Opinion

Election screams sweet, sweet gridlock

Party of incoherence replaces party of incompetence

By Eryk Salvaggio

Posted on Nov. 09, 2006, at 12:00 a.m.

Good news, America: The elections of 2006 have ended. After months of sex scandals and advertisements of Osama bin Laden nuking rural southern counties, we’re back to the default setting of American politics: not giving a damn.

Given that only about 600 students actually voted on campus in this election, I know my audience is small. So, for those who care, one thing seems certain: Democrats have won back the House, and possibly the Senate. Nancy Pelosi will be the first female Speaker of the House, with a solid majority behind her. The Senate is neck and neck, regardless of who actually takes control. So it comes down to this: gridlock. Sweet, sweet gridlock.

Say what you will about President Bush, but the man sticks to an agenda. He’s not built for compromise. He dangled the specter of a Pelosi House in front of his audiences as a scare tactic, and on Wednesday he had to invite her to lunch. I expect this bipartisanship to last roughly until it’s about time to decide what kind of condiment gets spread on their sandwiches. Clinton and Reagan both worked with opposition parties while simultaneously attempting to crush them. But Bush hasn’t had to do the whole working-together thing, and he never seemed all that interested in it. The House will be able to ignore Bush’s attempts to influence legislation, and Bush will be able to veto whatever they come up with.

Two years of our government doing nothing? After seeing Iraq lost to a sea of stubborn policy, the city of New Orleans swallowed up by a bumbling infrastructure, and nothing but ranting and oversimplification from the people whose rhetoric promises us an ethical, glorious Republic, the sweet silence of do-nothing gridlock is music to my ears.

Because if there is one thing you can count on from Democrats, it’s their remarkable ability to do absolutely nothing. If any Democrats believe that the party is in control on account of an inspiring message, creative leadership or thoughtful policy, think again. A plank of wood with a smiley face would have won this election, so long as the log didn’t call itself a Republican. Americans didn’t vote for Democrats, they voted against single-party rule.

We can expect some initiatives from the House, of course. They’ll want to increase minimum wage at the national level, they’ll want to expand stem cell research. At this point, they’ll face stiff opposition from people who hate paying $7.50 an hour and love Parkinson’s disease. This opposition comes in the form of the Bush veto pen.

Bush, of course, is now delegated to roughly the same status as that plank of wood with a smiley face on it, with “Republican” firmly carved into its heart. As the senate seeks clout to push for public approval of its agenda, Republicans will flee from Bush faster than they can say “34 percent approval rating.” The new leaders of the Senate will be the presidential hopefuls of 2008. For this reason, some of the Democratic agenda might get through.

But Democrats can be counted on to turn their backs on the issue that exit polls say is responsible for their election: by three out of five, voters would like to see reduced troop levels in Iraq. Too bad for you, 60 out of 100! Democrats have been whipped into a passive role on Iraq through years of Pavlovian conditioning from Republicans, stemming from the shocking idea back in 1968 that maybe we should get out of Vietnam. After years of being called weak on national security, they aren’t likely to make that mistake again. While Bush and the Republicans might say that their insistence on withdrawal shows a lack of resolve, they’ve got it all wrong. The Democratic inability to stand for anything, even the sentiments that sweep them into office, is what shows their lack of resolve.

But as I said, I’ll be happy if Democrats achieve even a temporary halt to that horrible shrieking sound coming out of the rapid decline of our national standards. Watching America’s carefully explore issues like torture and habeas corpus, which I assumed to be retired as hot-button political issues sometime after the Spanish Inquisition, has been like watching a bald eagle fly into a glass window.

Oh, glorious, dysfunctional America. Where one party stands for everything sensible Americans despise and another party stands for nothing we embrace, it’s no wonder the University of Maine could only muster 600 votes.

Eryk Salvaggio is a voting machine.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.