Obama vs GOP Government-in-Exile

Before a new blizzard brought Washington to a standstill, Barack Obama made another effort to dig out of the Republican snow job and verbal high winds that have disabled his efforts to govern.

After a two-hour meeting to clear the path for legislation, the President told White House reporters, "I won't hesitate to embrace a good idea from my friends in the minority party, but I also won't hesitate to condemn what I consider to be obstinacy that's rooted not in substantive disagreements but in political expedience."

"Expedience" is a polite word for what the GOP has been pursuing for the past year, voting uniformly against every Obama initiative from the stimulus to health care. In effect, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have chosen not to practice traditional politics but act like a government-in-exile, retreating to the sidelines and sniping until they can return to power.

At yesterday's meeting, the President's patience worn thin, and he accused Boehner of just wanting to kill all his initiatives, setting off what was reportedly a "testy exchange."

Even after conceding that the Obama White House has made many mistakes in strategy and tactics over a year of unprecedented challenges, it's remarkable that GOP opposition has been so total and unyielding.

Where are the yes votes of "moderate" Republicans--Lugar, Voinovich, Snowe, Collins or the "maverick" McCain--on any single issue? Such a solid bloc of "no" precludes any conclusion that philosophical or ideological differences are involved. The GOP is in a full tantrum, holding its breath and refusing to budge until it can get its way next November.

The President tried to lighten the atmosphere by starting his press conference with the observation, "I understand that McConnell and Reid are out doing snow angels on the South Lawn together."

If they were, Boehner, Eric Cantor and his crew were nearby with shovels, trying to bury the Senator Leader under piles of something other than snow.

Health Care as a Pyrrhic Victory

There is a rueful note in today's New York Times report of impending White House triumph in "a process that has at times seemed on the brink of anarchy":

"After months of plodding work by five Congressional committees and weeks of back-room bargaining by Democratic leaders, President Obama’s arms-length strategy on health care appears to be paying dividends, with the House and the Senate poised to take up legislation to insure nearly all Americans."

One criticism of all this chaos can be easily dismissed--that, as Matthew Yglesias shows, "Obama needs to be nicer to Republicans." Lack of bipartisanship on health care is like accusing the President of refusing to play tennis when nobody is on the other side of the net.

More important is the reality of Democratic Sen. Benjamin Cardin's observation, “When you are seeking 60 votes, every person is a kingmaker."

For only one example out of many, there is loathsome Joe Lieberman who, after being allowed to keep his committee chairmanship despite campaigning for McCain last year, is threatening to filibuster against any public option in totally predictable loyalty to the insurance companies that dominate his state rather than the President who forgave his own disloyalty.

Meanwhile, as the Wall Street Journal rails against "The Worst Bill Ever" ("Epic new spending and taxes, pricier insurance, rationed care, dishonest accounting: The Pelosi health bill has it all"), it's hard to refute those epic distortions about the many thousands of dense pages that are working their way through both houses of Congress.

These coming weeks will be a test for the Obama "arm's-length strategy," his instinct for consensus rather than strong leadership from the top.

According to one of his favorite philosophers, Reinhold Niebuhr, "Moral reason must learn how to make coercion its ally without running the risk of a Pyrrhic victory in which the ally exploits and negates the triumph."

But on the other hand, the mid-20th century's most eminent Protestant theologian never had to contemplate the arm-twisting that passes for reasoning with both allies and foes on Capitol Hill.

As in the debate over Afghanistan, the President is going to have to step up with decisiveness and persuade all the competing interests to follow his leadership.

Democracy of the Deaf

In Washington's two debates this week, health care reform and the Sotomayor nomination, you could turn off the TV sound and miss little of substance--the D or R on the chest of the talking head will tell you that the subject is universal coverage or government control and deficits, judicial qualifications or activism.

The election of a president who prides himself on reaching across political divides has resulted in the irony of more partisanship than ever as remnants of the Republican party that rode roughshod over opposition in the Bush years are reduced to mouthing the slogans that brought them to power back then.

On health care, it's the Blue-Dog Democrats who are discussing the substance of proposals as the GOP repeats scare mantras about socialized medicine and keeps voting a straight party line in committees.

