Given his inability to conjure up electoral victories for Democrats in the last few state races, many political prognosticators say that President Barack Obama will be forced to move “toward the center” if he or his party are to have any chance of maintaining their grip on power.
Astute man that he is, Obama appears to recognize the exigencies of retaining his seat, which is why he scheduled a meeting with the Republican caucus two days after his State of the Union address.
The purpose of the meeting was to allow Republicans to pose questions that Obama would respond to, in the manner of the British Parliament ““ an approach that, in conception at least, was far removed from the defects of the past year, when cloak-and-dagger was the dominant mode of the legislative process.
For all its noble intentions, however, the meeting panned out very differently, engendering doubts about whether Obama can really adapt himself to post-Massachusetts realities or act to suit the growing political pressures that have been placed on him.
As he tends to do ““ and, to a certain extent, as I suppose he is entitled to do as president ““ Obama used this question and answer session to enumerate his political victories and deflect responsibility for his failures.
To achieve the latter, he pointed to the “gridlock” in Congress, a phenomenon that he seems to believe he is totally detached from.
“I don’t think (the American people) want more gridlock. … I don’t think they want more obstruction. They didn’t send us to Washington to fight each other in some sort of political steel cage match to see who comes out alive. That’s not what they want.”
In the act of berating Congress for tainting the political landscape ““ and, it seems, for foiling his health care initiative ““ he also proposed a cure: bipartisanship, a word reiterated so many times over the past year that it has lost its meaning.
Obama said “bipartisan” or “bipartisanship” seven times during his palaver with the Republicans, so it is safe to say that he still believes it resonates with people.
One can surmise that the president puts little faith in people’s ability to remember or to know when they’re being duped, which is exactly what he tries to do by placing the blame on Congress for his own mismanagement.
That raises the issue of his faith in Republicans. On this point, we recommend not taking Obama at his word, and instead looking at his words in their entirety.
Early on, Obama made the case for the indispensability of across-the-aisle debate: “I’m a big believer not just in the value of a loyal opposition, but in its necessity. Having differences of opinion, having a real debate about matters of domestic policy and national security ““ and that’s not something that’s only good for our country, it’s absolutely essential.”
In reading between the strophes of his philosophizing, however, we discover a man who is more intransigent in his partisan convictions. Later in his opening remarks, he gave a classical liberal’s diagnosis of the political process.
“So we have a track record of working together. … But … on some very big things, we’ve seen party-line votes that … were disappointing. Let’s start with our efforts to jump-start the economy last winter when we were losing 700,000 jobs a month. Our financial system teetered on the brink of collapse, and the threat of a second Great Depression loomed large. I didn’t understand then, and I still don’t understand, why we got opposition in this caucus for almost $300 billion in badly needed tax cuts for the American people or COBRA coverage … or opposition to putting Americans to work.”
The gist here is that Republican recalcitrance ““ and nothing having to do with either Obama or liberals ““ potentially pushed the country further toward “collapse” by obstructing the well-meaning proposals that Obama and his sage counselors devised. This is not the response of someone who has no deeply rooted set of ideological convictions.
Falling victim to this rhetorical subterfuge was our first mistake. It was seductive two years ago because it was pronounced at a time of great popular disillusionment with the Republican Party, which had come to be associated with cabalism and a lust for power.
But when people gave Obama an inch, he took a mile. Instead of rebuilding trust in government, he amplified it by consistently overlooking worthy opposition. On Monday, four days after promising anew to “rein in our debt,” he unveiled the largest budget in the history of the world ““ $3.8 trillion for fiscal year 2011.
Now, with health care having been consumed by fire, Washington’s new priority is quelling unemployment ““ a task that has been a low point of many Democratic administrations and is particularly poorly suited to Obama’s priorities.
What are being called “new” strategies for dealing with this problem still rely primarily on old ways of thinking. For instance, the “jobs bill” that Obama touted in his State of the Union address is essentially just a rehashing of the ideas of the old “stimulus” packages and will undoubtedly be just as ineffective.
The bank tax and renewed calls for taxes on executive compensation have even less to recommend them. The punitive levies that those measures place on financial institutions and their employees will only end up punishing the millions of people who depend on them and eliminating talent we desperately need.
Obama apparently does not realize that the unalloyed liberalism of his policies ““ old and new ““ is the very antithesis of “bipartisanship” and compromise. That he tries to convince people otherwise reveals a faux sense of solicitude for these ideals and a divorcement from reality that is hard to believe.
Fortunately, people are catching on.
E-mail Pherson at apherson@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.