Wary of Republicans, but not walking away
WASHINGTON: Not quite seven weeks into Barack Obama’s presidency, the capital’s leading thinkers seem to agree that the era of postpartisanship is over.
Obama’s team made little secret of their intention to win broad support for his stimulus plan – an effort that yielded three Republican votes in the Senate and none in the House of Representatives. The president’s pick for the Commerce Department, Senator Judd Gregg, a Republican from New Hampshire, turned down the job, citing his personal opposition to the bill.
According to E.J. Dionne Jr. of The Washington Post, Obama himself, speaking to a group of columnists aboard Air Force One, suggested that, in the future, he would approach Republicans with more wariness. “You know, I am an eternal optimist,” the president said. “That doesn’t mean I’m a sap.”
Such talk acted like a shot of adrenaline to the stilled hearts of liberal bloggers and columnists who had feared that Obama might squander a chance to stomp on his bewildered opposition. So much energy has been spent berating the idea of bipartisanship, in fact, that no one has stopped to ask what Obama means by it.
As the political scientist James Morone recently pointed out on The New York Times’s Op-Ed page, legislative bipartisanship, in the sense of two-party unity behind a single agenda, has never really existed.
The presidents we tend to immortalize hardly managed to transcend party politics; their greatness grew from their willingness to articulate arguments that were calibrated to be divisive. Franklin Roosevelt infuriated generations of conservatives who reviled his concept of expansive government. Ronald Reagan’s passionate counterargument made him an enduring enemy to the left.
This doesn’t mean, however, that our politics have not fundamentally changed over the last few decades. Roosevelt and his Republican critics had profound disagreements, but both sides understood that their dispute was ideological rather than personal, the clash of opposing theories in a common pursuit.
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Wary of Republicans, but not walking away – International Herald Tribune.
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Tags: barack obama, Politics, united states
