The divide for 2012 - NYPOST.com By MICHAEL A. WALSH
The stakes for 2012 couldn't have been set out more clearly than two recent speeches by a pair of women who aren't making the decisions these days in Washington.
Speaking at Tufts University -- right in the midst of the negotiations over the 2011 budget -- ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi whined: "To my Republican friends: Take back your party, so that it doesn't matter so much who wins the election -- because we have shared values about the education of our children, the growth of our economy, how we defend our country, our security and civil liberties, how we respect our seniors.
"Elections shouldn't matter as much as they do."
There you have it: an authentic, unscripted window into the mind of a professional politician. For this is how the members of the permanent political class (Pelosi first went to Congress after a special election in 1987) view the messy -- to their minds -- business of politicking.
Elections shouldn't really matter -- because after all we agree on pretty much everything about the Nanny State: The federal government needs to take care of our nation's kids, micromanage all economic activity under the Commerce Clause, and tend to the elderly -- because if it doesn't, who will? All this messy, let's-pretend fighting at election time is just a distraction from the real business of snaking our tentacles into every facet of American life because, let's face it, the American people cannot be left to their own devices. They're too stupid and untrustworthy to make their own best decisions. That's what politicians are for.
As Tammany Hall Democratic leader George Washington Plunkitt, famously said: "Me and the Republicans are enemies just one day in the year -- Election Day. The rest of the time, it's live and let live with us."
Pelosi's frustration is understandable. Her party was turned out of power in the House last fall in a landslide, and she's now the minority leader. Worst of all, a grassroots group of citizens concerned about the untrammeled growth of government called the Tea Party rose up against both parties to deliver that electoral rebuke -- and to demand further changes in the post-Great Society relationship of the federal government to the citizenry.
By contrast, consider Sarah Palin's appearance in Madison, Wisc., last weekend. The former Alaska governor has been keeping a relatively low profile. But in a brief, fiery speech to supporters of Gov. Scott Walker -- delivered while being heckled and shouted at by pro-union activists -- Palin laid down some markers for the coming campaign.
She began by congratulating the people of Wisconsin for staring down the left's thuggish attempt to overturn the results of the 2010 elections, which installed Republicans in the governorship and both houses of the Legislature.
Then, taking on her own party's leadership, she lit into the Republicans over the recent budget deal. "If you stand on the platform, if you stand by your pledges, we will stand with you. We will fight with you, GOP. We have your back. We didn't elect you just to rearrange the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic . . . What we need is for you to stand up, GOP, and fight . . . fight like a girl!"
Palin also hammered President Obama and the Democrats, directly challenging their tactics of "conservatives want to kill granny" class warfare and their relentless tax-and-spend policies. "The Tea Party movement," she said, "wouldn't exist without Barack Obama."
Conventional wisdom says that Americans don't like partisan "bickering," that we want our politicians to just get along. Principled combat and loyal -- but vehement -- opposition, the thinking goes, make Main Street uncomfortable.
Baloney. Disputation is as American as apple pie. It's what made our country great -- vigorous disagreement, not cringing servility. So let the battle begin.
On one side is the business-as-usual, the bipartisan, rigged Washington poker game in which the media act as the bouncers and the rubes are the taxpayers, being fleeced as surely as the hapless mark in "The Sting." There is only one way for government to go -- up.
On the other side are the disparaged Tea Partiers -- vilified by the Washington Republicrat-media complex as unlettered and unwashed rabble from flyover country, bitter clingers with a touching belief in the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
As we head into the 2012 election, which side would you rather be on?
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