It’s Glenn Beck vs. Jon Stewart.\u00a0 It’s white vs. multi-racial.\u00a0 It’s senior citizen vs. twenty-something.\u00a0 It’s rural vs. urban.<\/p>\n
And this year more than ever before — more even than 2008 — the threads and ligaments binding these two clumsy, disparate nations feel fragile and tenuous.<\/p>\n
I was at the Bill Clinton-Scott Murphy event this morning in Saratoga Springs.\u00a0 Inside, more than a thousand activists, labor supporters, and college students chanted and sang and shook their fists.<\/p>\n
They expressed sincere outrage that just two years after Democrats were given control of Washington, voters appear to have assigned them the lion’s share of blame for the country’s terrible malaise.<\/p>\n
Clinton pointed to a raft of legislation — from healthcare to finance to college loans to the stimulus package — and said that it offered a slow, tentative path out of the wilderness.<\/p>\n
A wilderness, the former president insisted, that George Bush and his Republican allies led us into.<\/p>\n
Outside, Republican and conservative protesters backing Chris Gibson painted a fundamentally different picture.<\/p>\n
I interviewed one man who argued vehemently that President Barack Obama promised to fix the economy fast.\u00a0 But nearly two years later,\u00a0 there’s still a lot of pain out there.<\/p>\n
To him — and to millions of Americans — the conclusion is obvious:\u00a0 the Democrats had their chance to turn things around and they blew it.\u00a0 Now they must go.<\/p>\n
If they capture majorities in Congress, Republicans are promising bluntly to repudiate any real compromise with Democrats.<\/p>\n
Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader in the Senate, has said point-blank that his number one legislative priority will be to make certain that Obama is a one-term president.<\/p>\n
Democrats, meanwhile, have failed to craft an agenda that attracted more than a handful of Republican votes; and the popularity of landmark programs, from the stimulus to healthcare, has continued to sag.<\/p>\n
In the end, it seems clear that the biggest losers in this year’s vote will be the centrists in both parties.<\/p>\n
Some — like Arizona Senator John McCain — have been forced to abandon their independent streaks, conforming to their party’s increasingly polarized rhetoric.<\/p>\n
Others — from Charlie Crist to Scott Murphy — are scrambling just to keep their political noses above water.<\/p>\n
Without these moderates, it’s difficult to see how the epic work of the nation will get done.<\/p>\n
We need fixes for everything from healthcare (yup, still broken) to the climate (yup, that’s broken too) to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and (of course) the economy.<\/p>\n
The problem, increasingly, is that we can’t seem to agree on what a “fixed” nation should look like, or what sacrifices (if any) we’re willing to accept to get there.<\/p>\n
Higher taxes?\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 Cuts to major entitlement programs?\u00a0 No way.\u00a0 More modest pay and benefits for government workers?\u00a0 Forget it.<\/p>\n
As we ping back and forth between the two parties, it’s hard not to see America as a frightened and self-doubting society, balanced precariously between the competing desires, whims and myths of two very different tribes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s Glenn Beck vs. Jon Stewart.\u00a0 It’s white vs. multi-racial.\u00a0 It’s senior citizen vs. twenty-something.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[886],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3114"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3114"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3115,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3114\/revisions\/3115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}