Like many in the District, I've become enamored with the Netflix original series, House of Cards. I was hooked in the first season and now that the second season is here I plan to episode binge like the rest of the city this weekend. Personally, my fascination with this show is comparable to that of another DC-centric drama in ABC's Scandal.
So right now I'm three episodes in and one instance really caught my attention and has induced me to write about it. That instance was a conversation where the vice president compares a congressman, and leader of a progressive faction of the House Democratic Caucus, to that of the tea party. Eventually, he's able to facetiously apologize to the congressman, most likely as an attempt to sway his opinion. Yet it didn't escape me that Vice President Underwood saw this idealistic progressive congressman and his 28 colleagues as obstacles; which is not dissimilar to how he viewed a conservative tea party senator and his allies seeking to shut down the government.
This got me to thinking about the real world. I wondered if this is the way that the White House really sees things. Past comments by President Obama talking about Occupy Wall Street and the tea party seem to make me think that this is indeed the case. While Occupy Wall Street and progressive Democrats in Congress aren't exactly the same thing, my thoughts are that they see idealists as obstacles to be overcome.
But are progressives and tea party conservatives similar in this one regard? Hardly. Time and time again tea party conservatives have adhered to a stringent orthodoxy. They have shown that they value their ideology above compromise. Indeed when many of them were first elected to Congress in 2010, they said that they were not coming to Washington to work with the existing establishment. All of this ideological zeal ultimately manifested itself in the government shutdown last year.
Meanwhile progressives in Congress have always been willing to compromise. If they hadn't done so in 2010, the Affordable Care Act would have never become a reality. Also, with the government shut down it wasn't the progressives who were the problem. Eventually however, there are times when a line in the sand will have to be drawn and you have to stick to those ideals. I suppose you have to pick your battles wisely.
