Guest Author“The absence of articulate political leadership in the country makes us feel that we are floundering,” the great Saul Bellow wrote in a piece for Forbes — in 1972.
Richard Nixon was president, a reminder that even in the worst of times, if the nation could survive that knave, it’s not about to be sunk by the likes of John Boehner and Ted Cruz. On the other hand, even when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, he never threatened the full faith and credit of the United States, as these suicidal fanatics just did in their latest attempt to end Obamacare.
They knew they were fighting a battle they couldn’t win. These alleged priests of fiscal responsibility were nevertheless willing to stomp their feet long enough to shatter the nation’s — and the world’s — financial stability, and almost did.
Letting them get away with it makes us complicit. My district — Northeast Florida — has the misfortune of being represented by one of those fanatics who held the nation hostage 16 days. Ron DeSantis is not yet into his second year as a congressman. We should spare him, and ourselves, a second term. His shutdown mania is hardly the only reason.
DeSantis is a former corporate lawyer with the personality of a bookend and a push-button doll’s ability to parrot the right-most talking points in a whiny soprano voice. He’s not interested in governance. He’s a saboteur. He derails, with self-righteous bombast and distortions for TNT. He is your standard-issue Tea Party reactionary.
He voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. He voted against closing Guantanamo Bay, America’s most enduring concentration and torture center (in whose aberrations he participated as a staffer for the military’s kangaroo proceedings there).
He voted to deny food stamps to millions of people — and this from the guy who represents the county with Florida’s highest unemployment rate. And he spent his 10 months in Congress fixating on Obamacare to deny better access to health insurance in a state with the second highest proportion of uninsured Americans. He does not exist outside his Obama fixation, his bête noire in every sense of a term that so disturbingly feeds Tea Party pathology.
He does all this by wrapping his words and even the name of his bills in the mantle of the nation’s founders, the way he just called one of his anti-Obamacare measures the James Madison Congressional Accountability Act — James Madison, mind you, the consummate compromiser, the founding negotiator who abhorred extremists and ideologues, and who must be retching in his grave to hear his name invoked by a man who doesn’t know accountability from Adams.
Madison was nothing if not anal about the nation’s debts, calling them the nation’s “moral obligations.” To DeSantis, one of Congress’ moral mimics, debts are bargaining chips.
But DeSantis, who may have learned the ruse in his Guantanamo days, quotes the Founding Fathers the way the Taliban quote the Koran: the cherry-picked citations are correct.
The intent is perverse. And for the unconscionable, quite effective. DeSantis degrades present-day realities in the name of a bogus golden age that Tea Party amnesiacs love to conjure up as an escape from their own obligations to the present.
It’s a distortion of history so rich in resentment that it’s blind to its own paradox: invoking the founders in a drive for a less perfect union.
DeSantis isn’t getting the message. He’s doubling down. But so it goes with the dim-witted and the blowhards who think politics is the art of grandstanding rather than the art of the possible, and who are willing to grandstand all the way to the nation’s grave.
Any constituency with a shred of responsibility would vote him out. But he’ll always have a trump card, and he knows it.
That’s the local Democrats, who have a gift for producing congressional candidates who couldn’t win a fifth grade talent show.
So we may be stuck with this catastrophe of a congressman for a while yet. Let’s just not kid ourselves. We’ll need Obamacare’s catastrophic coverage to survive him.
