| A couple of days ago, I noted that the Center for Michigan spent a bunch of time and money on townhall events that might produce a credible idea of what voters and taxpayers want, but that ultimately it'll be wasted effort because the people who run the government don't particularly care for what voters, taxpayers, and the Center for Michigan has to say. They have their agenda, and they plan to enact it in whatever fashion they can, and if everyone else gets on board, it'll be a magnanimous act of bipartisanship. Along the way, I noted that perhaps the time had come for the Very Serious Persons at the Center for Michigan and perhaps the Freep's editorial page to figure out that the real reason why no one is working towards their ultimate agenda of coming together and negotiating like adults. That reason is that one of the parties is not interested in compromise and negotiation and regards bipartisanship as the other side dropping their objections and buying into their ideas, and that these ideas are in fact the opposite of those espoused by the Very Serious Persons in the first place. Today, in one of this year's great acts of self-parody, the Very Serious Persons from the Center for Michigan and the Detroit Free Press come together to discuss why no one is going to pay much attention to the Center for Michigan's townhall. DICKERSON: How is what you heard from citizens different than what we hear from the governor or state legislators? POWER: There's quite a gap between what ordinary folks talked about in these community conversations and the kind of rhetoric you here in the Lansing hothouse. It seems as though the people who are engaged in the disputing in Lansing are all representative of one interest or another; they tend to denominate things in terms of cut and thrust.
If you read the entire thing, what you get out of it is that they think that Lansing is out of touch with what normal humans want, which everyone already knows, but they don't bother to point out that what Lansing is saying right now about education is mostly what the Republicans who control the entire thing are saying. Instead, you get mealy-mouthed allusions to both sides being incapable to doing the public's business. |
