STUPID PROGRESS:

Outside straight (David M. Shribman, February 13, 2005, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Four of the last five presidents came to office as outsiders, campaigning fiercely against the way things were done in Washington, making the capital a symbol for the nation's ills, portraying themselves as crusaders against the status quo.

The exception in the string from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush is, ironically enough, President Bush's father. His administration represented the greatest example of the establishment of the Establishment in a half century. In his years, the whole world knew who wore the (striped) pants, and the whole world knew how things were done. It was tidy, to be sure, but in the modern world tidiness is not next to godliness. He lost his re-election bid to Bill Clinton, whose many gifts did not include tidiness. [...]

Carter ran as an honest farmer but governed as a lost alien trying to blend in with the natives. Ronald Reagan, who previewed his role in his two screenings as governor of California, ran as the plain-speaking man of simple truths but repeatedly bent to the prevailing truths. Clinton, who ran for president to alter Washington, was, along with James Garfield, William McKinley and Richard Nixon, at heart a careerist, which is to say a career politician. He reverted to form once in the White House.

All of these status quo antis soon became enamored of, or co-opted by, the status quo, making it easy for the next guy to run against the guy who himself had run against everything else. It is the most unappreciated quality of the modern presidency, and yet the most enduring.

Now we come to the incumbent. [...]

[T]he president is an outsider now, even here, in the capital where the big jobs are appointed by him and confirmed in a Congress controlled by Republicans who increasingly identify with his own interests. He's a rebel now with a cause, freedom, and in fact that cause is a metaphor: free Iraq from tyranny, free Americans from taxes, free America and Americans from the old ways of thinking -- in fields ranging from diplomacy to retirement planning.

No president of our time has tried this, or sustained it over such a long period of time, which is one of the reasons the Democrats seem so befuddled this winter of their greatest discontent. Customarily the opposition in politics is trying to upend things, to throw the old out so as to install the new, but Bush has changed all that. The Democrats want to throw out the new to restore the old.

Thus the party that prides itself on representing the "outs" in American life -- the poor, the infirm, the old, the striving, the reviled -- is in an immensely awkward position. In defending the old, the Democrats seem to be (and this phrase comes from William F. Buckley Jr. and his conception of conservatism) standing athwart history yelling Stop. That is no place for a progressive party to be.

The conundrum is easily enough solved: stop thinking of liberals as the progressive party.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 13, 2005 10:00 AM