data, and acknowlege this is a continuing subject for legitimate debate, not something on which one side or the other than claim any definitive “win.”

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

For all the notoriety of the Tea Party Movement, it’s been difficult to get any reliable fix on its fundamental political objectives. Is it a “third force” in American politics that will either morph into a third party and/or burn itself out through ineffectual if incendiary protests? Or is it essentially a hard-right takeover bid aimed at turning the GOP into a mirror image of its ideological obsesssions, ranging from gun rights to anti-immigration sentiment to radical reductions in taxes and spending?

We may get a better understanding of the answer to that question next month, when a group called the Tea Party Nation puts on the first-ever national conventionof tea party organizers and activists at Nashville’s Opryland.

TPM’s Christina Bellatoni says the convention’s agenda “sounds a lot like an attempt to form an official third party.” I dunno; the announced speakers list looks a lot like a prayer meeting of the right wing of the Republican Party. The big keynote speaker is Sarah Palin, with Michele Bachman speaking at lunch. Other confirmed speakers include the U.S. House GOP leadership’s resident wingnut, Marsha Blackburn (you do have to admit the Tea Party folks are very good at achieving gender parity in their panelists); Christian Right warhorses Rick Scarborough and Judge Roy Moore; and assorted conservative TV and radio gabbers.

It’s now becoming standard for hard-core conservative candidates in Republican primaries around the country to identify themselves closely with the Tea Party Movement. Nowhere is this more evident than in Florida, where Marco Rubio’s senate candidacy is a cause celebre for Tea Party folk everywhere. There’s a long profile of the Rubio-Crist race by Mark Leibovich in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine that gives the distinct impression that Crist is a goner and Rubio’s about to become a maximum national conservative celebrity. And although there will be elements of the Tea Party movement who want to remain independent, the temptation of an opportunity to conquer, or at least intimidate into submission, one of the two major parties may prove irresistable.

Update: The intrepid David Wiegel reports some conservative grumbling about the cost of this event–$549 for registration, and $349 just to attend the Palin speech–and Palin’s own rumored speaking fee of somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000. Sure, big-name pols often command that much or a lot more for speeches, but it’s not what you’d want to charge to a grassroots activist group if you were thinking about running for president with their support. More generally, this kind of money-grubbing could undermine the legitimacy of the event.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Over the last 24 hours, word has been leaking out of four separate Democratic candidates for statewide office around the country deciding to retire from office or otherwise fold campaigns. They are Sens. Chris Dodd of CT and Byron Dorgan of ND, along with Gov. Bill Ritter of CO (up for re-election this year) and Lt. Gov. Don Cherry of MI (running for governor this year).

Republicans are naturally spinning these unrelated developments as part of a wave of discouraged Democrats getting out of campaigns in anticipation of a big pro-GOP November. That’s not surprising. But it is annoying that mainstream political media are so avidly buying this spin. Politico‘s banner headline this morning is: “Top Democrats head for the exits.”

The irony is that these changes of heart could actually improve overall Democratic prospects in November. Dodd was in deep political trouble, and his likely replacement as Democratic nominee, CT Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, will be favored to win. Cherry’s gubernatorial campaign was struggling to raise money, and his withdrawal could open the door to any number of better-positioned Democratic candidates. And in CO, Ritter’s retirement could well draw former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff out of a contentious primary challenge to Sen. Michael Bennet; if that doesn’t happen, highly popular Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper might run, and there’s even been some talk that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar would like to be governor. Any of these candidates would be considered stronger than Ritter.

Dorgan’s retirement is definitely a blow to Democrats. But he, too, was badly trailing Gov. John Hoeven in the polls, and if Rep. Earl Pomeroy decides to take the plunge, his prospects might be as good as Dorgan’s.

In terms of handicapping the overall contest for control of the U.S. Senate, it’s important to remember that not two but six Republicans have already announced retirements (in OH, FL, MO, KY, NH and KS). I don’t recall any “Top Republicans head for the exits” headlines about them.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

With Republican prospects for 2010, and just maybe 2012, trending upward, it’s worth noting that Mitt Romney, the insiders’ front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, has announced a publicity tour for his upcoming book, No Apology. He’ll begin with two stops in (surprise!) Iowa in March.

Team Romney has tried to suppress in advance any comparisons between the Mittster’s round of book signings and that of Sarah Palin. “We’re not going to match her crowd size or sales. These are two different people with different ways of expressing themselves,” Eric Fehrnstrom, a Romney spokesman, told the Boston Globe. But, even if he’s no Sarah Palin, putative candidate Romney needs to show with this tour that he’s got his groove back.

