Paul Krugman makes a convincing point about partisanship and why the folks who say “it’s the person, not the party” — at least at the national level; on the local level this plays out differently — are at best naive. He criticizes the Sierra Club for endorsing Lincoln Chafee for re-election to the U.S. Senate from Rhode Island.
The Sierra Club, rightly, points out that Sen. Chafee has been a reliable pro-environment vote.
The Sierra Club’s executive director defended the Chafee endorsement by saying, “We choose people, not parties.” And it’s true that Mr. Chafee has usually voted with environmental groups.
But while this principle might once have made sense, it’s just naïve today. Given both the radicalism of the majority party’s leadership and the ruthlessness with which it exercises its control of the Senate, Mr. Chafee’s personal environmentalism is nearly irrelevant when it comes to actual policy outcomes; the only thing that really matters for the issues the Sierra Club cares about is the “R” after his name.
Put it this way: If the Democrats gain only five rather than six Senate seats this November, Senator James Inhofe, who says that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” will remain in his current position as chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. And if that happens, the Sierra Club may well bear some of the responsibility.
We live, Mr. Krugman says, in “an age of one-letter politics, in which a politician’s partisan affiliation is almost always far more important than his or her personal beliefs.”
And those who refuse to recognize this reality end up being useful idiots for those, like President Bush, who have been consistently ruthless in their partisanship.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 