The Time for Bipartisanship
Looking back on the stimulus votes a lot of people are, rightly, drawing some conclusions about the prospects more broadly for efforts to pursue bipartisan or “post-partisan” initiatives. For my two cents, I think the main point is that you need to think seriously about what kind of issue you’re talking about. What bipartisanship requires, at the end of the day, is not politeness but a willingness to identify issues that cut across normal divides. For example, George W. Bush seems to be a stupid man, who’s also kind of a cruel jerk, along with being such a hard-core partisan that he routinely corrupted a number of federal agencies, including the U.S. Attorneys’ offices, in an effort to abuse his power for partisan gains. But none of that stopped him from having a nice bipartisan signing ceremony for the legislation authorizing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief:
The crux of the matter wasn’t that Bush had some momentary conversion to a skilled bipartisan approach. Rather, funding for initiatives aimed at fighting infectious disease in Africa is just a bit peripheral to the core issues of American politics. So bipartisanship was possible.
The high tide of bipartisanship in the United States came when many northern Democrats started seeing an embrace of civil rights for African-Americans as a logical extension of economic and social egalitarianism in the Jefferson-Jackson mold. At this same time, all Southern politicians were committed to a white supremacist social framework and to the view that terrorist violence aimed at bolstering that framework should go unpunished by legal authorities. That meant that you had a wide range of views about non-racial issues inside the Democratic Party, because Southern politicians of all perspectives were Democrats, and you also had a wide range of views about racial issues inside the Democratic Party, because the Southerners were white supremacists but the northerners generally weren’t. This meant there were ideological coalitions that cut across the partisan divide on all kinds of issues, with some Democrats joining with most Republicans to take a conservative view of economic issues, and some Democrats joining with most Republicans to take a progressive view of racial issues. And you also had questions of pure partisan interest (relating to the winning of elections and disbursement of patronage) that cut across the ideological coalitions.
The modern political system just isn’t like that. Racial issues have been subsumed into the larger economic debate, and the parties are well-sorted by ideology. That doesn’t mean you can never see bipartisan coalitions, but it means you can’t see them on the core political issues about taxes, spending, and the distribution of resources. You can’t find them, in other words, on things like the stimulus bill. But they’d be easy to find both on things like PEPFAR that are fairly minor, and also perhaps on issues that have a strong regional component. What a commitment to running a bipartisan administration would have to mean, if not to be vacuous, would be a determination to use the president’s agenda-setting powers to focus legislative activity on those sort of questions. But with the country in the midst of an economic crisis, a health care crisis, and a climate crisis it would seem very odd to me to decide to do that.
46 Responses to “The Time for Bipartisanship”
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February 9th, 2009 at 8:33 am
This is an important and basic point: bipartisanship means finding areas of actual agreement, not compromising on areas of actual (indeed, defining) disagreement in the absence of an institutional (head-counting) need to do so.
February 9th, 2009 at 8:55 am
Cosign with DTM. I think a lot of the discussion of bipartisanship on left blogs — even here and TPM, sometimes — has been pretty credulous. There’s a generation of progressive activists so shell-shocked by Clintonian triangulation that they have trouble recognizing other kinds of strategies.
February 9th, 2009 at 8:59 am
You can’t find them, in other words, on things like the stimulus bill.
You wish. What about the socially liberal fiscal conservatives (e.g. Bloombergesque)? Sure they may agree with democrats on the distribution of resources but spending? Really?
And if you can’t see the bipartisanship opportunities for Repbulicans on climate change you are just being naive or perhaps disingenuous.
February 9th, 2009 at 9:02 am
I am going to surprise DTM by agreeing with what he’s saying here. IMHO Obama’s mistake (and this is where I very much disagree with DTM) was not in pursuing strategy B which, as polls continue to show, IS resonating with the public. It was in adopting a barely adequate (if that) proposal as his staring position rather than starting with a much stronger bill and letting it get compromised down to something that would still be sufficient to do the job. The centrists are all about process rather than content (they just need to be seen compromising something), so this would have worked beautifully.
The strategy was good, the execution thereof not so good.
