New York Times: Temperament Wars"Some time very soon, President George Bush is expected to sign a $400 billion bill adding a prescription-drug benefit to Medicare -- and he is sure to be flanked not only by Republicans but also by Democrats, perhaps including that arch-liberal, Senator Ted Kennedy. It's an image that is apt to drive former President Bill Clinton around the bend. The Democrats have, in effect, agreed to hand to Bush precisely the kind of politically precious legislative victory on health care that the Republicans went to any lengths to deny to Clinton back in 1994. Could it be that the Democrats are constitutionally incapable of acting as single-mindedly -- as ruthlessly, as unfairly -- as the Republicans? If so, is this the kind of Christian virtue that leads to being eaten by lions?
The difference between the two parties is not simply ideological. It is also temperamental. For all the talk about the tainted legitimacy of Bush's Supreme Court-inflected victory in the 2000 election, the Democrats have never sought to discredit Bush's presidency. Clinton, on the other hand, won fair and square, but many Republicans treated him as an illegitimate figure from the outset, and from the time of the 1994 election, which brought the Republicans to power in both houses and made Newt Gingrich speaker of the House, the G.O.P. practiced a politics of holy war that culminated in the impeachment proceedings.
Republicans have been bitterly complaining recently about the filibusters Democrats have mounted to block two of the president's nominees to the federal bench. But this obscures the historical facts. During the last six years of Clinton's presidency, the Republican majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee blocked fully one-third of Clinton's nominees to the federal appeals courts. When the Democrats regained control of the Senate in 2001, however, party leaders agreed to rapidly process all but the most controversial candidates in order to fill the vast backlog created by Republican obstruction. The judicial vacancy rate is now lower than it was even in Clinton's first two years, when the Democrats controlled Congress, and the bench is, of course, increasingly Republican and conservative.
Why are the Democrats so much more willing than the Republicans to make political sacrifices in the name of procedural fairness or of good government? Maybe Democrats are just nicer, but a more philosophical view is that liberals are committed to, are in fact bedeviled by, ideals about process that do not much preoccupy conservatives, at least contemporary ones. Liberals put their faith in such content-neutral principles as free speech, due process, participatory democracy. Is that too lofty? Then maybe we should say that today's liberals, unlike today's conservatives, don't believe in any particular set of ends ardently enough to blind themselves to the means they are using to achieve them..."
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