This past week saw an amazing episode of brinkmanship between the discredited Republican Congressional minority and the new president, with the outcome of the stimulus bill still in doubt.
I’ll put my money on President Obama.
He bent over backwards to please House Republicans, replacing 10-20 percent of the bill’s spending portion with business and corporate tax cuts that have little stimulus merit. It upset many progressives (myself included) to see Obama water down such a potentially good bill simply for the sake of bipartisanship.
Not only was he rewarded with exactly zero House votes; even more, right wing pundits and GOP leaders (including Senator McCain) chided the president none too subtly for not doing more to appease them.
I keep reminding myself that Obama is a master politician, and I am convinced that he has a larger plan in the works. Now that Republicans have made clear that they have no intention of negotiating in good faith, Obama and Congressional Democrats may be able to weaken the GOP provisions, add more progressive elements, and pass an improved bill.
If the GOP complains, it will be easy for Obama to say that he tried to bring them into the process and that they have no right to feel slighted. With his sky-high approval ratings, the public will likely side with him over the GOP—and when the economy ultimately turns around, Obama and the Democrats will get all the credit. This will likely happen before the 2010 midterm elections, putting the Democrats in an extremely strong position to make further gains.
But perhaps I’m giving Obama too much credit, and he was naïve enough to believe that the GOP wanted real negotiation. I doubt it. While some elements of the stimulus bill are little more than Democratic-wish list items, the GOP’s relentless emphasis on tax cuts is patently ludicrous; few economists still peddle this voodoo.
Sadly, what remains of the GOP is mostly an extremist Southern wing that is well out of the mainstream. While Republicans still control 40 percent of the votes in the Senate, the states they represent account for less than 30 percent of the population. With Rush Limbaugh seemingly calling the shots, we are witnessing the death throes of a loud and vocal minority.
And we should be happy we are.
Listening to GOP “leaders” and “thinkers” is like listening in on a parallel universe where black is white and up is down. Their ideas have been discredited, and they seem tone-deaf to the direction this country (and the world) is going. They continue to spread misogynistic nonsense (notice how many voted for the Liddy Ledbetter Fair Pay Act), have overtly racist leanings (i.e. RNC candidate chair Saltsman sending out CDs with the “Barack the Magic Negro” song), and they still cling to “culture war" crusades that are being drowned out by a collapsing economy and other truly serious issues. Americans know that it was Republican rule that landed us in the mess we are in, and that capitalism has been been brought to its knees not by “socialism” but by the GOP.
The bottom line is that bipartisanship for its own sake is a fool’s errand. The Republicans are so opposed to all that the Democrats and Obama stand for that the best strategy will be to largely ignore them. The public wants more social spending, a more progressive tax code, a more diplomatic and even-handed foreign policy; it wants science elevated to its rightful place, and it wants America to get serious about an energy policy.
Obama is the rare politician who is smart enough to have it both ways: appearing to reach out to those who disapprove of his policies, but not backing down from his core principles.
It’s up to us to make sure this is how he governs for the next eight years.
Jason Scorse