Entangled Alliances

Obama’s stimulus bill is finally law, all 787 billion dollars of it.  On Friday, the final version of the bill passed the House 246- 183 and the Senate 60-38. Once again, not a single house Republican voted for it. In the Senate, it only got three GOP votes.   It’s been a long, arduous process as Republicans did their best to try and sabotage America’s best hope of getting its economy back on track. But now the stimulus package is law and, though its not quite as big as it should have been, it’s still a great piece of legislation.

However, now the dust has settled on a bruising legislative battle it looks like there has been a casualty. Bipartisanship is dead, long live bipartisanship:

White House aides say they have concluded that Obama too frequently lost control of the debate and his own image during the stimulus battle. By this reckoning, the story became too much about failed efforts at bipartisanship and Washington deal-making, and not enough about the president’s public salesmanship.

For Obama’s next act, the program is the same as he has been planning for months: New Deal-style plans to rescue struggling homeowners and rewrite regulations on the financial markets, plus a budget proposal that lays the groundwork for sweeping health care reform.

But the strategy to promote these items is getting an emergency overhaul. Obama plans to travel more and campaign more in an effort to pressure lawmakers with public support, rather than worrying about whether he can win over Republican votes in Congress.

Obama has obviously finally noticed what the rest of us have been screaming at him : bipartisanship isn’t working. To celebrate the President’s epiphany I present to you five truisms that might have persuaded the president that bipartisanship is, well, pretty rubbish really:

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photo credit: jmtimages

Right now, Obama’s struggle with congressional Republicans feels a bit like a classic movie with the new sheriff. You know, the new friendly Sheriff comes into town, he’s polite, courteous almost to a fault, he tries to be friends, but instead all the powers regard him as a pushover.  They overreach, treat him with contempt, and carry on their old bad habits.

You see, Obama came into Washington after sweeping up the nation with a campaign of hope and a new direction, he promised bipartisanship – dined with conservative pundits, he had a cocktail party with congressional leaders from both sides, he backed this up with more meetings and urged both sides to find some common ground. In return the House Republicans delivered a stunning zero votes, zero, not one house Republican thought the necessity of the stimulus outweighed the cons.

That’s one punch to the face but hey, it might take these guys some time to get used to the new sheriff  and the House is more partisan anyway. The Senate, is the more measured and balance chamber, the wise musings of  men committed to the good of America regardless of party….

But wait, Senate Republicans  bemoan the lack of tax cuts, they want tax cuts to have close to  1:1 ratio in the stimulus.

TAX CUTS! Talk about a broken record.  Still our Sheriff labours on hoping that the Senate can get their act together, probably at this point casting a glance at Minnesota and the devoted public servant that is Norm  Coleman. Who, having no chance of winning has worked tirelessly to ensure the people of Minnesota stay as unrepresented for as long as possible (FiveThirtyEight has the latest here).  Obama labours on, surely they see the danger the US economy is in, surely they must see how a stimulus could work? Heck, even many of their own back it; even devout pork-fighter Palin (couldn’t resist) backs it.

But instead they delay and propose pointless alternatives that need to be cleared. Then, perhaps the final straw, they start pushing around his deputy, Hilda Solis, not once but twice. Nobody, but nobody should pick on the deputy. Oh, and to add insult to injury, guess who’s sniping from the sidelines?

Obama had even given some advance notice – a polite warning shot: ” I won” he noted, as they bemoaned his stimulus. He pointed out his electoral landslide, which in no small part was a vote on the economy,  a landslide that swept many of these Republican Senators states. But they didn’t listen.

Then the fightback begins.  With support from the White House, tired of the delays in Solis’ confirmation hearings, Unions and Hispanic support groups are pushing back. This is followed by the big gun, an open asault on the lunacy of the Republicans, to get the Bill passed.

The Result: This: essentially a minor victory for Republicans who not only trim down spending in areas such as education and science (both vital to the economy and jobs), but get to keep their taxes.

Hopefully our Sheriff has learnt from this experience, as Ed pointed out in an earlier post, there is no point meeting someone half way when their starting point is a terrible idea. They wanted tax cuts, Obama’s Bill actually started with tax cuts, but Republicans then sought to massively expand on the tax cuts, (claiming the whole bill was spending and framing it so by their huge presence in the media). Obama, remember, has also promised not to directly repeal the Bush super tax cuts, in light of the recession.

So despite effectively having had two rounds of tax cuts for free, receiving an electoral hammering and facing a President with exceptional popularity, Republicans defiantly watered down the parts of the stimulus which would actually stimulate the economy and demanded more tax cuts to boot.

