Absolutely right, Steve. I've been watching all this astounded that no one else has made the point you make so well here.

And when, oh when, are people going to stop calling insurance programs entitlement programs.

I think that Broder is just too stupid to recognize that the difference between republicans and democrats is in a willingness to see the point of view of the other side and compromise. Republicans do not often deviate from their obsession with ideology, and therefore always tend to vote as a block. Broder should realize this by now. Perhaps he needs to seek out a new career, perhaps as a janitor or custodial engineer.

Obama was prepared to make all kinds of compromises; what concessions are Republicans prepared to make? GOP leaders have acknowledged they can't just be "the party of 'no.'" So when might we see them start to say "yes"?

Great, great post Steve. I will consider this my talking point for the week.

Homer

No shit.

Good points Steve as usually the case. But to indulge in some paraleipsis, I don't need to remind readers that the way the Republicans have gamed the media system and through corporate ownership, the deep operational issues will be framed in terms of Republican viewpoint and needs (yet with enough socially liberal and personality cult buzz in the liberal direction to seemingly provide balance.)

Indeed--here, here.

When will the 'liberal media' deign to discuss this issue from the other side--that is, why is it the Republicans cannot seem to work in bipartisan fashion? When will we hear and see--as repeatedly as we've seen the opposite--that it is the Republicans who are not acting in good faith, and who are obstructing others' good faith efforts?

Could this be because the lion's share of the media is owned and operated by Republican-leaning and funded parties? That the fourth estate is (and has been for a long time) no longer the largely independent, investigative, and impartial entity that it is supposed to be?

We need not just a political revolution, but a media one as well.

Couldn't agree more.
There's a great antidote to Broder's pap with what Frank Rich wrote today about the same subject.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/opinion/01rich.html

"Perhaps... " yeah, especially if it sounds like peter falk in a greasy trenchcoat mit cigar butt in piehole...

but "Perhaps" the proverbial bird of paradise is about to fly out of david broder's ass, too...

So when might we see them start to say "yes"?

That's a rhetorical question, right?

• Tax cuts
  
• Overturning of Roe
  
• Invasion of Iran
  
• Tax cuts
  
• Repeal of VRA
  
• Tax cuts
  
• Pulling EFCA from the legislative calendar
  
• Tax cuts
  
• Invasion of Syria

When -- and only then -- the Democrats put these confidence-building steps in place, the GOP will then know it's safe to negotiate with them.

We know from the campaign what the GOP position on negotiations without preconditions with hostile governments is.

Forget Broder. Next to him in the Post this morning is a piece by Robert Reich that contains the best analysis of our economic woes since Paul Krugman's writings at the time of the inauguration. Reich cites the differences between economic "cyclists" who believe our problems are all tied to the housing bubble and that everything will be fine once Wall St. is bailed out, and "structuralists" who see the rot going back to late 70s' embrace of Friedmanian economics, leading to the stagnation of the middle class and a flow of the nation's wealth to the top 1 per cent on a scale not seen since 1928. His solution is more government investment in education, particularly higher education, innovative sustainable growth projects (so much for Steele's "Government doesn't create jobs"), and a radical, to Wall St. types anyway, revision of the tax code to favor the middle class and get that glut of money the 1 per cent holds on to moving into the economy again.

It's a damn shame Reich was passed over by Obama's boys for Secretary of the Treasury in favor of the Street insider Geithner. As usual, I'm saddened, but not surprised. Reich and Krugman's theories should be heard by every politician in the country and debated everywhere. They're winners, politically and economically, with everyone but, of course, the rich. Which brings us back around to campaign financing and the uncomfortable question: how much change does Obama really represent?

"It seems the burden of proof is all out of whack here. It's not the president's responsibility to make the rejected (and dejected) minority party happy. It's not Obama's job to find out what unhinged, far-right Republicans want to be happy, and then deliver."

Excellent post! I hope it provokes a broader conversation of exactly this point. The Republicans have made it clear that they are going to be obstructionists, actively seeking the failure of President Obama's policies, so screw them. Let's get a stimulus package that delivers a progressive America. We won this election after all. If the reverse were true, had McCain won, would Republicans be seeking to placate Democrats?

Just translate "bipartisanship" as "agreeing with a bunch of unreconstructed spoiled overpaid inbred elitist courtiers" and it makes more sense. The whole election thing, apart from being a rollicking good horse race and opportunity to bore everyone even further with their amazing insight into their own colons, is really just a sideshow for them and doesn't mean anything about, you know, who gets to run the country. They do, of course.

