6 April 12, 2013 | the providence phoenix | providence.thephoenix.com
LiberaL warrior
Sheldon WhitehouSe iS attacking the obStructioniSt goP head-on. Will it Work? _by daVid S cha rf e n b erg
The Republican Party’s disastrous showing in the 2012 election has spawned all manner of blueprints for a GOP reinvention. But the party seems more interested in amendment than overhaul. It’s budging on immigration reform and moving a bit on gay marriage. Elsewhere, though, it appears as immovable as ever. That intransigence — or, if you like, resolve — raises a vital question on the other side of the aisle: faced with a GOP still hostile to the president — and to standard political negotiation — what is a liberal legislator to do? Is there any use, at this point, in trying to work with the Republican Party on the big issues? It is a particularly fraught question in the Senate, which still clings to a dying tradition of comity. But a handful of junior Democrats have surrendered any dream of the old order and acceded to the hyper partisanship of the Age of Obama. Among the most articulate and forceful of this new breed: Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. When it comes to his signature issues — climate change, campaign finance reform, tax fairness — he makes little secret of his approach: marshal the facts, hammer the Republicans, and embarrass them into action. It is, for Whitehouse’s liberal supporters, an effort of undeniable appeal: here is a Democrat going on the offensive, taking it to a GOP that so often seems the aggressor. But is it the best course? The only course? And most important: can it work?
And even in the Congressional ranks, figures like Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, whose seniority place them at or near the top of several key committees, cannot afford to antagonize GOP dealmakers with fiery rhetoric. Whitehouse is keenly aware of this reality. As a new senator with a safe seat, he knows he is uniquely positioned to be a bulldog. To sink his teeth into the public discussion and drag it to the left. The task comes with certain benefits: not least of them a rising public profile. But it’s not clear that Whitehouse will be able to claim a big, tangible success in the near term. That owes something to the issues Whitehouse has chosen to engage. He seems optimistic about joining with Republican Senator John McCain to produce a new round of campaign finance reform. But the push faces sharp opposition in the GOP. And the issue, however important, has never stirred much public passion outside activist circles. Tax fairness has some populist appeal; Whitehouse has pushed for a “Buffett Rule,” which would require the wealthy to pay at the same rate as the middle class. But taxes seem a core issues the GOP is unwilling to surrender, even as it makes accommodations on social issues like gay marriage. And the senator, himself, acknowledges that his push for major climate change legislation is going nowhere for now. He calls his public pronouncements on the issue an attempt to keep up morale on the left and “bring the day, earlier, when things change — and suddenly what was impossible is now possible.”
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EVOLUTION
Whitehouse did not present as an ideologue in his early career as a US Attorney and Attorney General. His job was law enforcement, then, not political duel. But when he ran for the Senate in 2006, partisanship was running hot in this country. Blue states like Rhode Island had come to detest the Bush Administration. And Whitehouse was able to turn that enmity against his popular, moderate opponent: Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee. A vote for Chafee, he argued, was a vote for GOP control of the Senate. In his early days in Washington, Whitehouse was involved in his share of partisan skirmishes. As a former prosecutor, Whitehouse proved a particularly useful critic of Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, who was embroiled in controversies on warrantless wiretapping and what looked like the politically motivated dismissal of several US Attorneys. But it was the election of President Obama, and the GOP’s response to that election, that launched the senator on his current trajectory. “We began to see this absolutely relentless Republican obstruction that, it became more and more clear, was actually a strategy,” Whitehouse says, a strategy that “was going to be applied to everything the president tried to do, no matter how much he tried to compromise.” The Republican Party’s single-minded pursuit, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch
GAME PLAN Whitehouse looks to marshal the facts, hammer the republicans, and embarrass them into action. McConnell would later acknowledge, was to make Obama a one-term president. Whitehouse says he and some of his Senate colleagues recognized this reality before the Oval Office did. There was a moment, he says, during the Obamacare negotiations “when a considerable number of us in the caucus, mostly newer and younger members,” came to the conclusion that bipartisan talks in the Senate Finance Committee “were essentially a sham and were designed to draw out the process so that the political attack machine on the other side could do its work.” When the discussions dragged on and on, culminating in a party-line vote on the legislation, Whitehouse says, he and the other new Democrats felt vindicated: “That was where . . . a group of us became most mobilized, saying you just can’t take some of this stuff at face value.” On the eve of the Obamacare vote, he took to the Senate floor to excoriate the president’s opponents, saying they drew support from “the birthers, the fanatics, the people running around in rightwing militia and Aryan support groups.” He made reference to mob violence — to Kristallnacht and lynchings. The speech was widely ridiculed on the
right. But when I asked Whitehouse this week if he regretted the oration or considered it prescient, he allowed only “a little bit of both.” What commentators then considered signs that the GOP had gone off the rails, he says, look pretty mild compared to the present bearing of the Tea Party wing of the GOP.
THE STRATEGY
In the face of continued Republican obstructionism, Whitehouse argues, Democrats can only succeed if they make a forceful case for their point of view and visit heavy public pressure on the GOP. It was only public pressure, he says, that forced Republican movement on the fiscal cliff, Hurricane Sandy relief, and the recently passed reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. The Democratic establishment has, in many respects, come around to this point of view. Since his re-election, President Obama has engaged in an outside-theBeltway, rally-public-opinion approach to a whole host of issues. But the president’s position still requires conciliation on issues that many liberals, including Whitehouse, consider off-limits; his new budget includes cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
END GAME
Whitehouse’s partisan broadsides, then, which can seem so loud and immediate — so of the moment — are really a longterm play, a slog. Heroic in the eyes of his liberal supporters, perhaps, but of indeterminate value. And if the Republicans do eventually come around, says analyst Jennifer Duffy of the Washington-based Cook Political Report, Whitehouse will face a crucial question: having staked out such strong positions on these core issues, is he willing to compromise? There is reason to believe he is. Rhode Island’s junior senator, for all his partyline advocacy, has found opportunities to work with Republicans on a few issues: cybersecurity, for instance, and a push to protect the oceans. And when I asked him if he’d be willing to compromise on what may be the most important issue on his plate — climate change — he said “yes.” But you’ve got to have your sticking points, he added. Carbon pollution has a real price, he said, and we’ve got to require payment. We’ve got to impose a carbon tax. That’s non-negotiable. It’s hard to see the GOP accepting that as a starting point any time soon. ^
David Scharfenberg can be reached at dscharfenberg@phx.com. Follow him on Twitter @d_scharfenberg.