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:

1) There’s no point in being bipartisan if the other side won’t play ball. Obama made sure Republicans were part of stimulus discussions.  He made sure controversial family planning provisions were axed from the first draft. Hell, right from the start the stimulus already had over $200 billion of the two words Republicans love most: tax cuts. How did that work for him? House: zero Republican votes. Twice! Senate: Three Republican votes. Fact is, the party of Reagan and Bush don’t do bipartisanship. They’d rather become the party of Taliban-esque insurrectionists. You have to read it to believe it…

2) You can’t have bipartisanship if the other party’s stupid. The lesson here is that unless you want your bipartisanship to be merely of the symbolic variety, then only offer to take on board your opponent’s ideas if your opponents actually have an ideas worth using.  However, the only idea Republicans had, apart from doing nothing, was the laughably destructive proposal by Senator Jim DeMint, which received near universal support from the GOP. Essentially, his plan was to just pass two trillion dollars of tax cuts. Incredible as it may sound, that was the best they could come up with.

3) Trying to be bipartisan ruins your strategy. If Obama had brought to the table a trillion dollar first draft of the bill, then when the inevitable compromises came it probably would still have ended up around $900 billion. Instead, so as to not to compromise the dialogue with Republicans, he kept it in the $800 billion region.  Therefore the final stimulus bill, though still a great piece of legislation, is arguably nowhere near big enough to turn the economy round for definite.

4) No-one thanks you for being bipartisan. Republican response to Obama’s bipartisan offerings was to… accuse Democrats of not being bipartisan. The media’s reaction to Republican refusal to play ball was to… blame Obama for the failure of Bipartisanship. Frankly, it just ain’t worth the effort.

5) Bipartisanship hurts the country. With the U.S. in dire need of a good economic recovery package, the Senate negotiations over the stimulus bill were essentially put into the hands of a few moderate Republican senators who, in a bizarre ode to meaningless symbolism , went through it randomly cutting the funding of  socially just provisions that also created jobs (their targets included such evil ideas as money for building schools). Some of the damage was repaired by Democrats before the final bill was passed, but the lesson here is clear: give Republicans any power, and they will try and find a way to harm America.

Bipartisanship won’t be dead for ever. At some point it will return, zombie-like, to munch on the brains of otherwise sane politicians. But, for now, let’s celebrate not just the passing into law of a great, socially just and economically sensible stimulus package, but also the President’s determination to no longer waste his time with bad-faith Republicans. Now, Barack, you can really make a difference…

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?

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.

Whether Wednesday’s unanimous “hell no” vote by House Republicans was carefully orchestrated or just coincidental, their reaction to it was unambiguous and unequivocal. They’ve spent the last few days beating their chests, playing ‘eye of the tiger’ and generally acting like this is the start of some glorious insurrection:

NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) repeated the request during his own briefing for members Friday – telling Republicans that they need to get over the idea that they’re participating in legislation and ought to start thinking of themselves as “an insurgency” instead.

With stuff like that it’s painfully obvious that no matter how hard Obama tries to compromise with them they simply aren’t interested in coming together with Democrats to make good legislation – they’d rather simply be the party of “no”.  Republicans, as ever, are proving themsleves to be the ultimate bad-faith bargainers. So why, in the face of such rebukes by the Republicans in the House, is Obama now offering concessions to Republicans in the Senate?

Maybe it’s a move to get votes. Whereas democrats have safe-ish majorities in the house, in the Senate they are, at the moment at least, at 58 seats – two short of the 60 seats required for a filibuster-proof majority. Therefore at least two Republican senators need to go along with the stimulus to get to that all-important 60.   Nonetheless, this isn’t a satisfactory explanation. True, a couple of Republican votes are needed. But with or without significant alterations to the stimulus, there are already a handful of moderate Republican senators – with a history of occasionally siding with the Democrats – who will vote with them a lot more over the next two years for the simple reason that they face re-election in 2010 in what are now strongly Democrat-leaning states. Arlen Specter, facing a tough re-election in Pennsylvania, and Judd Gregg from New Hampshire are two such possibilities, as is Olympia Snowe from Maine.  Maine’s other senator Susan Collins was re-elected last November but, being a New England Senator, is likely to vote yes anyway. But even if the count is close, are we really expected to believe that Obama can’t dip into his considerable political capital to sway a vote or two without gutting the legislation itself?