The fact that the Republican party platform tends to intersect nicely with the views of a bunch of unreconstructed spoiled overpaid inbred elitist courtiers is an exercise for the reader.

I think what is always astonishing in these broderian excursions into analysis is the element of time. Its like he's an old fashioned structuralist anthropologist who lays out the balanced elements of a system that must always reproduce itself, in balance, as he sees it, to work. But the political system isn't a balanced system, like a baseball game which has always the same number of players and whose players play by a limited set of rules. Its a dynamic system in which the rules stay the same but the players grow and change and each previous "set" affects the next set. Obama's offer to reach out to the Republicans had some implicit preconditions--that it was time limited, for example. That means that you only reach out once or twice, then you go about your business. That *is* evidence of good faith bipartisanship. Its like a market negotiation. I don't get why the ever pro capitalist stooge broder continues to pretend that this isn't so. You make a friendly offer once or twice, in the market, and if it is refused you move on to find new negotiating partners. The republicans have nothing to sell, really, except their votes and if they aren't willing to sell them they remove themselves from negotiations. Its that simple. Sorry to mix my metaphors and my analogies but its quite an interesting set of mixed ideas broder et al display about politics and political systems and I think it goes way, way, back.

The answer to your question about "what are Republicans going to do to play a productive role in the process?" is NOTHING. As Frank Rich pointed out to day in his column as he referenced the Repub. leaders, THEY GOT NOTHING. They keep screaming about tax cuts and eliminating pork. That's it. When you got nothing all you can do is either attack the other guy's ideas or shut up. And we know they aren't going to shut up.

Obama asked them for ideas and got nothing but same old crap that doesn't work. So my hope is that Obama says f them and moves ahead without them. But he needs to explain to the American people why he is doing that and why his ideas are better; he did it during the campaign and he needs to do it again. Otherwiase the screaming know nothings will undermine the whole thing.

Two things Broder doesn't tell you when he compares Obama's expressed desire for bipartisanship to Reagan's is that Reagan had no choice but to win a bipartisan majority for his regressive tax reforms.

1) Republicans were not in control of Congress. They only had a majority in the Senate. The House remained in Democratic control throughout his presidency. (In the last two years of Reagan's presidency, the Senate was firmly back in Democratic control and the House Democratic majority averaged 50 seats each year from 1982 through 1988.)

2) Reagan's economic plans were gratuitous (tax cuts for upper middle class and the rich) compared to the plan that Congress must pass now to reverse the collapse of the domestic economy.

Broder's an old man completely out of touch with today's reality.

Aw, Broder's a hack.

Bi-partisanship is just code for do-nothing, change-nothing, preserve the status quo.

To Broder, the GOP is the natural governing party. For him, no crisis or issue should ever intrude on his Washington-as-cozy-village comfort zone except as a catalyst for insider gossip.

Two observations. First, people have been saying for a long time that Obama needs to call the Republicans on their BS, lay it out for the public that they screwed up and he won, and so on. But his not having done so yet is really paying dividends -- the public now sees him as serious and generous, and the zero-supporting-vote Republicans as intransigent and obstructionist. I trust his timing on this issue -- he'll call them out (as he just called out Wall Street) when it will bear maximum political fruit.

Second, quite apart from the many analyses that have observed that the Republicans have everything to gain and nothing to lose politically by opposing Obama, at least at first, from the point of view of Republican orthodoxy, they have no need to compromise -- much less apologize -- because they have done nothing wrong. Tax cuts are the solution; government spending is bad. The current economic situation has its origins in the early Clinton years; Bush is merely the victim of bad luck. Entitlements and other welfare-state money-sinks are steps down the slippery slope of socialism. The recent election is due to a confluence of bad luck and the American people's inability to understand what really matters in economics.

I think eventually Obama's gonna have to do a Medici on one of them -- draw him, quarter him, and put his head on a pike outside the White House as a lesson for the others -- but that time has not yet come. I will, however, keep a bag of popcorn around.

Nice post! Extension of this point for the long term: when will we get a responsible Opposition Party and what would such a thing look like? The present situation (like the one in 1933) helps define an answer to the latter query: the question is no longer whether we "believe in" government or in the utopian fantasy of pure free markets. Every reasonable, mature person agrees that, in the real world, only government investment and regulation produces a livable, sustainable, fair capitalism. The real issue is where and how you define the role of the public and of public interest in such an essentially mixed economy.

