Bipartisan Corruption

Frank Rich details how both parties are bought by corporate lobbyists in The New York Times.

Our political leaders seem more inclined to hasten the next bust — and perhaps cash in on it — than prevent it. Massachusetts Republicans can’t be blamed if they react with anger, not civility, to The Boston Globe’s new revelations that Scott Brown raked in off-the-charts donations from the finance industry while toiling to weaken the financial regulatory bill. Democrats are equally entitled to be outraged that Obama’s former budget director, Peter Orszag, has followed the egregious example of his mentor, Robert Rubin, by moving from the White House to a job at Citigroup — and only four months after leaving government service.

As The Times reported, Citi is now marketing all-new lines of loosey-goosey credit cards to debt-prone Americans much as it stoked the proliferation of no-money-down mortgages during Rubin’s tenure in the housing bubble. It can do so with impunity, since the incoming chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Spencer Bachus, has already guaranteed institutions like Citi a pass. As Bachus’s instantly notorious pronouncement had it, “My view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.” In truth, this congressman’s view has been the prevailing view in Washington under both parties since the Reagan administration.

Rich is not participating in the false equivalence the Beltway media attributes to the "hyperpartisanship" of the current political climate. He notes that a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 47 percent of Republicans opposed any compromise with Democrats while only 29 percent of Democrats were similarly oppositional. There is no counterpart on the left for shrill partisan propaganda to Fox News and right-wing radio. Andrew Sullivan explains how GOP opposition to Obama has been much more extreme than Democratic criticism of Bush. Rich's point is that despite the imbalance in partisanship, there is no shortage of venality on either side.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan and C. M. Carpenter respond to Rich's criticism of President Obama as naive in his pursuit of pragmatic bipartisanship. Sullivan:

If the next two years are as productive as the last two, and if Obama resists the Rich-Krugman-Maddow chorus to be Michael Moore in chief, then the promise of the Goodbye To All That presidency is very much alive. From the perspective of this Christmas, after the many bewildering twists and turns of the last two years, Obama is looking good because he kept his nerve and retained his restraint. That's a tough combo: nerve and restraint. It takes a cold-bloodedness to pull this off, and there are times when ice seems to run through the man's veins. I occasionally used to day-dream about a 'one-nation' Tory U.S. president, a second Eisenhower of a sort. Little did I know he would be a black man with a funny name.

--Ballard Burgher