I've said it over and over but it's now being brought to the surface so let's say it again: the sooner Obama learns that post-partisanship is a fantasy the better for all of us - and the Democratic party.
In a blistering take-down of high-profile wingnut Dick Armey's trademark treatment of Joan Walsh on Hardball, Glenn Greenwald repeats the theme a number of us have been pounding away at, this time over the knee-bending Obama did for the Congressional Republicans trying to get Pub votes for the stimulus bill.
As I've documented many times before, Beltway "bipartisanship" means that Democrats adopt as many GOP beliefs as possible so what ultimately is done resembles Republican policies as much as possible (anyone doubting that should simply review these "bipartisan" votes of the last eight years). I'm glad that the stimulus package yesterday -- which Democrats watered down and comprised on as much as possible to please Republicans -- did not attract even a single Republican vote in the House: not one.
Republicans aren't interested in "bipartisanship" except to the extent that they can force Democrats to enact their policies even though they have only a small minority thanks to being so forcefully rejected by the citizenry. And why should they be interested in bipartisanship? Why should they vote for a stimulus package that they don't support and that is anathema to what their most ardent supporters believe?
Obama's insistent blindness on this point cannot continue, not just because the extremist GOP (Greenwald calls the modern GOP a "crazed, primitive, regional mess" and for my money he's being kind) is wrong about everything and clinging to policies and prescriptions guaranteed to make the mess they've made even worse, not just because coddling and kowtowing to the monsters of the Pub party doesn't work, but because it would require him to go against all his instincts, everything he apparently believes, and violate the will of his own base. The real Obama has been sighted, and even today he doesn't match the guy who went scurrying up to the Pubs on the Hill like an underpaid employee trying to wheedle a raise out of a stingy boss.
President Barack Obama issued a withering critique Thursday of Wall Street corporate behavior, calling it "the height of irresponsibility" for employees to be paid more than $18 billion in bonuses last year while their crumbling financial sector received a bailout from taxpayers. "It is shameful," Obama said from the Oval Office. "And part of what we're going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint, and show some discipline, and show some sense of responsibility."
The president's comments, made with new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at his side, came in swift response to a report that employees of the New York financial world garnered an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses last year. The figure, from the New York state comptroller, drew prominent news coverage.
Yet Obama's stand also came just one day after he surrounded himself with well-paid chief executives at the White House. He had pulled in those business leaders and hailed them for being on the "front lines in seeing the enormous problems in our economy right now."
(emphasis added)
There you have the problem in a nutshell. The simple truth is that the President isn't going to be able to solve the economic crisis by negotiation or pulpit-pounding. He's going to have to bring both the obstructionist GOP and Corporate America to heel. That little bit of political theater above is clearly a warning (something we've been waiting to hear come from a Democrat for a very long time) to the corporate Right that they're vulnerable and he isn't afraid to exploit that vulnerability - their overweening, fuck-the-country-I'm-getting-my-money greed - in the press if they don't get on board pretty damn quick.
It's a canny move. If he can get to the High Honchos and convince them that it will get very rough if they don't play ball, hen doesn't need the ideological bigots of an increasingly irrelevant GOP. A lot of us over here in the Left trenches have identified quite a few potential wedge issues over the last 8 years (Obama's choice is one of the strongest - it cuts across a lot of party lines if not ideological ones) and have banged away at the Dem leadership to use them. They refused. As Greenwald has said over and over, "[the] Democrats'...overarching desire in life is to please the needy harmony fetishists by adopting as many GOP views as possible" and the BD-led Dems have absolutely run away from confronting the GOP's blatant craziness, choosing over and over to appease or placate the unappeasable and unplacatable.
Obama is signalling that even if they do, he isn't going to. This is going to bring him inevitably straight into the clash he has been trying to avoid: his vaunted post-partisan bi-partisanship and the heavily knee-padded corporate Blue Dogs versus the need to fix an American economy on the verge of implosion and his own clear understanding that Wall Street has gone way too far and has little intention of turning around as long as it still operates the Congressional Democrats, particularly in the Senate.
It is a clash that is patently fixable only by Obama either turning his back on the conservative Democrat establishment and developing more FDR-style Dems in the leadership (Harry and Nancy would have to go and some of Rahm's favored operatives get back-benched) or muscling the current crop of GOP fellow travelers around to a more traditional populist Democratic stance, morphing them from corporate puppet-enablers into corporate tamers.
