Considering the stubbornness of his opposition, I thought President Barack Obama was being quite generous in to express “regrets” over his role in Washington’s dysfunction.
“It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency,” he said, “that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.”
He shouldn’t be too hard on himself, in my view. When it comes to stirring “rancor and suspicion,” he had plenty of assistance from his stubbornly resistant conservative adversaries.
I am not one to complain, as many Obama supporters do, that the nation’s first black president has had a rougher road than any previous president. Who can forget the blizzard of allegations, myths and rumors that were showered on Bill and Hillary Clinton during his presidency?
Expect more of the same if his wife is nominated for the presidency this year, as expected.
Obama should have expected no less, as I wrote at the time of his first inaugural: Nobody promised him a rose garden, except for the big official one behind the White House.
Sure, both parties try to block their rivals’ agendas. That’s politics.
But as Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein point out in their book, “It’s Even Worse than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism,” there has been a glaring difference in recent years in Congress.
While today’s congressional Democrats will boast about their ability to work with Republicans to get things done, Mann and Ornstein point out, Republicans who work across the aisle risk condemnation and even primary election challenges from their fellow Republicans.
The result has been gridlock, shutdowns, saber rattling and brinkmanship, emboldened by a Republican race to the farthest-right positions.
Small wonder, then, that Obama called for an end to gerrymandering, a system that, as Obama said, draws “congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters and not the other way around.”
Nevertheless, Obama’s own rise benefited from a gerrymander in the Illinois Senate, as Ryan Lizza chronicled in the New Yorker in 2008. Political scientists also disagree on how much gerrymandering contributes to polarization compared to other factors.
Obama also called for campaign finance reform, even though he made the reforms passed after the Watergate scandal obsolete in 2008 when he raised more money over the Internet than he would have been allowed had he accepted federal matching funds.
The fact is Obama, burdened by the triple-header of two wars and a recession, never got anything resembling a break from conservative Republicans.
Quite the opposite, a “tea party” movement that long had been a small, easily ignored rump group suddenly exploded in national growth, prominence and influence.
Was that Obama’s fault? Has his presidency actually made relations between the races and other groups more angry than before? Or is it that having a black president makes some people, as Obama in his second memoir quotes an unnamed Illinois politician state senator as putting it, “feel more white?”
I suspect the latter. Yes, Obama might have done more to reach out to his opposition. He had more of a chance before Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress.
But, as the president said in his address, he cannot heal the divide alone. The rest of us have to do our part.
In that sense, I admire the other most-quoted speech of the evening, the Republican response by South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. She took a lot of heat from fellow Republicans for her not too subtle criticism of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, in particular, for his divisive rhetoric.
She was even called a RINO, a “Republican in Name Only,” for criticizing Trump, who was easily identified despite her omitting his name. Conservative columnist-author Ann Coulter even tweeted that Haley, a native-born American child of Indian Sikh parents, should be deported.
Yet Haley set the sort of standard for civil discourse that establishment mainstream Republicans are trying, despite Trump’s antics, to revive.
“Some people think that you have to be the loudest voice in the room to make a difference. That is just not true,” she said. “Often, the best thing we can do is turn down the volume.
“When the sound is quieter, you can actually hear what someone else is saying. And that can make a world of difference.”
Indeed, it can. I hope Washington tries it again soon.
E-mail Clarence Page at cpagetribune.com.
