Letter 2 America for December 10, 2013

| No Comments | No TrackBacks
Dear America,
English: Kirsten Gillibrand, New York's junior...

English: Kirsten Gillibrand, New York's junior United States Senator (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


The problem in American politics is ego.  The mission on which most politicians go when they seek office in Washington gets forgotten and the holding office becomes an end in itself.  That is not to say that there are no unassuming, humble members of our congress.  In The Senate in particular I can think of two: Susan Collins and the now retired Margaret Chase-Smith.  Neither ever seemed to seek the limelight, and Collins, who continues to be a voice for comity and mutual respect in our harshly recriminatory party politics.  Of course there is a temptation to note that both examples of political professionalism of the right kind are women, but there are other women in congress, and even in The Senate, who do not demonstrate the kind of restraint and civility that the two senators from Maine have over their quite lengthy political careers.  As a counterweight to the maturity of the two Maine-iacs there is the junior senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand.  She has made herself a reputation--when I say that I am deliberately intimating calculation on her part--for being a maverick, and we can all recall who else harped on that kind of characterization for herself in the recent past.  And much like Sarah Palin, Gillibrand is far from stellar as a thinker and quite eager for the personal attention that is indigenous to Washington politics these days.  The question is, has she earned the right to be noticed; is she a legitimate force in American politics.

She seems to make much of being a working mother, bringing her children to The Senate when she picks them up from school and letting them roam around associating with her colleagues as if they were at a family dinner.  But if you consider the options that are available to her by virtue of the fact that money is not much of an object for her and her "venture capitalist" husband, the image of her children playing with John McCain in the halls of The Senate, ostensibly out of necessity, seems a bit contrived and deliberate.  Add to that her politic changes of political direction in the form of passivity on the subject of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" while she was still a member of The House from a conservative district, which became outspoken support for repeal of the policy when she was appointed to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat when Clinton became Secretary of State, and the redolence of political opportunism begins to rise in one's nostrils.  Now throw in her overt recalcitrance on issues of policy interest among Democrats generally and her sincerity, or perhaps the lack thereof, becomes even more an issue.  She was regarded as a "blue dog" when in The House, and she continues to comport herself thusly.  She took a stand against a compromise farm bill with full knowledge that a compromise was necessary because a pure bill that protected the rights of many receiving food stamps who would be excluded from the program under the compromise bill couldn't get past the Republicans' strategy of filibustering anything they don't like.  And with regard to her signature issue, rape in the military, she makes a great show of "fight[ing] for men and women who shouldn't be raped in the military" ( I assume she doesn't think they should be raped anywhere, though she might have found a more artful way of expressing herself on the subject in order to make that clear) as if she is a crusader, which she might be if she were as interested in protecting all people from going uninsured as she was in getting coverage for first responders to the 9/11 catastrophe in New York City.  She seems more focused on the profile of issues than on the issues themselves, and while that may be just an illusion, her persistent role in her party's fights with the opposition does shed some light on her priorities, which seem to be directed at fulfillment of her political ambitions rather than fighting the good fight.

Senator Gillibrand has been likened to the Tea Party recalcitrants of the Republican Party, whom many regard as the impediment to progress on a number of issues including unemployment and the augmentation of the somewhat torpid economic recovery that the nation is now in the midst of.  This notion that such "speaking truth to power" is populist zeal rather than internecine political grandstanding, notion by which she seems to be guided, has been destructive of our political momentum over the past ten years or so, particularly since the emergence of the Tea Party as a political force in 2008, directly analogous to that of the Blue Dogs in 1995 after a mid-term rout in the first term of the Clinton administration.  The Tea Party, while purportedly telling that truth to power of which Gillibrand speaks, inspired the shut down of the government this year along with Republican intransigence on several issues, like health care reform in the form of the Affordable Care Act.  And it is no coincidence that the Blue Dogs in The House are at least in part responsible for the fact that we got insurance reform instead of health care reform in 2010 when the Affordable Care Act was the best that the Democrats in congress could do...even though they were in the majority in both houses until the end of that year.  Gillibrand was in The Senate by the time the bill was passed into law, but those of her ilk in The House, and those seeking the same kind of star power that seems to be on her wish list as a Senator, have been as responsible for the effeteness of the Democratic Party, and thus the progressive movement, as the Tea Party led Republican Party has been.

In the final analysis, self-seeking and the filibuster are the two main causes of our national political malaise.  Politicians, Senators in particular, taking to microphones to make their effusive pronouncements on their favorite issues and to fulminate as to the sanctity of their respective parties' philosophies, are clogging up our legislative process with personal ambition and a neurotic need for attention, begging the question of whether it should be in the constitution that anyone seeking office in our bicameral legislature must have been breast-fed.  Maybe the New York Times should ask Ms Gillibrand that question the next time they interview her instead of commenting on her child-care priorities.

Your friend,

Mike

Enhanced by Zemanta

No TrackBacks

TrackBack URL: http://letters2america.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/attymwol/managed-mt/mt-tb.cgi/522

Leave a comment

Categories

Pages

OpenID accepted here Learn more about OpenID
Powered by Movable Type 4.34-en

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on December 10, 2013 9:28 AM.

Letter 2 America for December 6, 2013 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for December 13, 2013 is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Political Blogs - BlogCatalog Blog Directory google-site-verification: google9129f4e489ab6f5d.html

Categories

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael Wolf published on December 10, 2013 9:28 AM.

Letter 2 America for December 6, 2013 was the previous entry in this blog.

Letter 2 America for December 13, 2013 is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

google-site-verification: google9129f4e489ab6f5d.html