He clearly does NOT want to take that road but there is no other road open to him. The problems within the party that have been suppressed by the leadership are now in the open. Having won a convincing mandate in the presidential election and a solid majority in both houses of Congress, the party's progressives are putting pressure on the Blue Dogs - something they never had to deal with when the GOP was in power.
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote an article for In These Times predicting that congressional progressives would be emboldened to assert themselves in an unprecedented way under an Obama administration - and that the broader progressive movement would help itself immensely by focusing on working with and strengthening those lawmakers. Now, after eight years of a rubber-stamp Congress, that prediction seems to be coming true.
In the last few weeks, we've seen:
- Senate Democrats publicly press Obama to make the economic recovery package far more robust.
- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly challenge Obama to be bolder on taxes.
- Congressional progressives challenge the Obama administration - against its wishes - to include bankruptcy reforms in the economic stimulus package.
- House Appropriations Chairman Dave Obey (D-WI) tell the administration it's stimulus package is too small.
- Transportation Committee Chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) expose how Obama's push for tax cuts is crowding out transportation infrastructure funding
- A bipartisan House coalition make one of the new Congress's first votes a statement of opposition to the Bush-Obama bailout for Wall Street, and for much stronger bailout oversight.
- Progressive Democrats, joining with the blogosphere and outside progressive movement, push a House amendment to boost infrastructure spending in Obama's stimulus proposal.
This week, this nascent progressive pressure system emanating from Capitol Hill and the outside progressive media/movement intensified.
The people want it, the heart of the party wants it, and the Dem base wants it. We've waited decades for the pendulum to swing and every poll says it has. Obama cannot continue to act as if none of those forces exist, and I don't think he wants to. But as I have said repeatedly, and it ought to be obvious by now, he's going to have to take on his own party's establishment - an establishment he was a member of until November. The Big Question is the same now as it has been since he announced his candidacy: Will he do it?
We're closing in on the time when that question will finally be answered.
A Prediction: Social Security may be the point where the r meets the r.
UPDATE 1: Apparently the battle has already been joined and Rahm is right in the middle of it. (Via Avedon)
Right after Emanuel demanded Democratic congressional candidates "move to the right on immigration," one of his lackeys, North Carolina freshman Heath Shuler, introduced some Tancredo-esque enforcement-only legislation that has caused a serious split inside the House Democratic caucus. Republicans love it and this morning's CongressDaily reports they are petitioning to get Shuler's bill onto the floor for a vote. If enough treacherous Blue Dogs join with the Republicans and their petition tactic works (they need 170 signatures and their presidential candidate's blessing) "it would set up a platform for political attacks in the November elections, highlighting the GOP view that Congress should get tough on the border before addressing guest-worker visas or illegal immigrants."
UPDATE 2: I rolled right over the sacrifice Obama demanded for his pointless attempt to get the GOP to act like adults because I was more interested in the political ramifications, probably because I'm a guy and we tend to be self-centered when it comes to stuff like contraception. Fortunately, Stellaa at Flickers reminds us who's paying for BO's post-partisan illusions.
They friggin wanted the birth control out and they got it. What did they do? A big fat Republican obstruction. The sore losers will nickle and dime us again into stupidity.
So, we bend to them and kick the women who worked so hard for the Democrats to win. Apparently, birth control for poor women will come somewhere else. But when the Christiansts of the red states complain, we cojole. In the end, what do we get? Nothing.
Go read the rest.
Agree with much of what you say, but I thought jamming a wedge issue like birth control into an unrelated bill was unnecessary, uncalled for, and that it made the Democrats look weak. It was as if Pelosi was saying "we can't pass this straight up so we're playing like the Republicans did."
Pass the birth control funding a la carte. Put every Republican on record with their vote. Don't bury OUR issues in omnibus bills. We have public opinion on our side and should be able to pass significant legislation without power plays.
Posted by: Mark Gisleson | January 31, 2009 at 10:55 AM
I suspect that the birth control issue was jammed in not because it was a power play so much as because the progressives demanded it, trying to salvage something from this overly conservative and business friendly stim package.
But there's also the opossibility that the power play was aimed at the Democratic party: ie, that if the birth control stands on its own, the BD's may well not allow it to pass. Possibly they were the ones who made the power play necessary, not the Pubs?
Posted by: mick arran | February 01, 2009 at 02:37 PM