Sometimes I like local pundit Jon Keller - at the very least he’s beefed up CBS4’s political beat and has been a more analytical version of WHDH-7’s Andy Hiller. But this brand of political cynicism seems wrongheaded to me:
We are coming up on the 30th anniversary of the last major auto insurance reform here, a disaster that sent rates skyrocketing and left us with the country’s costliest, most complex system. So, what has the latest effort to fix auto insurance provoked on Beacon Hill? — Some nasty partisan skirmishing….
Members of the legislative committee that held Tuesday’s hearing kept saying they have got an open mind on the Romney bill, and the governor kept saying he’s open to any better ideas, so maybe they will lay politics aside and figure this out. Then again, next year is an election year.
Actually, in the original telecast, I swear he blamed something like "Beacon Hill politics as usual." You hear this complaint a lot, especially from the political center. We have all these problems to fix, only some mystified "politics as usual" and "partisan bickering" gets in the way. There may be an element of truth in the charge: as part of their jockeying for power, parties sometimes find it advantageous to temporarily obstruct, and the nature and extent of that obstruction drives much of the "inside politics" patter we hear on those Sunday morning talk shows.
But sometimes there’s a reason for partisan bickering: the political parties and those who vote for them have divergent ideas of what should be done, even what the problem really is. With auto insurance, you have the Republicans like Romney, who are committed to market-based prices and for whom "reform" means full deregulation, and Democrats like Reilly, who are inclined to see some regulation as beneficial and for whom "reform" simply means making a better mousetrap, a regulatory scheme that deals with insurance fraud better, say. There’s nothing terribly cynical about this state of affairs. And it’s not enough to treat "reform" as an obvious path, when the very outline of what "reform" means is what’s being debated.
Meanwhile, Joan Venocchi blasts previously pro-Iraq war politicians who are now expressing regret for their past votes:
AS GO the polls, so go the pols…..
In 2005, belated spine is better than no spine. But it should never be confused with real political courage, the kind that stands up to presidents when it is unpopular to do so.
Here’s another frequent popular complaint. And why do these spineless politicians care so much about what the people think? Look, I know that opinion polls are fraught with problems. And I know that representative democracy is not the same thing as direct democracy: things would be a mess if decisions were cast on minute-by-minute polling. And on this particular issue one could argue that the Democrats in Congress could have had a longer-term strategy. Still, the "Senator/Representative of moral character" model that Venocchi expects is odd when you think about it. It’s like we’re expecting politicians not to express what the polity thinks now, but what it will think in some near future, in part because Mr/Mrs. Politician of Character was so persuasive that he/she changed his constitency’s opinion. We’re blaming politicians for not being Jimmy Stewart.
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