After losing the GOP nomination 2008, he dropped below most Americans’ radar screens. Yet he retains most of his original points of appeal: the granite visage, the competent-exec air, the economic policy fluency, and the résumé that includes being governor of blue-state Massachusetts and CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympics, which is sure to make him a regular quote machine during the upcoming Vancouver games. Each day that passes takes him further away from the social policy heresies of his earlier political career. And some Republican insiders really do believe that a prior failed presidential bid is an essential box to check, making him arguably “next in line” for the nomination.

More importantly, the likely GOP field for 2012, in comparison to the 2008 crop, looks a bit easier for Mitt to manage. As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru observed in asmart piece in October, Mitt didn’t fit in 2008 as the conservative alternative to John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, but he will find it easier in 2012 to be the establishment candidate acceptable to movement conservatives:

Romney seems more naturally an establishmentarian than a conservative insurgent, so this strategy would be a better fit for him than his last one. He is not a man to be swayed by the momentary passions of his party’s base; pretending otherwise adds to his reputation for slickness. If he ran as an establishment candidate, the fact that he used to take less-conservative positions would still matter. But it would not matter as much, because he would no longer have to prove himself as a true-blue conservative.

If either Mike Huckabee (strangely undamaged by the Maurice Clemmons firestorm of late November) or Sarah Palin runs in 2012, much of the oxygen among social conservatives will be bottled up. Since the GOP establishment really dislikes Huck and doesn’t have much faith in Palin, other than as a hobgoblin with which to terrify progressives, Romney would be nicely set up to be the “responsible conservative” in the race, competing for that mantle mainly with Tim Pawlenty, who makes Mitt look like Mr. Excitement.

But there’s one major problem with Romney’s positioning for 2012–and it’s a very big one: He may no longer be “acceptable” to movement conservatives thanks to his sponsorship of a health reform plan in Massachusetts that looks uncomfortably like the legislation that Barack Obama will probably be signing early this year.

In his profile of a possible Romney 2012 run, Ponnuru notes this problem, along with Mitt’s rationalizations for it:

Romney makes three arguments in his defense. The first is that a Democratic legislature and his Democratic successor made the plan worse than his original conception. The second is that he has no intention of pushing the Massachusetts plan on the entire country. Health-care reform, he tells me, “should occur on a state-by-state basis.” The third is that the plan has worked out well for his state. “The plan is well within budget and has accomplished its objectives at a relatively modest cost.”

It’s that third point that could get Romney into trouble. The cost to the state government has indeed been modest. But the plan was designed so that the state picks up only a fifth of the costs the plan generates, with the federal government and the private sector absorbing the rest. Premiums are growing much faster than in the rest of the nation. Waiting times are up, too, which imposes costs on people. The plan is losing popularity in Massachusetts. Ideally, Romney would learn from this experience that a reform centered on state governments’ manipulation of federal dollars is a mistake. At the very least, Romney would be foolish to keep defending the plan.

But, given the hopped-up rhetoric among Republicans about “Obamacare” since Ponnuru wrote these words, it may not be enough for Romney to “stop defending” his health care plan. For one thing, right-wing hysteria is now increasingly centered on the supposed tyranny imposed by the individual mandate, which Romney has always championed. But, were he to flatly repudiate his own record, the “flip-flop” attacks on his character would resume with a real vengeance.

Put simply, Romney can’t just recalibrate his 2008 race based on the 2012 landscape and expect to win. This isn’t the Republican Party of two or three years ago; it’s moved palpably to the right. While Romney’s 2008 rivals took some shots at his health care record, it wasn’t that big a deal in the contest. But, at that point in history, conservatives weren’t in the habit of using Slavedrivers-of-Collectivism rhetoric about individual mandates or other features of the Massachusetts system.

With health care policy certain to remain front-and-center in Republican politics for the foreseeable future, the supposed front-runner for the 2012 GOP nomination may face an impossible, disqualifying problem. And, given the choices Republicans look likely to have (any “fresh faces” emerging in 2010 won’t be ready for an immediate presidential race), that’s a very big problem for a party that considers itself on the brink of a return to power in the next few years.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Anyone paying attention to political discourse during the last two or three months is aware of an acute unhappiness with the Obama administration among a goodly number of self-conscious progressives, sometimes expressed in terms of the president’s “betrayal” of “the Democratic base,” which may not turn out to support the party in November.