Rich is right: the current Repugs are out of ideas. And that's because they still represent the old debate and the old utopia which denies any legitimate role to public investment or regulation. Responsibility is on their shoulders to grow up and join the adult debate. Otherwise they can rot on the dustheap of history!

You quote Broder: "He wants to be like Ronald Reagan, steering his first economic measures through a Democratic House in 1981, not Bill Clinton, passing his first budget in 1993 without a single Republican vote. The first way leads to long-term success; the second foretells the early loss of control."

Oh, David. Reagan's "supply-side" tax cuts started us down the road to trillions of dollars in debt and national insolvency. Clinton's budget gave us a chance to get our nation back on a sound financial footing -- which Dubya and his Repub majorities in Congress blew all to hell.

Of course, it does all depend on your definition of "success" and "loss of control"!

Broder: "He wants to be like Ronald Reagan, steering his first economic measures through a Democratic House in 1981, not Bill Clinton, passing his first budget in 1993 without a single Republican vote."

The big difference wasn't between Reagan's and Clinton's persuasive skills or willingness to compromise. The crucial difference was between the willingness of a healthy fraction of the 1981 Democratic opposition to work with Reagan, and the total unwillingness of the 1993 GOP opposition to give an inch.

The GOP opposition of 2009 is like one of these things but not the other.

When do I expect Broder to take notice of this? Maybe in the year 2525.

...from the point of view of Republican orthodoxy, they have no need to compromise -- much less apologize -- because they have done nothing wrong. Tax cuts are the solution; government spending is bad. The current economic situation has its origins in the early Clinton years; Bush is merely the victim of bad luck.

Yes, good point...which is why the second half of the "failed Bush policies" message that resonated during the campaign must be: "It wasn't uniquely Bush who was the problem; it was Republican policies." Right now the GOP is busily trying to pretend that Bush failed conservatism rather than conservatism failing the U.S. We shouldn't let them.

Another point worth making is that the political system was simply different in the early 1980s. The two political parties were not as polarized as they are today. There were lots of conservative Democrats (and for that matter, moderate Republicans) back then, so getting conservative Democrats to back Reagan's conservative economic proposals was not particularly difficult.

Today, however, there are so few liberal Republicans that it simply is not possible for any kind of even moderately liberal legislative package (even if it were shepherded by the cleverest parliamentarian) to make it through the House while receiving Republican support. Broder's thinking reflects a time when there was less polarization between the parties, and where bipartisanship was more possible. He's trapped in the past.

Broder should spend less time looking at Reagan's first budget, which was only bipartisan because all the Dixiecrats hadn't fled to the Republican Party yet, and more time considering the time Newt Gingrich closed down the Federal Government. If Obama succeeds in projecting an image of compromise and accommodation while the Republicans keep a united front of opposition up, where the only basis for unity is blind partisanship, Obama wins. Fortunately the majority of American voters are not complete idiots. It appears that only about 30% fall into that category.

As David Neiwert said:

In fact, all this shouting is just cover for Republicans' greatest and deepest fear: That Obama in fact will succeed. That progressive "socialism" (as they call it) actually will make people's lives better, heal the economy, and get the nation back on its feet. That the nation's working people will finally get a clear view of which side is on their side. That the public will finally see that not only is Conservatism an abject failure, it's a fraud.

In the end, they are such deeply invested ideologues that they would rather see the nation fail than see that reality reach fruition.

If you try to negotiate with them without recognizing this, you are going to run into problems.

Here's another way of putting it--

If Edward Kennedy had somehow won his presidential bid in 1980 and had sought to pass a liberal stimulus package as a way of dealing with the recession of the early 1980s, he, I bet, would have been able to pick up the support of a number of moderate to liberal Republicans from the northeast or great lakes area, and maybe Broder then would have praised Kennedy for his ability to work across the aisle.

But Broder doesn't seem to realize that today there are very few moderate Republicans left, and almost no liberal ones. So the only way Obama could win the support of Republicans is to put forward a genuinely conservative package--tax cuts and nothing else.

