The Bipartisan Tango

The Washington air is filled with fake piety as Republican survivors of 2008 try to feign amity with a popular president and vote against him by making villains out of Congressional Democrats.

In the House, they lined up unanimously against the stimulus bill, despite more schmoozing with Barack Obama than any recent president, while blaming Nancy Pelosi for their disaffection.

Pointing out Obama's belief that "economic recovery is about psychology as well as money and that Americans will have more confidence in the future if they see the nation's politicians cooperating to resolve the crisis," E. J. Dionne Jr. notes in the Washington Post:

"If achieving bipartisanship takes priority over the actual content of policy, Republicans are handed a powerful weapon. In theory, they can keep moving the bipartisan bar indefinitely. And each concession to their sensibilities threatens the solidarity in the president's own camp."

The test will come this week in the Senate, where the bipartisan tango will be less robotic as real bargaining beyond posturing begins. The battles will be over increasing infrastructure spending, government-backed low-interest mortgages and how to target tax cuts, among other issues. (Nostalgia note: John McCain is still railing about pork.)

Meanwhile, legislators in both parties are still trying to parse the Obama definition of bipartisanship, Democrats worrying about weakening their agenda, Republicans questioning how much of it is window dressing.

Rep. Zack Wamp, who headed Fred Thompson's ill-fated primary effort, may have summed up the GOP position best: "We got the sense that he was very genuine," he says. But if Obama "comes and meets with us like that and it doesn't have an impact, it begins to hurt his credibility."

In times like these, presidential credibility counts more than ever.

Scenes From a Spending Spree

The House stimulus bill recalls those old TV game shows with contestants racing the clock to fill shopping carts, items spilling into the aisles in a mad dash to the checkout counter.

In the House, $200 million to re-sod the National Mall and $200 million to extend Medicare to cover family planning services fell out yesterday as Democrats keep ransacking the shelves from what the livid Wall Street Journal calls their "40-year wish list."

Is this the only way to revive a sinking economy--to rush through 647 pages of $825 billion in scattershot spending? The President talks about transparency and accountability, but it's hard to see those elements in a grab bag of what he himself has denounced as "throwing money" at the economy.

The funds for infrastructure are beyond dispute but make up only a small fraction of the whole.

“They keep comparing this to Eisenhower, but he proposed a $500 billion highway system, and they’re going to put $30 billion” in roads and bridges, says the ranking member of the House Transportation Committee. “How farcical can you be? Give me a break.”

After eight years of Bush inaction and deadlock, the exhilaration of rapid movement is understandable, but does everything have to be done at once?

If Democrats have to give up on bipartisanship, as seems inevitable, they should be thinking twice about ramming through a bill with booby traps that are sure to explode in their faces and undermine long-term fixes for the economy.

By all means, start the flow of defensible government spending, provide loans for hard-pressed states and municipalities, and strong-arm the banks into using bailout money for lending, but can't we slow down the drunken-sailor act? The hangover could be painful in the extreme.

Time, the Slow-Motion Terrorist

To get America’s attention, people have to die--in wars, on falling bridges, in coal mine cave-ins. Even then, hearts sink, heads shake and the news moves on to the next disaster.

Now that the catastrophe du jour is infrastructure, some politicians are trying to do something constructive while public emotion is still raw. This week, a Minnesota Congressman proposed a plan to fix the nation's 73,784 bridges rated "structurally deficient" by the Department of Transportation.

Rep. James Oberstar suggested paying for the repairs with a five-cent hike in the gas tax, but the next day President Bush, about to go off on vacation, dismissed the idea of any new taxes, saying Congress should change its priorities when spending highway money.

Bringing the nation's roads and bridges into the 21st century will cost $155.5 billion, according to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. The $75 billion in annual spending by federal, state, and local governments is not even enough to keep their condition from getting worse.

"Maintenance,” says one expert, “is just not sexy.” Politicians like new construction they can brag about to voters while posing for ribbon-cutting pictures.

If a bomb had blown up the Minneapolis bridge, politicians would be scurrying to throw money into something to satisfy their constituents. But time is a slow-motion terrorist, and nobody is eager to pay new taxes or tolls to prevent the disasters waiting to happen.