But is “the Democratic base” really as upset with Obama as elements of the progressive commentariat?

Mark Blumenthal looks at the numbers over at pollster.com, and concludes there’s not much evidence of displeasure with the president among rank-and-file Democrats, particularly those of a more progressive bent. Using Gallup’s weekly tracking poll of presidential approval ratings as a benchmark, Blumenthal notes:

Obama’s rating among liberal Democrats the week before Christmas (89 percent) was just a single percentage point lower than in the first week of his presidency (90 percent). None of this suggests a full revolt.

Approval ratings, of course, don’t get at intensity of support or disdain, which could have an impact on voting participation, particularly in midterm elections. So Blumenthal goes on to look at more nuanced measurements:

Between late February and mid-December, the ABC/Post survey shows an overall decline in Obama’s strongly favorable rating from 43 percent to 31 percent. Among liberal Democrats, strong approval started out at 77 percent in February and varied between a low of 72 percent and a high of 81 percent through mid-September. It fell in October (65 percent) and November (67 percent) before rebounding in December (76 percent).

So that’s a one point drop in Obama’s high “strong approval” rating from self-identified liberals between February and December.

Now everyone doesn’t mean “self-identified liberal Democrats” when they refer to the “party base.” As Blumenthal notes, Bob Brigham, among others, has suggested that “base” really refers to smaller communities like activists or donors. But it is fair to say that the political relevance of any particular community is somewhat limited if its views are sharply at odds with those of rank-and-file voters who say they share the same ideology.

Remember that next time anyone presumes to speak exclusively for “the base.”

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

I don’t know exactly what it is about being a “conservative columnist” at The New York Times, but now the young-un on that beat, Ross Douthat, is exhibiting the same habits as his older colleague, David Brooks. Brooks, of course, has mastered the art of looking down at the squabbling major parties from a great height, condemning them both, and somehow always coming down in the conclusion with recommendations that coincide with the short-term positioning of the Republican Party.

In his first column of the new year yesterday, Douthat performs a similar pirouette, with some interesting twists. His own skywalk begins with an Olympian view of America’s position in the world after the aughts–we’re now just a superpower, not a “hyperpower”–then predictably cites political polarization as one of the threats to our competitive position.

Warming to his task, Ross criticizes conservatives of the Bush era for a failed experiment in reduplicating Reaganomics, but then equals the score by accusing “Obama Democrats” of “returning to their party’s long-running pursuit of European-style social democracy — by micromanaging industry, pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs, and binding the economy in a web of new taxes and regulations.”

Aside from that very questionable characterization of the Democratic agenda, you will note that Douthat does not observe any causal relationship between one party’s “sins” and the other’s. Any “micromanaging industry” that’s going on presently is, rather obviously, the result of an economic calamity introduced under the previous national management. I don’t know if by “pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs” Douthat is referring to stimulus legislation used to counteract the disastrous effects of the economic calamity, or to the resolutely centrist health care reform proposal that is struggling through Congress after being signficantly compromised along the way. Any “new taxes” in prospect are part of said centrist plan, or part of the broader Democratic objective, announced not this year but as early as 2002, of reconfiguring the tax system to resemble what it looked like before the failed Republican exercise in Reaganomics that Douthat denounced earlier in his column.

All this is rather ho-hum High Broderism, but then Douthat gets more interesting when he proposes his own “center-right agenda” to replace the horrific move to the left essayed by Democrats. He begins with a tout court endorsement of the agenda recently laid out by Manhattan Institute wonk Jim Manzi, which is all the rage right now in what’s left of the non-Tea Party conservative commentariat:

Manzi’s National Affairs essay, a tour d’horizon of our socioeconomic situation, provides a solid place to start. He proposes a fourfold agenda: Unwind the partnerships forged between Big Business and Big Government in the wake of the 2008 crash; seek financial regulations that “contain busts,” by segregating high-risk transactions from lower-risk enterprises; deregulate the public school system, to let a thousand charter schools and start-ups bloom; and shift our immigration policy away from low-skilled immigration, and toward the recruitment of high-skilled émigrés from around the globe.

To this list, I would add tax reform and entitlement reform. The former should broaden the tax base while cutting taxes on work, childrearing and investment. The latter should means-test both Social Security and Medicare, reducing both programs’ spending on well-off retirees rather than questing fruitlessly for their privatization.

