The pragmatists: switch-hitting has long been a characteristic of politicians - but never a more honored one than today

National Review, Dec 22, 1997 by James Bowman

Switch-hitting has long been a characteristic of politicians --but never a more honored one than today.

Mr. Bowman is American Editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

THE great Restoration statesman the Marquess of Halifax is now usually remembered with the disparaging title of "Halifax the Trimmer." Not only was he (as we would say) "pragmatic" in his own political allegiances, but he invented The Character of a Trimmer in a pamphlet of that name in 1684. When, said his lordship, a boat was weighed down by too many people on one side or the other, "it happeneth there is a third opinion of those, who conceive it would do as well, if the boat went even without endangering the passengers." Those passengers, therefore must rely on the Trimmer to move back and forth between the two sides so as to keep an even keel. Yet in his own day, said Halifax, "the poor Trimmer hath now all the powder spent upon him alone, while the Whig is a forgotten or at least a neglected enemy; there is no danger now to the state (if some men may be believed) but from the beast called a Trimmer."

By what strange quirk of human nature, then, does it happen that in our time the Trimmer has come to be more honored than the party man? If the media consensus is to be believed, the danger to the state comes from the beast called a "Partisan" -- while the Trimmers of the Clinton Administration are all triangulating away like mad to keep the Partisans from capsizing us. As Congress recessed last month, for example, Alison Mitchell sadly announced on the front page of the New York Times the "Return of Partisanship to Capitol Hill."

As the 105th Congress ended its first session tonight, it could boast of one paramount, bipartisan achievement: the midsummer legislation to balance the budget and cut taxes. But the ill will, stalemate, and destruction of the session's closing weeks point to a return to sharp partisanship next year.

Who are the guilty men of this Partisan Congress? Interestingly, those who are blamed for bringing back hated Partisanship are those who take up contrary positions to those which the New York Times consistently identifies as the right ones. The Republicans were at fault for killing campaign-finance reform and the nominations of Bill Lann Lee to head the civil-rights division of the Justice Department and William Weld to be ambassador to Mexico, while the Democrats were guilty of opposing their President on free trade. The reader is invited to share in the writers' longing for an ideal world in which everyone would be as far-sighted as the New York Times.

Meanwhile, in the Washington Post, Dan Balz was singing the praises of current British political discourse, to which the new Conservative leader, William Hague, had made a remarkable contribution by admitting that his party had suffered its worst defeat in over ninety years because it "was regarded as out of touch and irrelevant." Balz does not reflect that Hague could hardly have acknowledged less and might have acknowledged a lot more; that "was regarded" was a typical politician's use of the passive voice in order to avoid assigning responsibility. No matter, it was enough to send Balz off into raptures:

What if the Republicans, after 1996, had acknowledged that, in their haste to undo the Great Society, they had alarmed many of the voters who had put them into power? What if they had really owned up to the fact that the hard edges of their conservatism in the 104th Congress had triggered a public backlash that hung like a dead weight upon Dole's campaign?

And what if neither of these things is true? Balz never considers this possibility because for him, and for the journalistic Trimmers whose ever-growing numbers he would join, it is true ex hypothesi: all moral failing and most electoral unsuccess must be the results of deviations from the Golden Mean, that tolerant, secular, "compassionate," Great Society Lite habit of mind that the journalistic consensus has made its own.

The irony is that Balz is right in claiming that "neither party in America works very well these days." But much of the reason for this state of affairs is that both parties are terrified to go beyond that same journalistic consensus, lest they be identified as "extremists" or unduly "hard edged." We all are Trimmers now.

What was it that turned the Trimmer from a reviled turncoat into the "pragmatic," "non-ideological" hero of our time -- the Colin Powell or the Bill Bradley to whom so many in the press look to usher in a new, "non-partisan" political era? Perhaps the sea of cant on which our politics has been floating since Vietnam and Watergate is just unusually stormy and requires a lot of trimming. But if so, the job of the Trimmer is an easy one so long as he continues to occupy his usual place of journalistic safety. What could be easier than to stand to one side and tweak the party men with one's own disinterested avoidance of party conflict? What could be nicer than to gain a reputation for high-minded principle by promoting such issues as campaign-finance reform, gun control, punishment for tobacco companies, and stepped-up production of racial pieties?