Barry Obama is trying too hard to get GOP support for his stimulus package.
The GOP aren’t voting for it anyway, & why should they? No matter what is put in the bill, GOP institutional survival depends entirely on defining themselves as different.
Barry O has it backwards. If he wants bipartisanship, he should pitch an utterly Democratic bill & not first water it down (by, say, cutting family planning funding). Let the right come to him, & have to compromise themselves to put their stamp on it. If he runs to them, they can pull further back, cost him Democratic support, & then torpedo the whole thing.
I’m watching NewsHour, & I see these career legislators parroting lines about small business that they’ve been fed. The economic conventional wisdom of those who rely on taxes & bribes their whole life is not really convincing.
This bipartisanship is undercutting the ability to pass useful law.
Your recommendation sounds like it was taken from the GWB playbook. Instead of offering the Democrats some cover on issues over which they were concerned and which did not interfere with Republican goals, Bush went ahead and pushed through the most extreme versions of his bills, held back (marginally) only by the more responsible members of his own party. If we are going to get past the last sixteen years of political polarity, he needs to demonstrate that he is willing to reason with and negotiate with the “loyal” opposition. The only way out of the idiocy of the last decade and a half is to actually attempt bipartisan efforts, disagreeing only where there is genuine disagreement and not for the sake of trying to score points for the next election or scoring a “big win,” now,
Since he had a good reputation for that sort of effort in the Illinois legislature, I suspect that he will try it, here, and I think he has a chance to succeed, (provided the GOP does not pick Blackwell or some other partisan hater to run the RNC.)
The problem there is that as far I can tell, there ISN’T any “loyal opposition” of any significance. The Republican leadership is composed of people loyal to the Republican Party, and to hell with the country. And as long as the Republicans can keep getting what they want, without ever having to compromise, that’s not going to change.
You can’t be bipartisan unless the other side is willing to meet you halfway, and the Republicans aren’t. Giving in to the other side for nothing in return isn’t being bipartisan; it’s caving in. And that constant caving in is part of what has dragged America so very far to the right; if the Democrats don’t actually push back, that’s not going to change either.
I think he should extend the olive branch and if the Republicans will meet him at slightly more than halfway, keep extending it. But if they don’t meet him halfway, then he should stop seriously offering to compromise.
In the end, the guys who just keep refusing to do anything helpful are going to look stupid. Sure, you can push stuff through without them, but specifically making them look bad is probably going to do you more good in the time ahead.
Being bipartisan doesn’t mean he has to go with things that he disagrees with, and if the deal gets torpedoed at the end when it’s something that the American people were expecting to come out, they’re not going to be happy with the guys who are playing politics instead of saving the nation.
Obama is a very smart politician, but I gotta admit I do not understand why he seems to be bending over backwards to accept every idiotic GOP proposal that they are demanding of him.
The point is that he won’t accept things that he definitely disagrees with. He’ll only accept things he mildly disagrees with, and can accept in order to get some Republican support.
It’s probably how he is maintaining his very nice 69% approval rating. People do notice that he is taking GOP opinions into account.
Let them oppose all they want. Obama is going to get whatever he wants as long as his ratings stay so high.
If the stimulus works then the GOP is completely in the crapper.
I know that after a few decades of Republicans politically pouncing on the Democrats, it is expected that the Dems will fail when they go head to head with the GOP. This just plays very nicely into Obama’s greatest skill: allowing people to underestimate him.
Checkout how he played Limbaugh into looking like a complete douche:
He’s not wrong to make the effort. And he’s especially not wrong to make the effort so publicly. Even given my disdain for the current crop of Pubbies, I am taken aback by the teeth-bared ferocity. Obama has conducted himself faultlessly, in terms of civility and generosity, and his efforts are returned with bitterness and spite.
In terms of political jiu-jitsu, that could work for him, big time. Is that it? Is he really that crafty, that smart? Is it Scripture, “a soft word turneth away wrath”? And isn’t the next line “…and verily, it maketh them look like douchebags”?
Wow, I really see it the other way. Obama is showing weakness, & doubt. He acts like a man who thinks the GOP are at least partly right, while they act like they are always right & the left always wrong.
Of course, elected politicians are largely staggering about in the dark when it comes to the effects of their actions anyway. Not all of them, but getting elected is less a matter of knowing what you’re doing & more a matter of making friends & letting them influence you.
So the false certainty of partisan conventional wisdom is reassuringly certain, where Obama’s apparent spirit of compromise is pure unknowing uncertainty by comparison.
I guess he’s trying to transcend knee-jerk partisan thinking, but that he thinks cutting family planning & throwing more tax cuts at the problem is helpful indicates to me that he’s just playing politics instead of choosing useful policy.
The ultimate effect of this approach is that everything swings toward the less compromising side.
A) he does not have unilateral support of the Democratic party. There are enough blue-dogs that he may not be able to overcome a filibuster even if he picks up a handful of the most liberal Republicans.
B) He wants political cover. If the stimulus bill passes with virtually no Republican support, and the economy is still in dumper in two years (which it well could be even if the stimulus package is working), the Republicans are going to hammer the Democrats’ ‘failed’ policies, attack them on the deficit, howl about every cost over-run or scandal that comes out of this bill (and with 860 billion worth of activity, you can be assured there will be some), and in general make life miserable for the Democrats in the mid-terms.
C) It’s good governance. The country is heading into a very rocky period, and the people will be much more willing to do the things he asks for them if he can get bipartisan support. The last thing Obama needs is a right-wing as fired up and angry as the left was against Bush. And it’s the last thing the country needs as well.
D) It’s the right thing to do. Almost 50% of the population voted against him. He has 69% approval ratings now, which are almost guaranteed to slide over time. You can’t just thumb your nose at half the country and their elected representatives. Not over things as momentous as this stimulus package and the various war decisions he’s going to have to make. Isn’t that exactly what you hated Bush for? Do principles only matter when you’re out of power?
I agree with this point in theory, but in practice will it actually give him any cover? I’m thinking of Bush’s tax increase and the '92 election. Bush violated his tax pledge as part of negotiations with Congressional Democrats, but that didn’t stop the Democrats from pounding on him about it in the next election.
I think the point of offering the olive branch now is making the Republican party a part of the stimulus package and thereby having a stake in its future. To appease the GOP Obama will have to limit the first stimulus bill, later he’ll have to come back for more, and if the Republican party signs on to it early they’ll have a good reason for wanting to further it’s success later.
If the GOP is cut out entirely from day one they’ll have good political reason to see the bill fail.
I’ve gotta say I appreciate what I see. How I hope he is proceeding is “We are in charge, but we welcome all ideas, and will accommodate those we can without sacrificing our core ideals.” Along with a dose of "Work with me on this, and I’ll work with you on something more important to you later."
That is the way I think whichever party is in power should act. Of course the minority party should not just cave on every issue. But I think there is value in them prioritizing in a way that allows them to remain a part of the process, instead of being excluded due to polar opposition.
And Obama looks nothing other than reasonable. Makes those who oppose him on strict ideological grounds look evermore less so.
The analogy doesn’t hold up because Obama isn’t violating any pledges, so they can’t blame him for that.
Think of what Bush kept saying when people accused him of starting a false war. How many times did he make a point of saying that most of the Democrats also voted for the war? That’s one of the reasons Democrats lost in 2004.