Istoria tinde să se repete
La nici un an de la victoria Democraţilor şi a lui Barack Obama în alegerile din S.U.A., partidul de la putere şi Preşedintele ales se chinuie să adopte un pachet de legi privind serviciile şi asigurările medicale. Senatul S.U.A. se pregăteşte să plece în vacanţa de vară fără să fi închiat negocierile cu privire la aceste legi. Teoretic, Partidul Democrat nu ar trebui să aibă nici o problemă în a adopta respectivul pachet de legi, având în vedere că deţine majoritatea atât în Senat, cât şi în Congress. Practic, o parte din Democraţi şi-au dat mâna cu Republicanii pentru a modifica anumite prevederi ale respectivelor legi. Este aceasta o situaţie nouă? Nici pe departe.
Conform lui Walter Karp, există două precedente:
When the 1936 elections were over, Franklin Roosevelt and his Administration stood at a unique pinnacle of power and promise. The President's victory was so great it overrode all sectional distinctions; in only two of the forty-eight states did he fail to win a plurality of the vote. Moreover, his victory was not a merely personal one. The voters that year sent 331 Democrats to the House of Representatives and 76 Democrats to the Senate, reducing the Republican contingent in the new Congress to an impotent rump. That reform of a broad and democratic kind would soon be forthcoming few people had cause to doubt. Although Roosevelt had offered no detailed program during the course of his campaign, he had expressed Populist sentiments which Americans had not heard in high places in many long years.
What happened shortly after the 1936 elections is well known. The apparently invincible President suddenly found himself blocked at every turn. An overwhelming Democratic majority, seemingly eager to follow his lead, split into warring factions; a coalition of Southern Bourbons and obstructionist Republicans, although numbering together no more than some 130 members, swiftly seized the legislative helm and blocked virtually all further reform. At the very height of its power and prestige, the New Deal came to a dead stop in one of the most remarkable reversals in American history.
Twenty-eight years later, another Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson, won a landslide election victory and found himself with yet another Congress dominated by lopsided Democratic majorities; 295 Democrats in the House, 68 Democrats in the Senate. He, too, had promised broad and sweeping reforms, among them no less a goal than a "war to end poverty" as well as a turning away from distracting foreign entanglements: he would not commit "American boys to fighting a war that I think ought to be fought by the boys of Asia to help protect their own land." Behind the President's evident wish to take care of the "unfinished business of the nation" lay, in fact, a great deal of unfinished business. Since the end of the New Deal in 1937 there had scarcely been a single major reform enacted in twenty-eight years-one-sixth the entire history of this Republic. During that period the Southern Bourbon-Republican coalition, which had arisen phoenix-like in 1937, had dominated Congress. It had frustrated Truman and Kennedy with apparent ease. It had subjected the Eisenhower Administration to the most muted criticism. It had given its full approval to just two major public policies since l938-national defense and a forward foreign policy.
What happened? A few months after the election, Johnson's "Great Society" was deep in an Asian war; after a brief spate of trumpery legislation-the "poverty program," for example-Congress became balky and unmanageable. In 1966, Johnson's great legislative majorities were reduced and the Great Society was dead, the victim of the Vietnam War. Another reform President, another landslide election, another landslide Congress, another stunning reversal.
Atât Franklin D. Roosevelt, cât şi Lyndon B. Johnson au jucat acelaşi rol: preşedinţi aduşi la putere împreună cu partidul din care fac parte pe baza unei platforme reformiste care, odată ajunşi la putere, au devenit, brusc, incapabili să pună în practică reformele promise. Se poate spune că politicienii din S.U.A. au multă experienţă în lucrul cu reforma.