Opinion writer
Old habits die hard. The media are so enamored of the continuing (and largely contrived) story about the great Republican civil war that they fail to appreciate that the real internecine fight is being waged on the other side of the aisle.
I grant that there’s a lot of shouting today among Republicans. But it’s aritual skirmish over whether a government shutdown would force the president to withdraw a signature measure — last time, Obamacare; this time, executive amnesty.
And it will likely be resolved with the obvious expedient of funding the government through next year, except for a more short-term extension for homeland security. That way, defunding the executive order could be targeted to just the issue at hand, namely immigration, and would occur when the GOP holds the high ground — control of both houses of Congress.
It’s a tempest in a teapot, and tactical at that. Meanwhile, on the other side, cannons are firing in every direction as the Democratic Party, dazed and disoriented, begins digging itself out of the shambles of six years of Barack Obama.
The fireworks began even before Election Day with preemptive back-stabbing of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, by fellow Democrats. This was followed after the electoral debacle by bitter sniping between Obama and Harry Reid when Reid’s chief of staff immediately — and on the record — blamed the results on Obama. In turn, Obama got his revenge last week by sabotaging a $450 billion “tax extender” deal that Reid had painstakingly negotiated.
But the Democrats’ civil war goes far beyond the petty and the personal. It’s about fundamental strategy and ideology. The opening salvo was Sen. Chuck Schumer’s National Press Club speech, an anti-Obama manifesto delivered three weeks after Election Day openly denouncing Obamaism, its policies and priorities. In essence: Elected with a mandate to restore the economy and address the anxieties of a stagnating and squeezed middle class, Obama instead attacked, restructured, reorganized and destabilized a health-care system that was serving the middle class relatively well.
While Schumer lobbed artillery at Obama’s faculty-room liberalism, the left — through Elizabeth Warren’s progressive populism — kept up its fire on the party center. Warren is looking beyond Obama to Hillary Clinton, cozy as Clinton is (Schumer, too) with Wall Street, the bête noire of the party base. Which is why Clinton actually said: “Don’t let anybody tell you that, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs” — a stupendously clumsy attempt to parry Warren by parroting her.
From opposite sides of the (Democratic) spectrum, Schumer and Warren are trying to remake and reorient the Democratic Party post-Obama. So while Republicans are debating the tactics of stopping presidential lawlessness — an inherently difficult congressional undertaking, particularly if you still control only a single house — Democrats are trying to figure out what they believe and whom they represent.
Which do you think is the more serious problem
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