February 9th, 2009 at 9:02 am
O/T: In-depth Washington Post article on how Petraeus et al used their “SURGE” testimony to undercut any movement toward disengagement from Iraq by Congressional Democrats:
YAY!!! YAY!!! YAY!!! TEH SUUUUURGE WORKED!!!! BUT YOU WILL ADMIT THE SURGE IS WORKING!!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY!!!
February 9th, 2009 at 9:18 am
I don’t believe in bipartisanship either. The question that remains is: Given Republican obstructionism, and the composition of the Congress, how *can* the president push through his agenda? There are only so many Republicans you can take out of the Senate for Cabinet positions.
February 9th, 2009 at 9:32 am
When Bush’s big AIDS in Africa plan was announced I did a bit of soul searching. It seemed to be evidence that maybe Bush wasn’t as simple as I had thought. Later, I happened across the fact that pharmaceutical companies were his biggest donor industry in the 2000 election. How much of the AIDS money found it’s way to their pockets? Fighting AIDS in Africa is still a good thing. My point is simply that Republicans may occasionally appear bipartisan because their lobbyists are, for all the wrong motives, pushing them to do something rational. I saw, I think on Atrios, that the National Association of Manufacturers is lobbying hard for the stimulus bill.
February 9th, 2009 at 9:38 am
So fighting AIDS in Africa is a great thing to bring both sides of the aisle together when Bush proposes it.
Fighting AIDS in America is something to be mocked, ridiculed, and a torn up by the right when Obama proposes it.
Funny how that bipartisanship thing works.
February 9th, 2009 at 9:41 am
Your mistake is in assuming that the same would have happened had Obama started from a strong negotiating position. Your other mistake (and Obama’s) is in not realizing that the Obama transition team basically left the drafting up to the House in the first place rather than crafting a detailed proposal of their own; those “increases” were applied by the House to a very sketchy proposal so it’s actually hard to tell to what extent there really were increases. The transition team thought that way they could save time to concentrate on other things, but that has turned out to be a serious strategic error. That’s how they got behind the curve in the first place.
Your last and fatal mistake lies in not realizing that if this bill only gets the economy 2/3 of the way up the hill whereupon it starts to slide down again, the whole exercise is actually worse than useless. And that, unfortunately, is the outcome I would bet on if I were a betting man.
February 9th, 2009 at 9:46 am
DTM’S theory here And so that is what Strategy B is really all about: not persuading Republican members of Congress, but rather providing political cover to marginal Democrats sound an awful lot like the “bank-shot pander” strategy Rove used in the 2000 and 2004 elections. They didn’t put all of those black Republican sewer commissioners and Hispanic Republican state representatives in prominent spots on the stage to woo black and Latino voters, but to reassure white suburban voters that they weren’t really the Krazy Kracker Southern Party.
February 9th, 2009 at 9:50 am
Here’s where you start to go wrong- right at the beginning. A ballpark figure is not a proposal. There was never a detailed Obama proposal; the details were left to the House. And the price tag has risen primarily because tax cuts have been added.
February 9th, 2009 at 9:57 am
That hill metaphor was borrowed from economist Mark Thoma. You would do well to read this.
February 9th, 2009 at 9:59 am
P.S. As you can see, Thoma’s email correspondent had adopted something like your position- unfortunately it was predicated on the prediction that “the number has nowhere to go but up” which as we now know turned out to be false.
February 9th, 2009 at 9:59 am
And I think you’re overestimating your ability to sustain an argument by pulling imaginary events out of your ass.
February 9th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Ends versus means.
Obama, when he ran for president, signed on to do his best to make the US the best it can be. In this case that means getting economic recovery in the short term and the most viable economy possible in the long term. Bipartisanship is a decidedly secondary consideration in that. Use it if it advances the cause, abandon it when it doesn’t.
If it is anything other than a political ploy, it is egotism, not devotion to duty.
February 9th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Look, as BO likes to say, nearly everyone has come to a conclusion about all this — even his strongest supporters. He is a young, inexperienced, well-intentioned President who, largely because of a naive conviction that republicans would join him in trying to save the country, failed to lead at almost every step. I’ve listed the litany of mistakes before, and there’s no use doing it again.
To continue to treat this as some “grand strategy” of a “master” poker or chess player is really, really counterproductive. If he believes that, and his followers believe that, he, they, and we are in for some serious setbacks ahead.
