With special thanks to GatesChiliPost.com in Cayuga County:
Guest essay: Principled doesn’t mean inflexible
By Ed O’Shea
Jul 30, 2011
Wayne County, N.Y. —
A week ago I wrote my congresswoman, Ann Marie Buerkle, to ask her if there was any way, by her action or inaction, she would allow the United States of America to default on its debt.
I have not heard back from Congresswoman Buerkle, but I hear from others who have contacted her office that she is slow to respond to questions that don’t chime with her political principles or the small range of issues she is interested in.
And that’s the problem. The 25th Congressional District in recent years has been a moderate district represented by political moderates like Dan Maffei and Jim Walsh. But A.M. Buerkle was elected as a member of the Tea Party coalition last November, and she’s typical of the Tea Partiers in that she leads with her ideology but has trouble getting further than that — to the political process where not everyone thinks alike and where you have to meet constituents and other politicians halfway. In other words, compromise.
When Bill Clinton left office, we had a budget surplus of $236 billion and no federal deficit (FactCheck.org). In the next administration, we had two wars that Americans were not asked to pay for, extravagant tax cuts, especially for the wealthiest Americans (also unpaid for), and a financial crisis, the deepest since the Great Depression, caused by risky unregulated Wall Street practices and the collapse of the housing market because of greed and lack of good business practices. President George W. Bush, and then after him President Barack Obama, took bold fiscal steps to ensure that we didn’t slide into a full blown Depression.
If Congresswoman Buerkle and other members of the House freshmen class of 2011 were in office at that time of crisis, I believe we would have what we have now in the debt ceiling crisis: the hopeless gridlock and finger pointing that rightly disgust the electorate. We would be in a full-blown financial meltdown with even worse unemployment and stagnation, no domestic auto industry (credit Barack Obama for his leadership in keeping it alive), and frozen credit markets unable to make loans to small businesses and home buyers.
We admire politicians who have strong principles and who aren’t blown around by every change in wind direction. But we don’t admire politicians who are inflexible, who don’t recognize the diversity in the electorate (Ms. Buerkle won the district by only some 600 votes), and who are more than willing to “play chicken” with America’s health and future prosperity.
In other words, Ms. Buerkle is wrong for the 25th District because she hasn’t learned how to both maintain her principles and accommodate other points of view to govern effectively in a pluralist democracy.
Ed O’Shea of Marion is chairman of the Wayne County Democratic Committee.
I have not heard back from Congresswoman Buerkle, but I hear from others who have contacted her office that she is slow to respond to questions that don’t chime with her political principles or the small range of issues she is interested in.
And that’s the problem. The 25th Congressional District in recent years has been a moderate district represented by political moderates like Dan Maffei and Jim Walsh. But A.M. Buerkle was elected as a member of the Tea Party coalition last November, and she’s typical of the Tea Partiers in that she leads with her ideology but has trouble getting further than that — to the political process where not everyone thinks alike and where you have to meet constituents and other politicians halfway. In other words, compromise.
When Bill Clinton left office, we had a budget surplus of $236 billion and no federal deficit (FactCheck.org). In the next administration, we had two wars that Americans were not asked to pay for, extravagant tax cuts, especially for the wealthiest Americans (also unpaid for), and a financial crisis, the deepest since the Great Depression, caused by risky unregulated Wall Street practices and the collapse of the housing market because of greed and lack of good business practices. President George W. Bush, and then after him President Barack Obama, took bold fiscal steps to ensure that we didn’t slide into a full blown Depression.
If Congresswoman Buerkle and other members of the House freshmen class of 2011 were in office at that time of crisis, I believe we would have what we have now in the debt ceiling crisis: the hopeless gridlock and finger pointing that rightly disgust the electorate. We would be in a full-blown financial meltdown with even worse unemployment and stagnation, no domestic auto industry (credit Barack Obama for his leadership in keeping it alive), and frozen credit markets unable to make loans to small businesses and home buyers.
We admire politicians who have strong principles and who aren’t blown around by every change in wind direction. But we don’t admire politicians who are inflexible, who don’t recognize the diversity in the electorate (Ms. Buerkle won the district by only some 600 votes), and who are more than willing to “play chicken” with America’s health and future prosperity.
In other words, Ms. Buerkle is wrong for the 25th District because she hasn’t learned how to both maintain her principles and accommodate other points of view to govern effectively in a pluralist democracy.
Ed O’Shea of Marion is chairman of the Wayne County Democratic Committee.