Steve, I concur with the others, this is a great post. To take it a step further, what Obama must do is document the obstruction, pass a good stimulus package with or without GOP support, and then campaign in the midterms against the GOP obstruction. The argument is a simple one for Obama:I campaigned in 2008 on a promise of a post-partisan Washington and you voted for a post-partisan Washington. I have done my part. I have extended my hand to Congressional Republicans. They chose not to shake it. They chose rather to slap my face. Now I must ask you to help me create that post-partisan Washington that you yearn for. Only you can give me a post-partisan congress.

Broder is as usual all ass backwards on this. We need to learn to respect the deep found principles of the Repubs. There is no good reason to spend stimulus money where the Senators and Congresspersons are both sure it is the wrong thing to do and that it will slow economic recovery. So we pass a stimulus bill that leaves their states and districts free to recover on their own. It's just the right thing to do.

Obama asked them for ideas and got nothing but same old crap that doesn't work. So my hope is that Obama says f them and moves ahead without them.

He played good cop with the GOP, and they didn't get the message. Now it's time to play bad cop.

To take it a step further, what Obama must do is document the obstruction, pass a good stimulus package with or without GOP support, and then campaign in the midterms against the GOP obstruction.

Obama's admiration of Reagan is due not to ideology, but to communication -- he got his point across to the public better than any president since FDR. Obama has the skills to do likewise; he might not be able to win that many seats away from Republicans, but there are a few districts outside the rock-red Deep South where he might be able to further isolate the GOP.

That's a wonderful idea, Glen. Preferential spending on stimulus and relief in Democratic states would provide a wonderful test of Democratic and Republican theories of government.

If Obama and the Democrats had any sense they would use this example to prove it is the Republicans who refuse to be bipartisan. Democrats should REPEATEDLY point out that not only did Obama go out of his way to meet with Republican leaders, the bill contained some of what they wanted - tax cuts. The blame needs to be placed where it belongs - and has belonged since the 90's - squarely on the shoulders of the Republicans so that Obama can get on with the business of fixing the mess they got us into instead of continuing to pander to them.

I don't have much hope of this. Democrats should have used the fact that the budget bill they passed during the Clinton administration without any Republican vote was what led to the balancing of the budget. Instead they cowered in the corner and let themselves be blamed for not playing nicely with others - others who were in the wrong. Democrats are a bunch of cowards.

If Obama and the Democrats had any sense they would use this example to prove it is the Republicans who refuse to be bipartisan. Democrats should REPEATEDLY point out that not only did Obama go out of his way to meet with Republican leaders, the bill contained some of what they wanted - tax cuts. The blame needs to be placed where it belongs - and has belonged since the 90's - squarely on the shoulders of the Republicans so that Obama can get on with the business of fixing the mess they got us into instead of continuing to pander to them.

I don't have much hope of this. Democrats should have used the fact that the budget bill they passed during the Clinton administration without any Republican vote was what led to the balancing of the budget. Instead they cowered in the corner and let themselves be blamed for not playing nicely with others - others who were in the wrong. Democrats are a bunch of cowards.

One thing I have learned while observing and dealing with other people:

You cannot help someone who only wants things their way.

The neocons have had their way for the last eight years. While they cannot be blamed for everything that's wrong right now, they sure were responsible for a lot of it, and aided and abetted the robber barons in totally goosing the system by turning a blind eye to the shenanigans of those who should be "smart enough to regulate themselves".

The neocons have fouled their own nests and still insist on having their way. It does no one any favor, including the neocons, to let them have their way. If they don't learn that they will be relegated to the dustbin of history.

Given all the Republicans who crossed over and voted Democrat up and down ticket, we do have a bipartisan majority. It's called the democratic party.

Broder's fundamental error is in imagining there are still congressional Republicans in the mold of Howard Baker and Bob Dole -- or even more recent examples such as John Warner and Chris Shays -- with whom Democrats can cut deals on any legislation other than pork.

In fact, the congressional GOP is now almost entirely composed of legislative tacticians who use poison-pill amendments, filibusters, holds on nominees, objections to unanimous-consent motions and other parliamentary stunts to obstruct, delay and confuse.

Obama and the Democratic congressional leaders need to make it clear that it's up to the Republicans -- especially "moderates" such as Snowe and Specter -- to demonstrate their willingness to negotiate in good faith and then vote in favor of the resulting bills.

And put a fairly tight deadline on deal-making: After, say, the end of March, it's a straight-up fight between Democratic progress vs. Republican obstruction, with Democratic leaders constantly citing examples of GOP-engineered gridlock making a bad economic situation worse, and voters delivering their verdict in November 2010.