Obama’s Bipartisanship Is One Sappy Dream

Commentary by Margaret Carlson

Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) -- In his long and sometimes snarky campaign, John McCain took to ridiculing Barack Obama and his supporters for imputing messianic qualities to the upstart candidate, mockingly referring to the Democrat as “The One.”

New evidence suggests McCain was on to something. In less than a month, Obama has breathed life back into a Republican Party the whole world took for dead.

Skeptics will argue that the GOP wasn’t really deceased, only knocked unconscious by a devastating blow otherwise known as the November election. Yet even Republicans were heard to mutter about whether their party could be revived. Who knew they’d soon be given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by the miracle worker himself?

With Obama’s pilgrimages to Capitol Hill, multiple cocktail parties at the White House, dinner at conservative columnist George Will’s house, and a bipartisan Super Bowl party, not to mention inserting tax cuts in the stimulus package, the president put courting Republicans on equal footing with economic revival. Getting the party on board came to be up there with putting Americans back to work.

Republicans responded with a characteristic display of good will, quickly making it clear they’d be satisfied with nothing less than complete capitulation to their demand for ever more tax cuts for the wealthy even if the wealthy are likely to stash the cash in one of the banks hoarding their government-bailout money.

Cut food stamps? Check. Cut school construction? Check. Add more ineffective tax cuts? You got it.

Deficits Do Matter

Suddenly, spending mattered after eight years in which it was out of control, with Vice President Dick Cheney’s pronouncement that “deficits don’t matter.” President Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a surplus of more than $230 billion. Bush left Obama a deficit that’s likely to exceed $1 trillion.

Republicans couldn’t deny the president a victory but they could deny him a bipartisan one. Party strategist and CNN analyst Alex Castellanos said only “wussy Republicans” would cooperate, a remark reminiscent of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s calling Democrats who urged caution on the now near-bankrupt California economy “girlie men.”

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina shouted on the floor, “This bill stinks!” The de facto leader of the party, Rush Limbaugh, said he had only four words for the new administration. “I hope Obama fails.”

If chasing bipartisanship with Republicans wasn’t enough, Obama also sought it with the other branch of government, known as congressional Democrats.

Pelosi Takes Charge

Rather than dictate legislation from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Obama gave over the drafting of the stimulus bill to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. If ever there was an instance to trust but verify, this was it.

Did anybody flyspeck Pelosi’s first draft, the one that provided Republicans such irresistible targets as condoms. The so-called pork was trivial, but it hurt a $246 million grant to the movie industry, which provides substantial employment in Southern California, because nothing associated with Hollywood had a chance after Pelosi squandered her credibility on a $188,000 lobster-cam for the bottom of the ocean.

Obama didn’t fail, except by his own rules: He mustered only three Republican votes in the Senate and none in the House as the stimulus passed. The press, having applied Obama’s own standards, gave him lower marks than his triumph deserved. On the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the No. 2 House Republican, was profiled as the conquering hero atop the Party of Zero.

Drawing on Lincoln

Obama draws much of his fervor for bipartisanship from Abraham Lincoln. But Bill Curry, former counsel in the Clinton White House, pointed out in a recent interview on public radio, that Lincoln chose his top three Cabinet secretaries from among former opponents in his own party, not the leaders of the Confederacy or supporters of slavery.

A correct reading of the book “A Team of Rivals” yields Hillary Clinton at the State Department. Misreading it gets you the fiasco of Judd Gregg pulling out as Commerce secretary.

When the bill finally passed, the White House was so annoyed with inside-the-Beltway thinking that it went outside the Beltway to Denver for its signing ceremony.

Only the most starry-eyed idealist would mistake Congress for a Quaker meeting for very long. In an interview on Air Force One, Obama began a course correction. While still taking the “long view” and being “optimistic” about everyone getting along, Obama added,’’ “That doesn’t mean I’m a sap.”

Thumbing Their Noses

Hardly. But he’s chasing a sappy dream. Yes, we want policy-making to be civil. When possible, we want it to be consensual. Yet bipartisanship as an overriding goal allows the policies chosen by voters to be thwarted by mere obstructionists. So now, gerrymandered House Republicans with nothing to worry about but a primary from the right can thumb their nose not only at a president but at the voters who rejected them.

Obama wants the economy to revive and the Republicans to be agreeable. Perhaps he should shoot for one miracle at a time.

(Margaret Carlson, author of “Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House” and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net Sphere: Related Content