Now Manzi’s agenda has some virtues, but not so much as a Republican agenda. The Obama administration hopes to “unwind the partnerships” between government and business as fast as it can, and it, too, seeks to re-regulate the financial system in order to “segregate” high-risk transactions. For all the perennial conservative caterwauling about teachers’ unions holding a veto over good education policy, Obama, too, is a big fan of charter schools. This only looks like a “center-right agenda” if you buy the earlier Douthat premise that Obama is hell-bent on Swedenizing America.

Shifting the immigration system to favor higher skills (a very old “idea” also embraced today by Michael Barone) is not, as Douthat seems to think, a way to buy off conservative hatred of high levels of immigration; it may make the corporate community happy, but won’t do a thing for rank-and-file conservatives who dislike any wage competition from immigrants, and who want not a calibration of policies but wholesale expulsion of immigrants already in the country.

As for Douthat’s own supplementary ideas for a “center-right agenda,” he offers “tax reform” and means-testing Medicare and Social Security. Now “tax reform” as he is apparently discussing it is either one of two things: a continuation of the Bush-era failed experiment in Reaganomics involving deficit-financed tax cuts, however well-targeted they happen to be to workers and families, or a redesign of the system involving tax increases on some to pay for tax cuts for others. As Douthat knows, the constituency within the Republican Party for any tax increases on anybody could be comfortably accomodated in his own office.

Moroever, at a time when Republicans are shrieking about mean old Obama’s euthanasia-inspired efforts to cut Medicare benefits, Douthat is proposing the one “entitlement reform” — means-testing — that’s even less popular than privatization. It ain’t happening, and thus, like most of the rest of Ross’s “center-right agenda,” it’s not a serious contribution to the actual debate.

Now you could give Ross Douthat credit for thinking outside the box and proposing things that his own party would never embrace, which is tempting since he is a decent, thoughtful man. Or you could conclude, as many of us have simiilarly concluded about David Brooks’ MO, that by condemning Democratic policies without offering anything realistic to replace them, he’s simply ratifying the “Party of No” agenda of killing Obama’s policy intiatives and then figuring out later what to do once Republicans are back in the saddle again. It all adds up to an endorsement of Republican victory in 2010 and 2012, even if that would predictably return the country to the conservative policies that so distressed Ross Douthat, in retrospect of course, over the last ten years.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Though he called it “unlikely,” the New York Times Magazine‘s Matt Bai unleashed the idea this weekend that disgruntled progressives might support a primary challenge to President Barack Obama in 2012, even suggesting that Dr. Howard Dean could be positioning himself to make the challenge himself.

It’s natural for pro-Obama Democrats to recoil from even discussing the possibility of the President being “primaried,” but I’d argue it’s healthier for everyone to pull the idea right out of the closet and examine it closely, beginning with the recent history of such challenges.

* Four of the last eight presidents (Bush 41, Carter, Ford and Johnson) prior to Obama faced serious primary challenges in their re-election campaigns.

* In all four cases, the challengers (McCarthy in 1968, Reagan in 1976, Kennedy in 1980 and Buchanan in 1992) ran on the implicit or explicit message that the incumbent had betrayed his party base. In all four cases, the incumbent was struggling in the polls to some extent, amidst shaky economic conditions (less LBJ than the others, though inflation was a big concern in 1968).

* In three of the four cases (all but Bush 41), the incumbent’s party had done very poorly in the prior midterm election.

* All four challenges ultimately failed to secure the party nomination.

* The opposition party–twice Democrats, twice Republicans–won all four general elections.

Suffice it to say that primary challenges to sitting presidents are more common than many people realize, but never, in recent history, successful in any way other than chastening party leaders via general election defeat.

There is a fifth president whose re-election campaign might well be examined in this context: one Richard M. Nixon. He, too was having some trouble in the polls going into 1972. He rather notably was presiding over a very unpopular war, and the economy was sufficiently troubled that he actually imposed wage and price controls. His party had a very disappointing showing in the 1970 midterms. And he faced intraparty insurgencies coming from two different directions: antiwar Republicans (yes, there were some back then) who ultimately produced a candidate, Rep. Pete McCloskey of CA; and conservatives, some of whose leaders (including William F. Buckley, Jr.) signed a statement “suspending” their support for Nixon in 1971. Conservatives, too, produced a sittling member of Congress willing to take on the incumbent, Rep. John Ashbrook of OH.

Ultimately, of course, Nixon brushed aside these intraparty challenges with ease, and won the general election by a huge 49-state landslide, in no small part because of divisions and weaknesses in the Democratic party. (Yes, the excesses of his reelection campaign contributed to his rapid fall from grace and forced resignation in 1974, but no one really thinks that the crimes and misdemeanors we now know collectively as “Watergate” won him re-election.)

