Nothing so offends quite like unwelcome reality.
Nothing so offends quite like unwelcome reality. It’s, therefore, unremarkable that Democratic partisans tore at their garments and pounded the table when Politico reporter Rachael Bade confronted them with it.
This unobjectionable observation about the causes of the ephemeral political crisis in Washington that everyone is presently trying to “win” provoked manic fits in those who count on social media to ratify and reinforce their fantasies.
“This is not Karoline Leavitt’s account. This is supposed to be a reporter’s,” Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden sneered. “I guess those White House tips don’t come for free. Gotta earn ’em.”
Michael Linden, a senior policy fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and onetime Office of Management and Budget official, agreed. Bade wasn’t just advancing Republican talking points; she was promulgating false talking points. “If we had insisted on a partisan [appropriations] bill, with no negotiations, that we knew Rs couldn’t support,” he wrote, “does anyone think for a second that Rachel Bade would have blamed Republicans for the ensuing shutdown?”
“Wrong,” documentary filmmaker and executive director of American Family Voices, Lauren Windsor, declared. Republicans “control all branches of government,” she wrote. “They can pass a budget if they want to.” Her previous advocacy for abolishing the 60-vote threshold preserved by the legislative filibuster suggests she was at one point familiar with the obstacles Democrats have put before the Republican majority. Maybe she just forgot.
Dozens of the other lesser-known groundlings who populate this Pit hurled similar invective in Bade’s direction. Her views exposed the closely guarded fact that “media is secretly Republican.” She was castigated for overvaluing “the chess moves” in Washington (“and by extension,” herself) rather than focusing on the grand moral arc of American politics. And there were countless internet sleuths who congratulated themselves on sniffing out Bade’s latent fascist and white supremacist sympathies. Surely, their relative anonymity and irrelevance are cold comfort to Bade, given their numbers. The response was overwhelming.
And it was delusional. Bade was, of course, covering her beat, and she was covering it not just truthfully but in ways to which Democrats on Capitol Hill did not object.
“People hate shutdowns. And I hate shutdowns,” Vermont Senator Peter Welch told Semafor reporters this week. “So why are we doing it?” he asked, “It’s because, essentially, the whole Obamacare healthcare success we have is being unraveled.”
Indeed, by refusing to vote for a “clean” continuing budget resolution that makes no changes to last year’s budget save for funding additional security for federal constitutional officers (a necessity given the heated climate, of which the reaction to Bade’s post is illustrative), Democrats invited the shutdown so they could relitigate the fight over this summer’s reconciliation bill — a fight they lost the first time. It’s a risky move, Welch admitted. “If it seems about health care,” he posited, “then this will have been worth the effort.”
How else are we to interpret the point-blank admission that “we” are “doing it” so that it “seems” like we’re demanding the extension of Obamacare subsidies? That sure sounds like Democrats don’t mind if you blame them for the shutdown. They and their partisans only mind if you blame them for the shutdown and don’t like it.
They are perfectly content to take ownership of this impasse if you approve of it. And Bade’s critics got the sense from the tone of her post, not its content, that she betrayed a troubling lack of enthusiasm for their fraught project. Whose side are you on, Rachael?
It was a revealing reaction — one that is as attributable to Democratic partisans’ belief that legacy media outlets should be team players and that muscling dissenters into silence might change how we perceive our shared reality.
Bade shouldn’t feel too bad. The bitterness she encountered is a feature of the story she’s covering. Democrats started this fight to satisfy a base that is spoiling for one regardless of the prospects for victory. The subjects of her reporting on Capitol Hill are responding to the demands of that very cohort — hallucinatory though they may be.