Back Off, Olbermann

Liberals like Keith Olbermann and Paul Krugman are screaming and spinning about President Obama's tax compromise with the Republicans. They forget that compromise is fundamental to American politics.

We owe our existence to it. Many of the men who signed the U.S. Constitution had mixed feeling about it. Why? Compromise.

I’m reading Pauline Maier’s Ratification, about the, well, the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Sixteen of fifty-five participants in the Constitutional Convention did not put their names on the Constitution. Of these, many rejected some of the compromises that were needed to break the Convention’s gridlock. Some felt that safeguards were missing from the Constitution. Some of these men became powerful anti-ratification forces. They did their best to bring down the Constitution that probably saved our republic.

These opponents of the Constitution wanted to allow state ratification conventions to propose changes to the Constitution. They hoped in those state conventions to re-fight the battles they had lost at the Constitutional Convention.

Their idea to allow the state conventions to propose changes sounds reasonable. But here is the problem. The Constitution was a carefully-calibrated compromise among the interests of the various states. This compromise was possible because each delegation to the 1787 Constitutional Convention was free from instructions from their states. Their hands weren’t tied. They had the ability to compromise.

But at the state ratifying conventions, each state would amend the Constitution to suit their interests. So each state ratifying convention would propose different amendments than other state ratifying conventions would. The plan was that a second constitutional convention would iron out these differences. But the state delegations to the second constitutional convention would go with state-dictated instructions. These instructions would have destroyed the delegations’ ability to compromise.

The proposed second convention almost certainly would have ended in failure. And it wouldn’t have improved the product of the first convention.

The U.S. Constitution became the law of the land because the states accepted what was to them an imperfect federal government. Our nation survived because the states were willing to give a straight up-or-down vote on what they believed was a flawed document. The world was forever changed because the states accepted what was good, and did not hold out for what was perfect.

And that’s Obama’s take on legislation. He lives the old adage: You know a good deal because each side walks away a little bit unhappy.

But well-known liberal pundits are very unhappy to be a little bit unhappy. They expect Obama to beat the Republicans bloody in every contest. To them, legislation isn’t log rolling. It’s a Rambo movie. They would rather go down in defeat than compromise. Maybe they really do expect an action-adventure plot to unfold in Congress: the hero gets beat up by the bad guys at the beginning of the movie, and he beats up the bad guys at the end.

But this is not Commando. This is Congress. And Obama is operating in the American tradition. It isn’t flash-and-bang stuff. It’s the prose of politics.

So back off, Olbermann. Take a deep breath, Krugman. Obama is doing what he’s supposed to do.

Obama's problem: he was elected to be the cool friend; but he's governing as the responsible adult.