My point in mentioning Nixon is to note that primary challenges don’t necessarily doom incumbents, and that developments in the opposing party can have a very large impact on the fate of struggling incumbents.

Now, I personally doubt that any serious primary challenge to Barack Obama will ultimately develop, if only because it would be exceptionally difficult to mobilize a revolt of “the party base” against the first African-American president. Obama will also likely benefit from the same phenomenon that kept Bill Clinton from being challenged for re-election in 1996: the desire for a united front against a militantly vicious GOP. And lest we forget, there’s always the strong possibility that by this time two years from now, the war in Afghanistan could be winding down, the economy could be reviving, health care reforms could be very popular, and Republicans could be gearing up for a fratricidal nomination battle of their own.

But Democrats might as well talk through the consequences of a primary challenge to Obama while it’s an abstract proposition rather than an imminent threat. The precedents for potential insurgents aren’t very encouraging.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

As the 2000s come to a close, prominent publications (here and here) have joined in the name game: what to call these nameless past ten years. This post, by former PPI stalwart Mark Ribbing, was originally published by PPI in August:

The time is coming to give this decade a name. We are four months from its end, and still we have no handy moniker that captures the spirit of the 2000’s, their odd blend of dislocation, dissolution and hope.

Back at the start of the millennium, commentators offered various spoken shorthands for the 00’s, but none have caught on. The most logical choice, “The Two-Thousands,” is unwieldy. Playing on the multiplicity of zeros, some pundits suggested “The Zeros” or even—in an antiquarian turn—“The Aughts.”

Others chose to see all those circles not as numbers, but as letters, and to pronounce them as such—“The Oh’s.” This, it turns out, was a step on the right track. But let’s consider a different pronunciation, one that captures not only the numerical identity of the 00’s, but also their historical essence: “The Ooze.”

This name’s been suggested before, mainly as a gag entrant in the dub-the-decade sweepstakes. Now it’s time for us to embrace its aptness for our times. Let us ponder ooze.

My desk version of Webster’s dictionary lists its first definition of “ooze” as a verb meaning “[t]o flow or seep out slowly, as through small openings.” The second is “[t]o vanish or ebb slowly,” and offers as an example the following phrase: “felt my confidence ooze away.”

But “ooze” is not just a verb for things that seep through small openings (like an infiltrating terrorist, or a flu virus) or for things that vanish or ebb over time (like Arctic ice, or the U.S. manufacturing-job base).

For “ooze” is also a noun. It is mud, goop, gunk, but its meaning goes a bit, well, deeper than that.

Back to the dictionary. It turns out that ooze is the “[m]udlike sediment covering the floor of oceans and lakes, composed mainly of the remains of microscopic animals.” In other words, it is the inert decayed matter of that which was once alive, and moving, and whole, however fragile it turned out to be.

This was our national condition all too often in the 2000’s—a perceptible wearing-away of living, intact structures that upheld our sense of security, liberty, prosperity, and mutual obligation.

This sense of national loss and unsettlement was a continual theme of the first eight years of the decade. It was an undercurrent running from the September 11 attacks to Hurricane Katrina, from the abuses at Abu Ghraib to the implosion of our financial sector.

Yet before we mire ourselves in pessimism, let us once again consider the floors of oceans and lakes, where microscopic beings settle and separate into the mud. The resulting stew is a vital staging ground for life itself. It is a place where ecosystems filter and regenerate themselves.

In short, ooze need not only signify decay. It can also represent the conditions for lasting growth and renewal—the kind that emerges from the ground up.

Such emergence is often hard to see at first. Ooze does not lend itself to clarity or rapid fruition. But down there, beneath the surface, things are happening that will one day become visible to the wide world.

Somewhere, a laid-off worker is taking her career into her own hands and starting up a new business. An abandoned building is reborn as a charter school. A vacant lot becomes part of the growing nationwide push toward local, sustainable sources of food.

The American instinct for renewal was crucial to Barack Obama’s electoral appeal, and it may yet manifest itself in a national willingness to confront such challenges as our deeply flawed health-care system, our educational dysfunction, and our increasingly costly dependence on fossil fuels. These are big problems, and anyone who expected them to be solved easily or without opposition has forgotten the basic truths of human nature, and of democracy.

What matters is this: Progress toward change is indeed taking place, on all of these fronts and others besides. That progress may seem too slow, and it may send its tendrils down the occasional dead-end channel, but it’s nourished by something quite real — a keen desire to see our nation do better, to reclaim its inventive, expansive soul. The Ooze is where we have been, and our future is forming in its depths, nourished by the broken shells of what had come before.

