Magic1 | Dreamstime.com
From the earliest moments of Barack Obama’s presidency, the most perplexing question was how he would fulfill
his promise to change Washington’s partisan standoff — and whether
that promise was ever more than a rhetorical and political campaign gambit. Observers
have suggested that he always knew he couldn’t rely on Republicans to act in good faith, to negotiate reasonable
compromises, or even to speak honestly in debate. According to that
theory, Obama’s commitment to bipartisan solutions was and is theater
aimed at persuading independent or centrist voters to trust him.
But if seeking consensus is still his strategy, as he and his
advisers insist, it may be time for a rethink. All the months of
bipartisanship in talk and tactics from the White House have neither
brought congressional Republicans closer to supporting Obama’s
objectives nor preserved Obama’s early support among moderate voters.
What they have done is encourage the most outrageous conduct by his
opponents and make the president look weak.
The simple truth is that there is nobody on the Republican side who
wants to negotiate with Obama. They are no longer afraid of him, and
they unanimously want to ruin his presidency, regardless of the
consequences. They are in thrall to the stupid extremism that questions
the president’s citizenship and suspects that he is driving the country
toward a socialist dictatorship — while simultaneously demanding
angrily that the government be stopped from interfering with
Medicare.
Whether there was ever any prospect of significant Republican
support for Obama’s recovery and reform agenda is a moot point.
Certainly, the potential for obstruction and worse, in a party
dominated by Rush Limbaugh and William Kristol, always outweighed the
possibility of cooperation. Now, however, it should be clear to the
president that even the supposedly reasonable Republicans scarcely
pretend to want to work with him anymore. What the president must do is
make that reality clear to the public.
Lately those reasonable Republicans have given him plenty of
opportunities. The most widely noted example is Charles Grassley, the
Iowa senator whose dishonest endorsement of the “death panels” myth at
a town hall meeting must have ranked as one of the most craven
performances by an elected official in that state’s history. Dim and
reactionary as he usually seems to be, Grassley outdid himself by
encouraging Americans to “fear” the health-care legislation that he is
allegedly negotiating in the Senate Finance Committee. He is one of
those Republicans — like Sarah Palin — who has demonized
end-of-life counseling, despite his own past support of that essential
service for families enduring distress.
With Grassley it is also important to remember his role in
shepherding the Medicare prescription drug legislation sponsored by the
Bush White House, the extraordinarily expensive and flawed bill that
subsidized Big Pharma and only became law through gross chicanery. For
a man who now professes to worry about the evil effects of a new health
bureaucracy, he created a hellish paperwork nightmare when that bill
passed.
According to Grassley — and his equally insincere colleagues
Mike Enzi (R-Wyoming) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) — any
health-reform bill must win at least 75 to 80 votes in the Senate
before it could be considered truly bipartisan. Of course, this isn’t a
standard that any of these legislators required to support initiatives
of the Bush administration, or any other Republican bill for that
matter. Only Obama must somehow clear that absurd hurdle for them.
Unfortunately, Obama opened himself to this hypocritical gaming when
he pledged to pass bipartisan legislation, and he does himself no
favors by reiterating that dead promise. He must not be listening when
Senator Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) says openly what all of his colleagues
believe — namely, that their party’s future depends on destroying
Obama, which will begin with defeating health-care reform.
The opportunistic and irresponsible stance of the Republicans was
cemented, so to speak, by their amazing reversible positions on the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or stimulus bill. Having voted
or campaigned against it, they proceeded to take credit for spending in
their own communities as if they had supported the bill all along. (Now
that it is obviously working, they will probably claim credit for that,
too.)
Even John McCain, the Republican who could truthfully boast of
working with Democrats on serious legislation, and often did during his
presidential campaign, now indulges in sourly partisan posturing.
Unlike many other conservatives, who refuse to admit that climate
change is real and must be mitigated by government action, McCain has
advocated measures to reduce carbon emissions for years, against the
grain of his own party. But now that grave issue matters less to him
than defeating Obama, so he denounces the White House for seeking
“cap-and-tax” legislation, calling it a “giant government slush
fund.”
Faced with lying and demagoguery, confronted by unflinching
partisans who want nothing but his destruction, the president has so
far refused to respond with equal force. To most Americans, especially
those without strong ideological perspectives, that is not a sign of
strength. In a time of uncertainty, strength is what the public
demands. What matters is not what Obama believes but how willing he is
to fight for what he believes.
