Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Ugliness only makes politicians look smaller


By PAT MURPHY
Express Staff Writer

My memory of nearly two decades of newspapering in Arizona is that Republicans and Democrats governed with cordiality and civility, even when discord arose over inevitable differences. An example makes the point: One of the Republican Party's staunch, veteran conservatives, state Sen. Stan Turley, said he thought Gov. Bruce Babbitt, a liberal Democrat, was the best chief executive in Arizona's history.

That amity has vanished in Arizona and across the political map in toxic fumes of spite.

To what end?

Does nasty, snarling combat produce better government? No.

Does smearing political opposites serve any American's interest? Of course not.

What results when a party (GOP) announces in advance of the health care debate that it opposes everything proposed by Democrats? Chaos.

Bottom-dwelling methods only make practitioners of ugliness look smaller, meaner and intellectually stunted.

Republicans created and perfected the low language of political attack in their Southern Strategy during the Nixon era. But Democrats can be just as hurtful.

Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, a practicing Oklahoma physician who's forgotten the meaning of the healing arts, struck a menacing chord on the Senate floor by suggesting Americans "pray" that one of his colleagues would be a no-show for the health care reform bill so it would fail—clearly meaning that he hoped wheelchair-bound, sickly Sen. Robert Byrd, 92, would either die or be too ill to vote.

Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson, of Florida, was as bad. On the House floor, he insisted Republican health care strategy was hoping for Americans "to die."

In addition to lies he told in office, what could Americans possibly think of Vice President Cheney's locker-room vulgarity, telling Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor to "go f--- yourself"?

Rather than aspiring to the lofty role of Republican elder statesmen after running for president, Sen. John McCain has returned to mouthy old ways. He compared Democratic health care reform to Bernie Madoff's swindle.

Critics have piled on President Obama for lacking passion and being too above the fray. What they mean is he refused to abandon his elegant, polished prose for lurid similes and vulgar lingo.

Defenders of ugliness resort to a tiresome shibboleth—that name-calling politics were uglier in the 1800s. Please. Shouldn't a nation show some improvement in its public behavior in nearly 200 years?

Like so much of this era's repugnant public conduct, politicians engage in a rush to the bottom, stampeded like cattle by advisors who believe wrongly that anger and slander are winning tactics.

Not for the national reputation and character, one devoutly hopes.




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