The system’s the problem. The system’s the illness, and the drawing of Congressional districts must be drawn by nonpartisan commissions, not by political hacks.

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Our Sickly Political System
By Frank Bruni, October 5, 2013

In our journalism and our conversations, we tend to talk about things in isolation, focusing on what’s happening right now and failing to connect the dots. The present outrage becomes our complete obsession; the countless frustrations that telegraphed it fade from view. So it is with the shutdown of the federal government, which we could and should have seen coming. Which we did see coming, more or less.

The shutdown isn’t a new story. It’s the same story as the demise of sensible gun control legislation, even after Newtown, which was supposed to change everything. It’s the same story as the stalling of immigration reform. It’s all one cancer, sprouting tumors of various sizes. The mass we’ve been staring at over the past week just happens to be bigger and uglier than the ones we beheld in the buildup.

Our federal government doesn’t work, at least not the Congress, not the way it should if we’re going to preserve and pass on the treasure and blessings that were bequeathed to us, not the way it should if we’re going to strut around ceaselessly congratulating ourselves on how exceptional we are. We’re exceptional all right, in that we can’t summon the will, discipline or character to fix even those problems that most of us would like to see addressed. How many Americans doubt that our infrastructure is inadequate and leaves us at a serious global disadvantage? Few, but for all our hand-wringing, little gets done.

We’re exceptional in the billions of dollars that we pour into elections. All those commercials, air miles, speechifying and tweeting — and for what? We’ve spent a fortune on sclerosis, a king’s ransom on dysfunction. Then again, the money is a big part of the problem. In America your hobbyhorse can be a lonely, mangy one. Finance it generously enough and it has Secretariat’s stride.

We’ve let passion overtake reason: the recipe for disaster in all the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies we read back in school. The tragedy is now us. It matters less in American politics today if your cause is just or your logic sound than if you can raise a telegenic ruckus, if you’re enamored enough of your own voice to say whatever brings a microphone its way. That’s the moral of Ted Cruz, who has behaved amorally here.

He was reportedly savaged in a meeting of Senate Republicans on Wednesday. At last, some hopeful news. It’s no wonder they got riled: their party has become a big, hot, self-destructive mess, and the chief reason is its inability to sideline the wacko birds, like Cruz, who increasingly rule the roost.

The shutdown has merely added a new chapter to this narrative and raised a fascinating question. By resorting to hardball and trickery to kill or maim Obamacare, has the party given the program its best shot at survival?

Obamacare made its debut last week with so many glitches that portions of its federal Web site were going to be closed for repairs for some of this weekend. Navigating it was “like trying to score tickets to the Stones,” as Jake Tapper said late Friday on CNN. His comment joined a loudening drumbeat of complaints about the program’s flaws. I wonder whether it will attract as many healthy young Americans as it must. When they crunch the coverage numbers — premiums and deductibles versus the penalty for not signing up — some may take a pass and remain uninsured.

What’s happening so far is unclear. As the week ended, the administration wasn’t providing any meaningful numbers on enrollment, engendering suspicion in many observers.

BUT none of that was the big news that it might have been, because everybody was rightly thundering about the shutdown instead. It was prompted, of course, by the Cruz-led demand that Obamacare be defunded or delayed, which was never going to happen. What was achieved instead was the diversion of public attention from the program’s shortcomings.

You want to talk, Senator Cruz, in terms of Seuss-ian breakfast foods? For your hammy 21-hour soliloquy, you have egg on your face.

But regardless of how Obamacare in its initial phase fares, and regardless of many voters’ disappointment with the president’s overall job performance, an American who wants to register his or her upset at the ballot box may feel that there’s no attractive alternative to Democrats, no palatable way to switch allegiance to the party that opposed the new health insurance. Because what that party did last week was affirm how thoroughly it had been hijacked by its extremist wing. What that party did was further sully its brand. Polls show widespread misgivings about Obamacare, but that a sizable majority of Americans don’t want it gutted via shutdown or debt-ceiling threat. Polls also show that the current impasse is inflicting greater harm on the G.O.P.

So what the Republican Party is doing with Obamacare is turning a window of political opportunity into a grave, and the party’s cooler heads know it. As Jonathan Martin wrote in The Times, “Nearly a year after a second consecutive and decisive presidential loss, the rebranding effort that almost every top Republican called crucial has been set aside or obscured by the wrangling with Mr. Obama.” The elders are exasperated, but the toddlers run the show. The party is in the same bind as the country, unable to overcome the obstructionists.

Some reasons for that aren’t easily tackled. As Cruz’s reading of supportive tweets during his soliloquy demonstrated, social media can give politicians the impression of a bigger cheerleading section than actually exists, of more wind at their backs than they really have. That’s unlikely to change.

But the sort of gerrymandering that has created situations like Pennsylvania’s, where Obama won 52 percent of the 2012 vote but the House delegation has 13 Republicans to 5 Democrats, can and must be eliminated through political reforms like the drawing of Congressional districts by nonpartisan commissions, not by political hacks. Voters should take their disgust with this shutdown and turn it into a fierce, sustained push for a better, fairer system.

Because the system’s the problem. The system’s the illness. We justly congratulate ourselves on what the framers of our Constitution set up, but that doesn’t mean we’re set forevermore. It definitely doesn’t mean we’re in a healthy place now. And I worry that on top of everything else, we’re growing so accustomed to our sickly lot that we’re losing sight of its direness. For all our recurrent brinkmanship, we haven’t tumbled into any abyss. So as we find ourselves on the next cliff, in the next crisis, we trust that John Boehner will snap into action at the last minute; that Democrats will eventually cave; that this, too, shall pass.

It might, because it’s just a symptom. The disease, though, doesn’t go away.
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