Pot Calls Kettle Black, Then Doubles Down

Re: "Democrats more likely to support compromise" (Friday Opinion), EJ Dionne takes his usual tack, which is to criticize all things Republican.  This go-round he's making the case that Democrat politicians are more bi-partisan than Republicans, stating that "while polls find that six in 10 Democrats regard themselves as moderate or conservative, nearly three-quarters of Republicans say they are conservative."

 

What is delicious about his conclusions is that Dionne cannot help but filter reality through those special and very partisan glasses he wears.  Here are a few examples:

 

1) Dionne ties himself in knots to avoid using the dreaded "L" word - liberal - to describe any portion of the Democrat electorate.  This is not an isolated phenomenon.  It is well documented that many liberal Democrats flee from the term, and prefer to call themselves moderate, or progressive.

 

2) To jigger the statistics where he needs them to be, Dionne then lumps "moderate" and conservative Democrats into a 60% majority, bestowing a centrist tinge to the Party that is unsupported by the facts these past four very controversial years. 

 

3) Dionne repeatedly throws in references to the Tea Party so as to - in his mind at least - marginalize Republicans, but makes no reference to Occupy Wallstreet's connections to the Democratic Party.  These are not coincidences, since it is key to his argument that only those who can be portrayed as moderate are capable of compromise. 

 

Finally, he cites an April 2011 Pew survey that "found that 69 percent of Democrats supported the idea of their own side making compromises" compared to only 50% of Republicans.  But given the meltdown of our economy due to berserk spending mostly authored by the Democratic Party, reasonable people might conclude that a Democrat's propensity to compromise might not be because they are inherently more reasonable people, but because they had come to the realization that their party has been on the wrong track for quite some time.  It would also explain the 2010 Republican sweep of Congress and the rise of the Tea Party.

 

The phenomenon is called "Reagan Democrats".  Dionne should look it up.