Changes in Washington are not for the better

Washington has changed in the last few years, our national politics has, and not for the better. We got a full-blown demonstration last month with the debt ceiling/debt reduction fight.There are at least three ways our politics have changed.1. Republicans. Republicans used to be the party of restraint: Slow down; think again; reconsider. They played a constructive role. After the New Deal and the Fair Deal, we had the genuinely conservative presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, which slowed the growth of government and was in some ways more skeptical of foreign entanglements than the presidencies of Truman or Kennedy.The GOP is no longer the party of restraint but of stop, block and knock down.We have gone from Bob Taft, who advocated national health insurance, and Ike, who won a world war and built the federal highway system, to wreckers like Rand Paul and Eric Cantor.There are still a few Eisenhower and Taft Republicans around, but their voices have been muted. They have been driven into the hills.The debt deal, which is only a beginning and far from perfect but is amazingly better than the ugly process that produced it, was passed by moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats, but it was shaped by Tea Party Republicans. They then voted against the legislation that they helped produce. That’s how fundamentally uninterested they are in government and legislating.Barry Goldwater was a legislator. The Tea Party Republicans are not Goldwater Republicans but nihilists, pure and simple — wreckers who don’t know how to build and have no interest in building.If you doubt they have taken over the national party, consider that Mitt Romney came out against the debt deal. His alternative to default? Zip. His own alternative debt reduction plan? Nada.The Republicans are not what they once were. And we have lost something important.2. The press. The national press has also changed. Indeed, it is no longer called the press, or “the working press,” as it sometimes was, but the media.The press informed.Sometimes it educated.The media distracts and entertains with reality TV news.TV journalism is a joke — a combination of gossip and shout-fest. There is no Edward R. Murrow, no Eric Sevareid. No one even a little like them. Just Keith Olberman yelling. And Bill O’Reilly yelling louder.Instead of the sober, rational and calm Huntley and Brinkley, we have Wolf Blitzer in a perpetual whirl of hyperventilation.We have traded Walter Lippmann’s thought for Maureen Dowd’s archness.National commentary is mostly about style and impressions today. The pursuit is not of insight but a clever putdown — a one-liner that will be repeated at cocktail parties.Ask yourself: Do I ever learn anything from Dowd or Peggy Noonan? Is there ever a new fact or a fresh line of reasoning presented?Instead, we have an ongoing review of a high school dance. Frank Rich was a theater critic and that is how he writes about Washington — as a reviewer reacting to performance, not as an analyst struggling for understanding.There are exceptions: The Financial Times is a great newspaper, and Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times is an honest journalist who both teaches and seeks. Jay Newton Small at Time actually understands Congress and attempts heroically to cover it. Ezra Klein at the Washington Post digs deep into budgets and fiscal policy.But our journalism is being overcome by gossip and prejudice.3. Respect. There is less and less respect in our politics, as in our society, and that is a devastating change.Students commonly curse their teachers, and on the floor of the House of Representatives, as well as on op-ed pages, it is acceptable to deride the president of the United States.Washington was once a place of giant ghosts, and, occasionally, giant men. Those men had deep reverence for the buildings, monuments, heritage and folkways that preceded and would outlast them in that city. They respected the office, if not the man. They respected each other.One doubts that Lyndon B. Johnson would have refused to take a phone call from President Eisenhower.Everett Dirksen (who helped LBJ pass the great civil rights legislation) and Jerry Ford led the Republican opposition to John Kennedy and Johnson, but they never attacked either man personally.Mike Mansfield, William Fulbright and Sam Ervin referred to Richard Nixon, whose politics they loathed, as “the president,” and addressed him as “Mr. President.”We used to have respect for institutions in this country. We knew they were not perfect. But today, everything gets a pie in the face, cynicism and a dollop of barstool opinion based on nothing.What makes people feel bad about what we have seen in the in Washington is not the debt deal, but what accompanied it — the gossip, meanness, and disrespect.“Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out,” says the emperor Claudius, in one of Robert Graves’ novels.We have let the poisons hatch out.Now what? Keith C. Burris is editorial page editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.