dagblog - Comments for "Bipartisanship as Theater"

Obviously, I agree that HCR

Doctor Cleveland — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:12:00 +0000

In reply to I think the premise you've

Obviously, I agree that HCR hasn't been handled ideally. I suspect Obama realizes this now, too. Either he'll learn from those mistakes (and every new president has to learn on the job in some crucial ways) or he won't.

In a more local way, the timing is easy to understand. Obama is through with the nonsense, and going to make HCR happen no matter what. The prelude to using reconciliation and winning on a party-line vote is this public gesture of bipartisanship. He's holding out an olive branch, which he knows will be refused, because he has the invasion landing prepared.

Why did he wait so long? It's a good question, which I expect people in the West Wing have obsessed about. I don't actually believe that he didn't perceive the obstructionism of the GOP at large. He clearly set out to pick off just a few Republican votes in the Senate. (Recently some anonymous Blue Dog senator was carping about this during a blind-source attack on Rahm Emanuel; the complaint was that the White House had only tried to pick up a few moderates from the other side, when what was "supposed" to happen was an attempt to pick up 20 or 30 Republicans. That complaint actually made me think much better of Rahm.)

What Obama didn't count on was, first, the GOP's unprecedented party discipline. The stumbling block has been not being able to peel off those two or four Republicans, and to be fair, in the past peeling off moderates for a centrist bill has worked. In the past, picking off Snowe/Collins/Voinovich/etc. would have worked. The Republicans are genuinely playing the game differently, and Obama didn't see that coming.

The second thing Obama seems not to have expected in the deep appeal of irrationality. It's pretty clear that he didn't think the Town Hall and Tea Party lunacy would actually manage to move political situation at all, and I'll confess that I didn't either. I figured that the craziness would be counter-productive. Obama doesn't seem like a person who has much use for intemperate nuttiness himself, and I doubt he can really imagine why anyone would give those people ear. He figured that the general public would back the plan that polls all said they backed.

Yes, I hesitated before

Michael Wolraich — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:58:21 +0000

In reply to Speaking of the primary, I

Yes, I hesitated before employing the metaphor and then recklessly charged ahead. So shoot me.

Speaking of the primary, I

DF — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:15:00 +0000

In reply to Excellent point. You know,

Speaking of the primary, I think that's the metaphor that got a certain Senator from New York in a bit of trouble.

Er.. wait. Maybe she was just openly speculating about the probability of him actually being shot.

Excellent point. You know,

Michael Wolraich — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:13:43 +0000

In reply to I think the premise you've

Excellent point. You know, even way back in the Democratic primary, Obama had a tendency to be politically reactive. Whenever he plays aggressive politics, he plays it well, but he always seems to hold his fire until his opponent is about to shoot him in the head. There is some sense to this approach--he doesn't overreact, and he does seem to get what he wants in the end while maintaining that reputation for coolness under fire. But I worry that one of these days, he's going to wait too long and get shot. And even he pulls this bill off, I think everybody would have been a lot happier without the yearlong circus--much as we would have been happier without the last four months of the primary.

I think the premise you've

DF — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:55:36 +0000

In reply to Bipartisanship as Theater

I think the premise you've outlined here is pretty reasonable, Dr. C. The thing that I wonder about it is this: Why wait a year to make such a move? Did Obama just recently figure out that he wasn't going to get any blood from this rock? If not, why waste a year on the rest of the sturm and drang? Baucus, Grassley, et al? An ice cold bully pulpit in the midst of deliriously high polling numbers? That's the part that seems amateurish to me.