{"id":7110,"date":"2010-09-17T13:45:01","date_gmt":"2010-09-17T17:45:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=7110"},"modified":"2010-09-17T13:45:01","modified_gmt":"2010-09-17T17:45:01","slug":"david-ignatius-misses-the-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/7110\/david-ignatius-misses-the-point\/","title":{"rendered":"David Ignatius Misses the Point"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>See if you can <a href=\"http:\/\/www.realclearpolitics.com\/articles\/2010\/09\/16\/gridlock_breaker_country_first_107176.html\" target=\"_blank\">spot the missing detail<\/a> in <em>Washington Post<\/em> columnist David Ignatius\u2019s profile of former congressman Lee Hamilton (D-IN).<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Lee Hamilton remembers that when he came to Washington 45 years ago as a freshman Democrat from Indiana, he made a dumb parliamentary error that would have scuttled the bill he was advocating. The House Republican leader at the time, Gerald Ford, sent over one of his colleagues to help Hamilton fix the mistake.<\/p>\n<p>The story sounds almost unbelievable in today&#8217;s bitterly partisan climate, and Hamilton smiles and shakes his head as he tells it. Was there really a time like that, when party interests were subordinate to making the country work? And how could the America of 2010, a nation with an increasingly dysfunctional political system, ever get back to that Arcadia?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If you\u2019re wondering which bill Hamilton gaffed, you\u2019re on the right track.\u00a0 Ignatius conveniently glosses over the fact that a freshman in Congress is more likely than any other member to get a pass \u2013 or in Hamilton\u2019s case, an assist \u2013 when he botches procedure.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because a freshman member of Congress won\u2019t be within a 100 miles of steering important legislation.<\/p>\n<p>Hamilton\u2019s vignette shouldn\u2019t be the jumping off point that it is for reeling Democrats like Ignatius to pine for the days when people got the benefit of the doubt, so long as they\u2019re trying to \u201cmake the country work.\u201d\u00a0 If that\u2019s really Ignatius\u2019s position, then I look forward to his next profile of any of the U.S. Senate Tea Party candidates who are trying to \u201cmake the country work\u201d by getting the federal budget balanced and reducing taxes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>See if you can spot the missing detail in Washington Post columnist David Ignatius\u2019s profile of former congressman Lee Hamilton (D-IN). Lee Hamilton remembers that when he came to Washington 45 years ago as a freshman Democrat from Indiana, he made a dumb parliamentary error that would have scuttled the bill he was advocating. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1585,1849,1850],"class_list":["post-7110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-bipartisan","tag-david-ignatius","tag-lee-hamilton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7112,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7110\/revisions\/7112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}