What about political reasons – that is, getting enough republican support so that the fortunes of the Republicans as well as the Democrats are tied to the sucess of the stimulus? Clearly, this is only helpful if the stimulus fails – in that scenario Obama can point to Republican support to alleviate the blame. But if this is what’s going on – and we surely still have faith enough in Obama to believe that it’s not – then there is something tragically ironic about the  possibility of the stimulus being altered in such a way as to make it less likely to succeed… to cater for the possibility of the stimulus not succeeding. My head hurts!

Perhaps then, this is simply a genuine, tenacious example of Obama’s commitment to bipartisanship; of people from both parties bringing something to the table and thus improving the bill on the table. If so, he needs to think again. Bipartisanship is not an inherently wondrous thing, though you wouldn’t know it from the tremulous, hallowed tones with which some centrist-minded commentators in America talk of it.   Bipartisanship only works if both parties have something good to offer.  As Markos Moultisas put it over on Daily Kos recently:

So if you’ve got two parties that fundamentally disagree on how to solve our nation’s problems (including one that created said problems), it’s not better to take the good ideas, take the bad ideas, and somehow “meet in the center”. That doesn’t make the “good” ideas any better. In fact, it makes them worse. …

Bottom line, there is nothing inherently good about “bipartisanship”. The only thing that matters is whether a solution is good or not. Consider that two of Bush’s biggest disasters — his tax cuts and Iraq — were “bipartisan” affairs. Getting votes from the opposite party doesn’t make the underlying legislation any more likely to succeed. If anything, our nation would’ve been better served with more partisanship during those times.

The dangers of bipartisan wrangling are particularly evident with regards to the stimulus package. If the Democrats believe that their stimulus is the right remedy for the economic problems, then isn’t compromising the legislation for the sake of bipartisanship risking the very recovery of the economy it’s designed to ensure?  Efforts to bury this rather glaring reality have resulted in some demented logic. Some democrats have declared that some spending, though worthy, should be saved to later in the year. As Chris Bowers has noted on Open Left, thinking that you’ll save money if you postpone a proposal to another, later bill, is like saying that 2+2 is less than 4.

Even the president himself is at it. On Sunday’s NBC interview, Obama said that he would push for lawmakers to remove provisions from the bill “that are not relevant to putting people back to work right now.” Why? If we want to do it at some point, why not do it in the stimulus? Also, what does “now” mean?  True, some provisions of the stimulus – such as those to do with education and healthcare – don’t all directly benefit the economy in the same way that the package’s infrastructure spending and tax cuts do,  but they nevertheless indirectly benefit it by ensuring that all aspects of our lives are improved, thus making us all the more able to get jobs and hold on to them. The effects of these may not be felt straight away – or, more pertinently, by the time of the 2010 midterms – but they are all part and parcel of a long term recovery.

The crux of the matter is this:  If Obama and Senate Democrats allow the stimulus package – a package that has already been correctly criticised for not being big enough to address the problem – to be stripped of  further valuable provisions, then this will bode ill not only for the American economy-  the recovery of which rests on the passing of a good stimulus -  but for Obama himself, who might find if he is not careful an unfortunate pattern emerging: kowtowing to the Republican minority on major legislation for no political or substantive gain.  As a strategy, it ain’t all that.

So let’s abandon this mythical, “virtuous” bipartisanship and be done with it. This is the time for simple partisanship – red in tooth and claw.  Over the next few days of Senate activity someone might want to remind Obama that it is he, and not the bad-faith Republicans, that won power on that glorious night last november.