year democrats republicans
1960 731 566
1964 285 405
1968 630 672
1972 2,665 1,057
1976 3,591 2,395
1980 2,631 3,994
1984 850 1990
1988 190 2,514
1992 847 2,887
1996 1,396 3,924
2000 1,288 2,449
2004 None 1,203
Total 15,104 24,056
Debate is limited to be very brief on either side. A fifteen-minute vote becomes a three-hour vote while they persuade people, or bribe people, and there was the allegation of having offered a bribe on the floor of the House.” Unfortunately, the host cut her off before she laid out a complete list of abuses of process that Republicans had inflicted on the House Democrats.
Ms. Schakowsky, now a member of the House Democratic leadership, has not forgotten that “under the Republican House leadership, the reality was that Democrats were shut out of the process.” On November 13, 2006, she assured her constituents that it would be different under the control of the Democrats. “Nancy Pelosi has pledged not only a new direction for our country, but a new way of doing business in the Congress. The American people want us to actually get things done and work together. That is our intention and, hopefully, that of the Republican minority.”22 Democrats have since gone about the job of repairing the damage done by twelve years of ruthlessly partisan Republican rule of the House.
CNN Presented Broken Government as a Process Issue *Leading up to the November 7, 2006, midterm election, CNN broadcast a multipart series entitled “Broken Government.” On a Web site devoted to the series the network described it as an examination of “all branches of government” to explore “how much of the system may be broken beyond repair.”* These programs initially struck me as being about as blunt, and negative, as it gets in the mainstream news media.
As the series progressed, however, I realized CNN was not offering its own assessment based on independent inquiry, but rather was reporting Americans’ beliefs about the situation. The hard news of the series was the fact that overwhelming numbers of the country’s citizens acknowledged that Washington was out of order.
CNN’s growling curmudgeon-in-residence, Jack Cafferty, opened the series on October 19 by pulling no punches. “It’s my fervent hope that every single incumbent on the ballot will lose. It’s time to start over,” he declared. To justify his fervent hope Cafferty cited poll numbers:
68 percent of the nation said the country was going in the wrong direction; 64 percent opposed the war in Iraq; 61 percent disapproved of the job President Bush was doing. “And then there’s Congress,” he sneered, “a joke.” And he added, “Seventy-one percent disapprove of the job Congress is doing. The other, what is it, twenty-nine percent, they just haven’t read the paper. Our government is broken, and Congress has failed to do anything meaningful.” All this data did not necessarily mean, however, that the government was broken beyond repair.
To get more specific, Cafferty explained: “We sent crews around the country to find out what you think about all this, and here’s some of what’s on your mind.”
These “people on the street” interviews were revealing, even though they, too, were quite general. The first video clip featured a man who said that “our elected officials act like a bunch of second-graders; and that’s not even fair, second-graders have better discourse in the classroom than our representatives do.”
Next a woman questioned the usefulness of Congress “when they can’t do anything, . . . you know, bipartisanship.” Then came two more interviews with men, one saying that if the political parties were not broken, “they’re in bad shape,” and the other adding, “I don’t think [government officials are] doing a good job [because] they’re not listening to people, they have their own agenda; and they’re not working as hard as they should be.” Not one person complained about policy; rather, they all focused on various processes of government, the way it was failing to work.
Most Americans, CNN reported, have concluded that our system of government is broken. It posted two polls to support that contention.
The first—which was completely unscientific but informative— reflected an ongoing vote by people who visited CNN’s Web site. By a steady 9 to 1 ratio, respondents agreed with the statement “the political system is broken,” with almost twenty thousand people voting.
Far more devastating, CNN published a national poll conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation between October 13 and 15 that asked Americans whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement:
“Our system of government is broken and cannot be fixed.” (Emphasis added.) A startling 71 percent agreed, another 7 percent felt that, while the government was “seriously flawed,” it could be fixed.23 These numbers are alarming for several reasons. First, they are so much worse than the data regarding lack of trust in government by Americans, which were bad enough.* Second, aside from CNN’s raising the subject, and reporting its data, there has been virtually no media attention whatsoever calling attention to the fact that (or claiming that) the federal government is broken—ever.* This lack of confidence did not develop suddenly. As is often the case Americans were and are far ahead of their leaders, and instinctively understand when their national government is not functioning.
The CNN series garnered solid audiences.24 It was a gutsy effort, one that required considerable corporate fortitude by TimeWarner to broadcast, not to mention their aggressive promotion of the series, with its blunt title. Most of the negative reaction, as it happened, came from the right side of the blogosphere.25 The only comment from the mainstream news media occurred in response to the dustup that occurred when Dick Cheney’s wife took CNN to task for the series. Second Lady Lynne Cheney thought the programs biased, beginning with the title. She also claimed that CNN was “following a Democratic Party line.”
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