This Country is Governable

I look forward to Fridays.  Gateway to the weekends ? No. 

But on Friday morning each week, I get to sit down with a cup of hot tea and read Charles Krauthammer’s weekly column.  Charles writes for the Washington Post and is syndicated to more than 200 media outlets each week.  I get him on Townhall.com.

There is a tendency for liberals to dismiss Charles as a conservative commentator but I think that is an unfair oversimplification.  Remember that in 1980 he was a speech writer for Democrat Vice-President Walter Mondale.  I prefer to think that Charles is driven by events of the day – not ideology. 

In this week’s column, after a review of some useful history, Charles tackles the performance of the President’s first year – and the media coverage of it.  I will quote the history – but direct you to the full column for the rest.  <link here>  It is beyond me how the liberal media can feel that the overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate are not enough to pass the President’s programs.  As Charles states in his column, the problem is not one of structure but leadership.  Ah ! Now we are getting to it…

 “In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president's own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.

Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.

The tyranny of entitlements? Reagan collaborated with Tip O'Neill, the legendary Democratic House speaker, to establish the Alan Greenspan commission that kept Social Security solvent for a quarter-century.

A corrupted system of taxation? Reagan worked with liberal Democrat Bill Bradley to craft a legislative miracle: tax reform that eliminated dozens of loopholes and slashed rates across the board -- and fueled two decades of economic growth.

Later, a highly skilled Democratic president, Bill Clinton, successfully tackled another supposedly intractable problem: the culture of intergenerational dependency. He collaborated with another House speaker, Newt Gingrich, to produce the single most successful social reform of our time, the abolition of welfare as an entitlement.

It turned out that the country's problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn't. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills and an ideological compass in tune with the public, the country was indeed governable…”

My source: http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2010/02/19/ungovernable__nonsense?page=full