He’s got a bloody nose for sure, Nate Silver’s excellent article underlines the cost to Obama of failing to sell his plan (his own punches were too late). But Obama shouldn’t give up on bipartisanship.  He probably got skinned in the first round, but he’s got brilliant media strategists of his own.  Next time he needs to get out early to frame the debate and give Republicans less room for manoeuvre.

photo credit: haaaley

In Mark Bailey’s post below he pointed out the net loss of Obama’s soon-to-be-confirmed pick of Republican Senator Judd Gregg as Commerce Secretary and asks the question: did Obama get played?

Well, I hope  he got played, because the alternative -that he genuinely thinks Judd Gregg is a good pick – is pretty unsavoury . But I don’t think he did.  I find it hard to believe that Obama and his advisors, when considering whether this was a sneaky chance to get a 60th seat in the Senate,  didn’t take into account the possibility that Judd Gregg would demand his replacement be a Republican and that New Hampshire governor Jon Lynch would in fact appoint a Republican to replace him (which is, as Mark points out,  now the likely outcome). Obama’s team aren’t idiots, nor are they risk takers. There must have been more going on than pure numbers politics, indeed it’s more likely that any positive in terms of an extra senate seat was thought of as merely a possible bonus.

Therefore, I think Obama’s decision was down to one of three reasons, or perhaps a combination of the three:

1) Obama wants to repair the olive branch to Republicans damaged by arguments over the Stimulus Package

2) Obama thinks that Gregg will be a moderate at Commerce and likes the idea of having plenty of moderates around

3) Obama thinks that his administration’s faith in government spending needs to be somewhat balanced out by a fiscal conservative

If any of these three reasons were really an operating factor in the decision, then this means that we are faced yet again with the same flawed bipartisanship logic that I decried in my post “Bipartisanship for Dummies: Stupid Compromise on the Stimulus Package”. As far as this situation goes, it does not make sense to support a stimulus package that has, as its main principle, faith in Government spending … and then appoint a doctrinaire fiscal conservative like Judd Gregg to Commerce.  In short, this does not bode well for those who hoped that Obama’s “post-partisanship” would actually lead to common sense progressive solutions as opposed to the same old Bipartisanship Baloney.

photo credit: megabn

Hello to whomever may be out there! As the only blog member who’s currently languishing in full-time education, I’m gonna keep my posts snippy for the time being, but I hope to provoke debate and provide links to a few interesting things from around the web.

To get us started, here’s a question to which I’d genuinely like an answer. It’s now pretty much a fait accompli that Judd Gregg, senior Republican Senator from New Hampshire (and facing a tough re-elect in 2010) is heading to Obama’s Department of Commerce. More interestingly, despite NH’s Democratic Governor, John Lynch, having the prerogative of appointment, Gregg and Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seem to have managed to ensure the appointment of a Republican Senate replacement (probably former Gregg-aide Bonnie Newman). So what’s Obama’s logic?

As far as I can read it, there are two possibilities:

1) This idea, which looks like it came from Harry Reid, is basically just an example of the Administration and Senate Democrats getting played by Republicans. Reid naïvely thought he had a path to 60 Senators, Obama latched on, and the GOP proved to be stronger than they’d imagined. If so, this is a worrying precedent. Two weeks in, the Administration loses a Cabinet post in a rookie attempt to seize fillibuster-proof control.  Good luck passing universal health-care.

2) If not an error, we’re left with the possibility that Obama is genuinely a “post-partisan”, and welcomes the presence of Gregg in his Cabinet.  Admittedly, the Commerce Department hasn’t exactly been a repository for major political muscle since Herbert Hoover moved onward and upward, and in a Democratic Administration, the balance of power traditionally shifts from Commerce to Labor, but it still seems awfully generous to welcome a third Republican to the Cabinet (joining Gates at DOD and LaHood at Transportation) with no qui pro quo.  Remember too that this was the Department that Bill Richardson, Democratic presidential candidate, Governor, and Clinton-Administration Energy Secretary and UN Ambassador, was supposed to fill.  It had hardly been ring-fenced for the Republicans during the Transition, so why the change?  The prospect of an open seat in 2010 may have helped matters, but Gregg’s re-elect numbers were already pretty anemic, and I hardly think this merits a place in the Presidential Line of Succession. Nor does a single potential vote on the stimulus package, as some have suggested.

So did Obama get played, or am I missing something?

Last Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in favour of President Obama’s Economic Stimulus Package, despite every single House Republican voting no. Yes, you heard that right – not one Republican congressman voted in favour of economic stimulus, despite Obama granting them face-time to discuss their concerns and significant concessions in the bill itself. The legislation is  now being sent to the Senate, yet in ominous news it looks like Obama hasn’t learnt his lesson, promising to reshape the bill to ensure the support of Republican senators.

This slavish devotion to the continued courting of Republicans over the stimulus package  is not just nonsensical in the wake of the House GOP effectively telling Obama to go f— himself but downright dangerous as well and yet another example of the mystifying american obsession with “bipartisanship”.  I explain why over the fold.

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