Remember the horus and hours of talk radio time, cable talk show time, and the huge number of blogs posts by Republicans about how terrible, awful, downright undemocratic reconciliation would be? So the Democrats abandoned the idea even though Republicans had used it in the past.
Now it turns out that if the GOPs wins big they are talking about…you guessed it..using reconciliation to deep six health care reform.
This is why except for partisans of both parties so many Americans have come to feel very little of the rage now expressed in politics or the great principles many partisans espouse really mean anything. It’s all positioning to gain advantage and an upper hand in a given political moment. In the end, what matters is getting power and using it against the other side. And in that contest, the Republicans more than Barack Obama have shown that they know how to practice “Chicago politics.” And, kiddies, it looks like a lot more of it is yet to come. It’s a cliche now but, really true: the Democrats do resemble Charlie Brown about to kick a football held by GOPer Lucy.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.