Getting serious

The merit of partisanship is that it provides a framework in which thoughtful people of widely divergent opinions can argue over policy and the best course for the country.

The great problem with partisanship, however, is that it sometimes merely reflects intertribal hostility rather than real disagreement, and thus becomes nothing more than posturing to deflect blame — lawmakers saying they believe X or Y merely to make their opponents look bad.

Sadly, there is every chance that in discussing the financial crisis and in identifying its causes and solutions, lawmakers will hide behind a simulacrum of principled disagreement to avoid blame and electoral punishment.

This would be disgraceful and, as the markets signaled again Monday with a meltdown to below 10,000 for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, it could have highly damaging long-term effects. Financial markets disliked Europe’s failure to agree to a coordinated response. But the sell-off was also due to lingering doubt that congressional lawmakers had any sustained ability to respond effectively, last Friday’s bailout passage notwithstanding.

It is tough, 30 days before a climactic election, to ask politicians to opt for government rather than campaign politics. But those who fail to do so will have a lot of red ink on their hands. It must be hoped that oversight hearings before Rep. Henry Waxman’s (D-Calif.) Oversight and Government Reform Committee will not prove merely an exercise in pre-Nov. 4 point-scoring.

Instead, we would like more statesmanship of the sort contained in the following recent words of Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.). His statement is worth quoting in full.

He said: “Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues, I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I defended their efforts to encourage affordable homeownership, when in retrospect I should have heeded the concerns raised by their regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit that when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong. By the way, I wish my Republican colleagues would admit that they missed the early warning signs that Wall Street deregulation was overheating the securities market and promoting dangerously lax lending practices. When it comes to the debacle in our capital markets, there is much blame to go around for both sides.”

Blame is important because it emerges when investigators — congressional or otherwise — arrive at a problem’s actual cause. Blame is properly a byproduct of serious scrutiny and intelligent findings.

When it is not, when it is merely public opinion whipped up because one side was better at spin than the other, it is grotesque and a deadly charade.