There are some Democratic Presidential candidates who tout their ability to find legislative solutions with their Republican colleagues and believe this asset makes them more qualified for higher office.
While this image is as appealing as a freshly baked apple pie, since the election of President Clinton in 1993, the Republican Party has repeatedly demonstrated that they would rather drive the USA into a ditch than compromise with members of the Democratic Party.
The demise of political compromise began when Newt Gingrich, as the Republican Speaker of the House, chose to impeach the President of the United States because he lied about an extramarital sexual relationship. Given President Trump’s history, the Republican’s impeachment of President Clinton is almost incomprehensible.
The demise of political compromise continued when Senate Republicans put party loyalty ahead of country and all Republican Senators tried to prevent President Obama from passing legislation to end the Great Recession.
Further on into the Obama Presidency, the Republican House of Representatives conducted innumerable bogus investigations of prominent Democrats purely for the political spectacle. Not unexpectedly, those investigations resulted in no significant legal action against the targets of their investigations. And during Obama’s last 2 years in office, Republicans proudly proclaimed that any compromise with a Democratic White House, or even meeting with White House representatives, was an abandonment of their principles. They broadcast their intransigence as if it was a badge of honor and now America is stuck with the Republican Party which believes “it’s my way or no way.”
Democratic Presidential candidates who proclaim that their most important qualification for the Presidency is their demonstrated ability to legislate with Republicans, as they had done in the past, clearly have failed to recognize that the Republican Party they knew, now no longer exists. While proclamations of bipartisanship are appealing, in the absence of a major shift in the Republican Party, those proclamations are objectively delusional.
The future leaders of the Democratic Party must acknowledge this new reality and build a future around that reality. We need a Democratic President who understands that she will have to lead the country with an opposition party which believes compromise is inherently evil.
Those Democratic presidential candidates who insist that they can recreate the political environment they once knew, when “compromise” was an honorable concept, are objectively out of touch with today’s Republican Party. I thank those Democratic politicians for their service to our country and ask that they gracefully step aside so more “reality” based Democratic Presidential candidates can assume the mantel of leadership and move our country forward.
Hayward Zwerling
6/21/2019