In the Sotomayor hearings, Republicans are obsessing over the Wise Latina remark and other speeches, while majority members are asking the judge about specific cases and legal principles in the course of her career on the bench.

As the Obama Administration closes in on its first six months in office, the reality of possible bipartisanship keeps receding, leaving it as only more slogan in a dialogue of the deaf.

Obama in the Operating Room

Today's joint statement by Sens. Max Baucus and Ted Kennedy promising to “seek common ground on health reform legislation” is, in essence, a declaration of war over inclusion of a public insurance plan to compete with private companies.

As chairmen of the two powerful committees shaping the legislation, Baucus (Finance) and Kennedy (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) will be jousting over the core issue that the Obama Administration has been tap-dancing around but will eventually have to face head-on in what promises to be a serious test of the President's toughness and resolve.

After failing to get more than a glimmer of bipartisanship on the stimulus bill, the President up to now has been wooing both the health care establishment and its Republican mercenaries, but the public option (Medicare-for-all) is the deal-breaker he will eventually have to face.

Baucus' Finance Committee, to get Republican Chuck Grassley and his crew on board, has been bending over backward with compromises that would give lip-service to a public plan but "only if private insurance companies had not made meaningful, affordable coverage available to all Americans within several years."

Kennedy and 28 other senators are not buying that, insisting, as are large numbers of House Democrats, on a public plan in the bill that would be sent to Obama, who has said it is needed to “keep the private sector honest,” but thus far has signaled only his vaunted pragmatism if the eventual showdown materializes.

Today's statement is an attempt to put a Band-Aid over Senate differences, but health care reform is ready for the operating table and the Surgeon-in-Chief will have to decide soon about where and how deep to make the incision.

Obama's Defining Time

This week Barack Obama became who he is going to be for the next four years. Amid a flurry of crucial decisions on the economy and foreign policy, his presidency is showing what may be its ultimate shape--out of necessity daring on domestic issues, more conventional and cautious on foreign policy.

Liberals who criticized his response to the financial crisis as too careful, like Paul Krugman, were finally impressed: "If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course...(F)ears that Mr. Obama would sacrifice progressive priorities in his budget plans, and satisfy himself with fiddling around the edges of the tax system, have now been banished."

Conservatives also noted a difference. "A mysterious thing happened in that speech Tuesday night," Peggy Noonan writes. "By the end of it Barack Obama had become president," pointing to a moment "about four-fifths of the way through the speech. He was looking from the prompters to the congressmen and senators, and suddenly he was engaging on what seemed a deeper level. His voice took on inflection. He wasn't detached, as if he was wondering how he was doing. He seemed equal to the moment and then, in some new way, in command of it."

There is also a new edge to his determination to confront "the special interests and lobbyists...gearing up for a fight," and the days of wooing Republicans rather than defeating them in Congress, at least on domestic issues, seem to be winding down.

But foreign policy is something else. The pace of withdrawal from Iraq is slow enough to satisfy John McCain, and the decision to send more troops into Afghanistan while announcing a "soup to nuts" rethinking of our mission there has a cart-before-the-horse Bushlike feel to it. Shouldn’t the strategy precede the deployment?

Special envoy Richard Holbrooke is barely back from a whirlwind visit to the region, and the nature of Pakistan's role in fighting the Taliban is still unclear. For Obama, who puts so much emphasis on diplomacy, the military commitment seems premature.

As an incoming President with more on his plate than any in half a century, Barack Obama is shaping up fast and well enough to maintain good poll ratings from a jittery public, but the road looks long and uphill for the months ahead.

Obama's Offhand Ultimatum

In his most polite, professorial manner, the President tonight challenged Congressional Republicans to put up or shut up in helping him save the American economy.

He spent most of his first news conference translating the stimulus bill from the language of Washington into that of Elkhart, Indiana, where he held a town hall earlier in the day, talking over the heads of Congress to the American people. But when asked "what you're going to have to do to get more bipartisanship," Obama had a clear message for the GOP:

“Old habits are hard to break. And we’re coming off of an election and I think people want to sort of test the limits of what they can get.