‘Tis the season for year-end assessments. As the pundit class weighs in on Obama’s year in office, one meme has been particularly frustrating: the judgment that Obama “failed” to bring bipartisanship back to Washington.

Yesterday’s The Hill has the latest entry in the bogus narrative. “Obama’s first year yields few results in drive for bipartisanship” reads the headline. It then gives the floor to Republican sources:

“You might remember that Senate Republicans began the year hopeful that the president would actually make good on his campaign promises to reach across the aisle and build consensus,” said one GOP aide, who argued the divide began with the stimulus.

“People were skeptical of Obama’s rhetoric, but nobody could have predicted the surge in partisanship that his administration would wage over the first year. And their fierce partisan approach has become a major reason why independent voters are sprinting away from Democrats.”

In true he-said-she-said fashion, The Hill then gives some Democrats a chance to respond, without bothering to weigh in on who’s speaking in good faith and who’s spinning.

William Galston, in his evaluation of President Obama’s first year in American Interest magazine, offers a similiar take:

[T]he President never tried very hard to render bipartisanship a matter of substance as well as tone, making it all but certain that he would not redeem an important promissory note he had issued to the American people during the campaign.

Newsweek‘s Evan Thomas said much the same thing a month ago:

Obama tried to foster bipartisanship at the outset of his administration, but he didn’t try very hard, and his fellow Democrats can be just as rigidly partisan on the left.

It’s indisputable that Washington is as rancorous and polarized as ever. And there’s no question that Obama may have set himself up for criticism by campaigning as a post-partisan figure who could bridge the Washington divide.

Misplacing the Blame

But to blame Obama for failed bipartisanship is to blame the only grown-up in the room for the mess the kids are making. The two real culprits are a Republican Party that refuses to act responsibly, and a mainstream press that is unable or unwilling to call them on it.

What we have in the GOP today is a party that has lost all interest in policy now that it’s out of power. It has one goal: to destroy the Obama presidency. Every hand extended by the other side is to be rejected. The Republicans know what they’re doing — the media, true to form, has stuck to its pox-on-both-houses posture. Never mind that the president has made an honest effort to get Republicans interested in the idea of governing again: if Republicans keeps saying no, it must be because Obama’s not asking often and nicely enough.

Take the claim that the stimulus represented a violation of Obama’s pledge to reach out to the other side. Here was a stimulus plan that was one-third tax cuts designed to appeal to Republicans — tax cuts that economists agreed would be less than stimulative. Despite that sop to conservatives, it got only three GOP votes, including one from a Republican who would soon make the switch to the other side, Arlen Specter.

To think that Obama could have won more GOP votes had he given in a little more is to misread the GOP. The stated Republican objection to the stimulus was that there was too much spending in it — which is exactly what stimulus is. The hidden Republican objection, of course, was that it just might work. And if there’s one thing the GOP is deathly afraid of, it’s the rebound under Obama’s watch of an economy that they wrecked.

Take another example: health care. Some have complained that the Democrats rammed through their bill without Republican input. Does anyone not remember the slow-as-molasses work of the Senate Finance Committee on its bill, geared specifically toward winning the support of Republicans?

The Party of No Compromises

The Republican idea of compromise is that Obama enact Republican policies. Anything short of that means that he must not be serious about reaching out. Even policies that won Republican support in the past are now encountering opposition, lest Obama claim a bipartisan win. (Exhibit A: John McCain, hitherto a strong supporter of cap-and-trade, has now flip-flopped on it, calling it part of a “far left” agenda.)

True bipartisanship — the idea of two parties arguing in earnest over the direction of the country and reaching the necessary compromises to make sure everything runs smoothly — is impossible with the current Republican Party. Obama has made every effort to reach out to Republicans. And as president, annoying as it may be for some progressives, he should continue to seek the higher ground and not get caught up in the daily trench warfare. But there’s only so much one person can do in dealing with a rabid and unbending opposition.

A certain madness has gripped the GOP. Many in the media know it — and yet their stories barely mention the phenomenon. The same kabuki dance keeps getting enacted news cycle after news cycle. Fact-free spin is treated as a legitimate retort to good-faith argument. The enablers of a Republican Party gone rogue, the media are a key contributor to our broken politics. Only when the news stops giving politicians and parties the incentive to act irresponsibly can we expect irresponsible actors to even begin thinking about changing their ways.