As I have written before, this is NOT about partisanship vs. bipartisanship. It is about lack of leadership and use of very, very poor tactics. The very worst outcome here is that his approach has empowered republicans. The notion that this will make things down the road easier is untenable at this point. No one in the reality-based community believes it.
I think he can recover — but not if he believes that this was inevitably the way it all had to turn out. We do him and ourselves no service by suspending our powers of critical thinking and buying into some “Superman” myth. He didn’t expect or plan any of this.
Hopefully, he’s as surprised and dumbfounded as we are.
February 9th, 2009 at 11:00 am
I think it’s important to note what all of the compromising with Republicans has bought Obama. All the front loading of (ineffective) tax cuts into the bill, all the overtures, all of the compromises to please “moderate” Senators, in the end, bought a total of, at most, 3 Republican vote. This in a Congress with Democratic majorities of historic proportions.
The way to victory here, if we actually want to get anything progressive accomplished in the next four years, is to roll over the minority and paint them as obstructionists when they use non-democratic procedures to try to stop us. Every Democrat who speaks to the press regarding an important bill pending before Congress should use the words “obstructionist Republicans” at least five times. Democrats want to get things done. Republicans want to obstruct. That’s the message you need if you want to get things done.
February 9th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Yes it is hard to be bipartisan with the economy. Especially when the other parties answer is “voodoo ecomomic” tax cuts. Which takes back to Reagan and the 80′and his tax cuts that were very effective in causing defiects, not fixing them. Never forget that the Republicans reason for tax cut is to undermine the social entitlement programs. Who needs Social Security? Just invest in the stock market. We can all easily see how silly this alternative advice is, simpley study the “always reliable” stock market.
February 9th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Maybe DTM is right about the overall strategy being Machiavellian, but can this example of bipartisanship reported by Charles Peters be described as Machiavellain?
“Obama proved persuasive enough that the bill passed both houses of the legislature, the Senate by an incredible 35 to 0. Then he talked Blagojevich into signing the bill, making Illinois the first state to require such [interrogation] videotaping.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/03/AR2008010303303.html
“Taken together, these accomplishments demonstrate that Obama has what Dillard, the Republican state senator, calls a “unique” ability “to deal with extremely complex issues, to reach across the aisle and to deal with diverse people.” In other words, Obama’s campaign claim that he can persuade us to rise above what divides us is not just rhetoric.”
————————
The bitchy hyperliberal left, like the autistic Glenzilla for example, who were for John Edwards during the primary and not Obama, equate bipartisanship with Clintonian, triangulating sellout. It’s the mirror image of Limbaugh’s war on RINOs.
I’ll admit Obama likes to appear ambiguous, like most politicans, and have his cake and eat it too. He did hire Emanuel as his right-hand man, not the most bipartisan of guys. His talk about Social Security concerns me, but probably heartens deficit hawks, who are taking a beating right now.
The proof is in the pudding. This stimulus is better than no stimulus. Will it be enough? If not they will be putting more stimulus in coming legislation. If that’s not enough, moderates can be blamed for cutting needed spending, but ultimately Obama will be held responsible.
February 9th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Well said.
February 9th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
At this same time, all Southern politicians were committed to a white supremacist social framework and to the view that terrorist violence aimed at bolstering that framework should go unpunished by legal authorities.
I hate to defend the Dixiecrats, but this is unfair. Firstly, there were a few Southern politicians who were genuinely supportive of civil rights – Estes Kefauver, Ralph Yarborough, Lyndon Johnson, and some others (28 southern congressman and three senators did not sign the Southern Manifesto; 7 southern congressman and 1 southern senator voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act). There were a pretty substantial number of others who did not support civil rights laws, not because they were “committed to a white supremacist social framework,” but because they were political cowards. It’s perverse to say that people like William Fulbright, say, were “committed to a white supremacist social framework.” They were willing to accept such a framework, and, in order to keep their jobs, they were willing to vote against civil rights legislation, and support filibusters against it, and so forth. But such people had no actual commitment to the segregationist system.
And it goes way too far to say that every southern politician was committed to the proposition that terrorist violence against civil rights activists should go unpunished.
The vast majority of the southern congressional delegation in the 50s and 60s opposed civil rights and supported segregation. But they were not all James Eastland.
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