"(T)here's a lot of jockeying in this town, and a lot of 'who's up and who's down,' and positioning for the next election...(T)his is one of those times where we've got to put that kind of behavior aside, because the American people can't afford it. The people in Elkhart can't afford it. The single mom who's trying to figure out how to keep her house can't afford it.

"And whether we're Democrats or Republicans, surely there's got to be some capacity for us to work together, not agree on everything, but at least set aside small differences to get things done...to break out of some of the ideological rigidity and gridlock that we've been carrying around for too long."

Translation: The President has reached the point where his attempts at give and take have met with almost total Republican refusal to sign on to the stimulus, preferring instead to position themselves for 2010 and claim they resisted expensive efforts to turn the economy around in their campaign to recover control of Congress.

Now that the battle lines are so clearly drawn, the Administration knows that this will be a Democratic program and has to concentrate on placating their own House members in conference by shaping a bill more in line with their version than the compromises made in the Senate to win three GOP votes to reach sixty.

When the final vote comes, the Senate so-called moderates--Specter, Collins and Snowe--will then have to answer the President's quiet ultimatum by serving their party's long-term future or abandoning it to the Rush Limbaugh us-against-them wing.

By staking his mandate on it tonight, the President should have his stimulus bill to sign next week.

Obama Mandate: Post-Partisanship

On Election Day, Barack Obama canceled a fireworks display for the Grant Park rally that night, a sign he wants to leave the long campaign behind and start governing, something the Bush-Cheney-Rove Administration neglected to do for eight years.

Governing, but how? Tuesday's victory margins clearly were a mandate to change the bitter two-year stalemate of tenuous Congressional control by Democrats and a stubborn, veto-wielding White House.

"Obama's ability," Dan Balz notes in the Washington Post, "to manage relationships with Democratic congressional leaders, with Republicans and with impatient liberal constituencies with agendas of their own will have a lasting impact on his presidency. Can he, for example, fulfill his promise to govern in a unifying and inclusive way yet also push an ambitious progressive agenda?"

That may be the wrong question. "Ambitious progressive agenda" still sees the American crisis through the left-right lens of eight years that led to abysmal approval ratings and voter revolt against Washington politics.

In the afterglow of his historic breakthrough, the President-Elect has an opportunity to test his consensus approach to governing by bringing the decimated Republican opposition into a process that goes beyond scoring political points for the next election cycle and attacks problems in some semblance of bipartisanship.

He has the chance to demonstrate the difference between consensus and caution by showing that leadership can go beyond "agendas" and begin to find solutions.

If that sounds naïve, so be it. Obama has rehearsed overcoming that charge in two tough years of campaigning. Let's see what he can do with it in the real world.

Obama's Strange Senate Friend

To illustrate his bipartisan approach as President, Barack Obama last weekend named three Senate Republicans he would work with if elected--Dick Lugar, John Warner and Tom Coburn.

Lugar and Warner are Senate elders, but his choice of Coburn raises questions about Obama’s judgment and, after what the junior senator from Oklahoma did this week, some would say his definition of sanity.

In an editorial headed “Locked, Loaded and Loony,” the New York Times today decried the position of Coburn, a physician, who “stands alone in blocking final passage of a suicide prevention bill in fear that the government’s record-keeping on troubled vets might somehow crimp their ability to purchase handguns.”

In naming him, Obama conceded Coburn “is probably the most conservative member of the U.S. Senate” but added, “He has become a friend of mine.”

The loyalty of Obama’s friend to the gun lobby is surpassed only by his right-to-life fervor, which Coburn has expressed by favoring the death penalty for physicians who perform abortions, even in cases of rape, pointing out that his great-grandmother was raped by a sheriff and then gave birth to his grandmother.

Coburn has called gays “the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today” and condemned the TV showing of the Holocaust film, “Schindler’s List” because it portrayed "irresponsible sexual behavior.”

When they get together for friendly chats, they can always have a few laughs about the Republican nut case, Alan Keyes, whom Coburn endorsed for President in 2000 and who, during Obama’s run for the Senate, filled in when his Republican opponent dropped out after a sex scandal.

They have so much in common.