By Tan Copsey
So anyone with even a passing familiarity with either youtube Comedy Central, or less relevantly US television news, will likely have seen the clip of Bill Clinton getting ever so slightly peeved at a Fox news presenter Chris Wallace (he of the ‘Smirk’). Those watching may have been blinded into thinking this represented just another bout of partisan combat between Democrats and Republicans (yes Fox news is here taken as a representative of the Republican Party). The trouble is they would have been right.
Bill Clinton has spoken at length, in the period since he left office, about the necessity of rebuilding US political discourse by concentrating on the many areas of agreement between the two major parties. So much so that he has received significant criticism from the left-wing blogosphere for ignoring the necessities of yet another closely contested campaign season. Instead he invited Laura Bush of all people to address his global initiative just last week. This was a line he seemed keen to stick to at the start of the Fox interview. In fact one might note that the very decision to appear on the network represented something of a bi-partisan gesture. However, somewhat predictably, things went awry. Clinton found himself accusing Wallace of ‘a nice little conservative hit-job’. Where previously he had shied away from directly criticising many aspects of Bush foreign policy, he launched a full blooded attack on some of its more obvious failings.
Now leaving aside questions of whether this attack was deserved (and in all honesty it is hard to argue with most of what Clinton said), one cannot help but wonder quite how much US political discourse has degenerated that the few true attempts at useful bi-partisanship (and the Clinton initiative must be seen that way given amongst other things its focus on climate change are so utterly squashed.
This is not to unnecessarily trumpet centrism, or to laud Lieberman-lite style politics, where allegiance with the opposing party is taken as virtue. Rather it is a reflection that something has been lost. In these circumstances argumentative rationality cannot prevail in debate, and as a result policy can only suffer.
