Bipartisan Blather
posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 02/23/2010 @ 10:43am
Bipartisanship is back as the next new thing in Washington. The White House is convening its bipartisan televised gabfest on health care on Thursday. Last week, the President introduced the co-chairs of his bipartisan commission on the deficits. By calling it quits and going home, Evan Bayh somehow earned wall to wall coverage for his plea for working together. Former Clinton pollster Douglas Schoen tells the Wall Street Journal that Democratic salvation will come by following Bill Clinton's example when he adopted "the bulk of Republican ideas on taxes, spending and welfare reform."Before the two Davids--Broder and Gergen--enshrine this as conventional wisdom, a small dose of common sense is needed. First this is the sound of one hand clapping. Last I looked, it took two--as in bi--parties to do something bipartisan. Well, Republicans aren't playing. The sentiment at the Tea Party and CPAC conventions on the right was more akin to a lynch mob than a negotiating team. And the right's commissars--led by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin-- are intent on purging any Republican legislators who dare stray from the gospel, much less traffic with the other side.
That sentiment is echoed by the Republican congressional leadership, now scrambling to prove their zealotry. Republican legislators championed the idea of a bipartisan commission on deficit reduction--until Barack Obama endorsed it. Then even co-sponsors of the measure joined in torpedoing it in the Senate. House Republican leader John Boehner's initial precondition for attending the bipartisan summit on health care was that the president "scrap" the legislation that has passed the House and the Senate and "start over." His compromise was to agree to come to the summit to expose the Democratic plan and demand that they agree to start over. This is like the Iranians telling the US they are willing to negotiate about nukes with no preconditions, if the US agrees first to scrap its nuclear arsenal.
The intransigence isn't accidental. Republicans bet heavily that Obama's failure would be to their benefit. They've honed obstruction into a political art. And they are winning. A year ago they were lost in the wilderness, now they believe they are on the march. Unless American voters start to punish them for their obstruction, they aren't about to change.
The second thing wrong with the bipartisan vogue is that it assumes that wisdom is somehow located in the middle point between a moderate Democratic Party and an increasingly conservative Republican Party. Figure out what a bunch of Republicans will vote for--if anything--and pass that. That, of course, leads to the likes of Max Baucus wiling away a year negotiating health care with reasonable Republicans like Charles "death panel" Grassley.
Worse, it ignores a little thing--reality outside the beltway. Out here, 25 million people are unemployed. A token bipartisan "jobs bill" that features tax cuts for business and the heirs of the wealthy won't begin to address this agony. Out here, 45 million Americans go without health insurance, and individual purchasers are getting hit with rate hikes of 40 percent or more. Scrapping comprehensive reform and starting over won't begin to fix a broken health care system.Out here, banks have reopened the casino, are still not lending to small businesses, one in four homes are underwater, and credit card companies have been jacking up rates beyond usurious levels that used to lead to eternal damnation. Abandoning consumer protection in finance and giving up on reorganizing the banks won't help. Schoen argues that the only way to "revive the Democratic brand" is to commit to spending cuts, continuation of the Bush tax cuts, and deficit reduction. This oxymoron is inane even for the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
More at...........
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/533509/print
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