Let’s bring back political civility

Published 9:22 pm Monday, October 28, 2013

By Staff Reports

 

We’re at the end of a long and exceptionally bloody political battle — now, perhaps, both sides have winded themselves enough that they’re ready to cool the rhetoric and bring more civility to the public square.

Both sides went too far in the debates over the Affordable Care Act, the budget and the debt ceiling — three separate issues, but they tended to all meld into a single messy issue in recent weeks.

The most reprehensible rhetoric came from the left, which took to comparing the amorphous Tea Party to the Ku Klux Klan. One congressman sent out a campaign email with the “T” of the Tea Party represented by a burning cross.

“Yet liberals from the president on down, including the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus, have said nothing about the use by Rep. Alan Grayson of that imagery to slander the Tea Party,” notes an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily. “They contend that the Tea Party is a racist organization, forgetting its opposition to all forms of big government, and focusing instead on its being formed in response to the signature legislation of the first black president — Obamacare.”

This went too far, but so did much of the rhetoric about the Republican Party itself. Words that President Barack Obama has long denounced — imagery of guns and violence and terrorism — were repeatedly used by the president to describe the GOP’s strategy.



Obama said he wouldn’t negotiate with Republicans while they held “a gun to the head of the American people.”

When called out for this crass incivility, White House spokesman Jay Carney employed the schoolyard defense of “he started it.”

“Numerous Republicans have used the hostage analogy,” he said. “Numerous Republican commentators have used the gun-to-the-head analogy. I hardly think this is unique.”

It may not be unique, but neither is it excusable — from either side.

Republicans were also uncivil in the days leading up to and during the government shutdown. There were the usual questions about Obama’s motives and goals (when we should really be discussing policies). And this time around, there was plenty of inter-party incivility too, as Sen. Ted Cruz and his allies battled House Speaker John Boehner and his.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, however, should be commended for backing down from his own comments in a rare and welcomed apology.

Reid said from his podium, “I’ll work harder and I hope my senators will work to their best to maintain these habits of civility and decorum.”

One instance of incivility probably didn’t happen, though. Sen. Dick Durbin claims that one GOP leader said to the president during tense negotiations, “I cannot even stand to look at you.”

The only problem is that Durbin wasn’t at that meeting, and people who were at the meeting — including White House staff — deny any such thing was said.

Politico’s Todd Purdom, however, can’t let a good story go, just because facts get in the way. He says if it’s not true, it could be true.

Perhaps he’s right. And that’s all the more reason for both sides to be more civil.