After reading a lot of different smart people try to explain why President Obama's attempts to reach some sort of bipartisan deal on the stimulus bill is a bad idea, I started to think about writing a post explaining why this really does make sense. Fortunately for me, Al Giordano was writing while I was thinking, which saves me a lot of trouble:
Rather, he's setting them up under the glare of the mass media to be seen as the unreasonable party in contrast to what everybody watching him on TV is going to view as reasonable and respectful. In sum, he's using them as props, and turning their weakness - their own frothing desire for "partisanship" - against them.
Al continues:
In the end, Obama's "bipartisanship" is one of the most Machiavellian partisan maneuvers we've seen in Washington in a long while, and I use that description in its most admirable context. The Republicans fell right into the trap today. Progressives that urge Obama to be more "partisan" should pay close attention to how the GOP is getting pwned before falling into the same trap themselves.
Bingo.
Right now, one of the things that's being reported is that the House Republican leaders announced that they were going to oppose the bill earlier today, before the President went to their house to talk to them about the package. Meanwhile, you've got conservative commentators - including some of the same ones he had dinner with right before the inauguration - using the same old partisan language to oppose his current plan.
As I speak, the Press Secretary is at the podium, noting that the House Republicans said that they were going to oppose the bill before the President arrived on the Hill for the meeting that they (the Republicans) invited him to. Other media outlets are reporting not that conservative commentators are opposing the bill - that's dog bites man news - but that the people he had dinner with are opposing the bill using language like "one of the worst bills in galactic history."
The genuine efforts that the President is making toward bipartisanship are setting up a situation that's a win-win-win - at least from his perspective. He gets his bill. The Republicans look bad winning. And wind up with nobody to blame but each other.
- Log in to post comments
If the GOP does try to filibuster every bill Obama wants, then Obama can go to the public and describe the problem to the people. The message is that the nation's rescue will have to wait until enough recalcitrants are removed from office and replaced.
Oh, but you missed one:
And the ones they blame will be the ones who had the least foam on their lips.
This gives me the best real hope that things will get straightened out.
I also sincerely hope that another of Obama's strategies is to keep looking forward, not dwell on the past, and (whilst he's not watching) his appointees find that they are legally compelled to investigate Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld for torture and war crimes.
I'm so glad to have a president who's smarter then me. What a delightful change.
Well, I suppose this is possible. One thing that makes this strategy more difficult is the fact that the press are such despicable hypocritical sacks of shit. When Bush was President, the press never ever considered it his responsibility to reach out to Democratic lawmakers, even when Democrats were in the fucking MAJORITY. Now that Obama is President, all the fucking asshole teeve "pundits" and "political analysts" are going on and on and on about how Obama "needs to convince Republicans blah, blah, blah".
It would be a masterstroke if Obama were able to sidestep these destructive scumbag "journalists" and actually engage directly withg the people!
The GOP won;t change because it can't change. They are fossilized into their hardened positions of greed, guns, and good ol' boy hate-mongering.
It's impossible for them to change. Biologically, psychologically, conceptually,it just an all-around physical impossibility.
It's the logical end of the Southern strategy.They wanted the South, they got the South. Their whole party went South. And now the voters are sending them South.
Somewhere down deep in Mississippi, they are going to learn Robert's Johnson's lesson: the devil will surely give you all the things he promised for your soul. But when he comes back around for payup, there's no weasling out of it. All those cute little tricks you thought were so slick don't work on the devil. You're toast, dude.
That sizzling sound you're hearing is the sound of some deep-southern pan-fried elephant.
In lots of pigfat.
The problem with that logic is that he does not appear to be following that kind of Machiavellian plot. He appears to genuinely want bipartisan consensus.
If he had intended to use bipartisanship as a bargaining ploy, he would have started out with a bill that didn't contain any of the useless pork barrel - like (corporate) tax downsizings - that he had to know the Repubs would demand. Then he'd throw them a bone that was precisely large enough that he could claim with a straight face that he had "given them everything they asked for, and they still oppose the bill." That way he'd win the same kind of political victory, but avoid having to cut down quite as much on useful things like railway investment in order to cram in yet more tax downsizing, highways to nowhere and kickbacks to favoured "campaign contributers."
When constructing new roads gets twice as much money allocated as repair and upgrade of the existing rail infrastructure (nevermind new railways...), you know that it's simply a bad stimulus bill.
- Jake