JKD
09-15-2009, 11:58 AM
The great myth: bipartisanship
By JIM VANDEHEI & MIKE ALLEN
President Barack Obama is on the warpath over myths and distortions about health care reform, but he’s spreading one of his own: that there’s any chance of genuinely bipartisan health care legislation reaching his desk this fall.
In truth, Democratic offers to reach across the aisle — and Republican demands that they do so — are largely a charade, performed for the benefit of a huge bloc of practical-minded voters who hunger for the two parties to work together and are mystified that it never seems to happen.
The answer is hardly a mystery to Obama or his adversaries. They know that the political incentives driving them toward conflict are vastly stronger than any impulses they may personally harbor for conciliation and compromise.
This ritual — publicly trumpeting the virtues of bipartisanship while privately navigating a Washington status quo with a bias for partisan combat — is playing out across virtually every major issue the White House and Congress confront.
White House officials privately acknowledge they would be lucky to get 1 percent of Republican lawmakers to vote for a final health plan. Right now, they would be happy to get just one vote: that of Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine.
From the GOP perspective, most lawmakers have long since calculated that their most ardent supporters so dislike Obama and an expanded government role in health care that they would rather see the president fail — or have health care legislation pass with all Democratic votes — than to have Republican legislators engage with the White House to affect the bill.
From Obama’s perspective, he would be delighted if he won significant Republican support — but he does not want it bad enough to substantially scale back his policy goals or risk alienating Democratic congressional leaders.
But White House and congressional polling shows independents demand the public appearance of cooperation. Hence, the many nods to bipartisanship in Obama’s Wednesday night speech to Congress: replacing “acrimony with civility,” bringing “the best ideas of both parties together,” incorporating “ideas from senators and congressmen, from Democrats and Republicans.”
“If you ask the typical voter out there in a targeted district or state, they want bipartisanship — they want people to work together,” said one Democratic official. “That’s what he ran on. So that’s what Obama’s trying to portray.”
Republicans play the same game for the same reason: It helps set up the other side as stubbornly partisan and appear to finicky independent voters that they are sincere about bipartisanship. In private conversations, Republicans acknowledge the incentives to kill any version of an Obama health plan.
The past three elections have basically clipped off the moderate wing of the GOP, eliminating almost the entire contingent of compromise-minded Republicans in the Northeast. Most of the Republicans left don’t consider the Democratic criticism — that GOP has become “the party of no”— to be much of an insult.
The few GOP moderates left confess their deep frustration.
“It seems like moderation in Washington is a vice,” said Rep. Brian Bilbray, a centrist Republican from California.
“It’s by far the most polarized Congress,” added Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio), another centrist. “We’re sort of a double minority. We’re in a minority and a minority within our own party.”
White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Obama’s overtures are sincere and that he’s spent a lot of time on them. This summer, Emanuel sat with a number of moderate Republicans and then brought them inside for talks with the White House health-reform czar, Nancy Ann DeParle.
Emanuel recalled: “I told them: ‘You’re not going to win everything, but tell me: What would you like to see in the bill?’”
Emanuel, not surprisingly, puts all the blame on the GOP. “Today, I haven’t seen a single Republican say: ‘Here’s what I liked in what the president said. Here’s what I didn’t like,’” he said the evening after Obama’s speech. “The goal posts get continually moved.”
LaTourette says the bigger problem is that the White House “outsources” the actual bill writing to Democrats on the Hill, who basically hang a “you’re not welcome” sign on the door.
House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia told POLITICO that Democrats seem to “need a straw man to blame for their inability or lack of leadership on health care.”
“From the stimulus bill forward, I don’t think that they have been very honest and sincere in their desire to want to work with us,” he complained. “It has essentially been a one-way street. The fact is, they control everything, and they haven’t been able to put a bill together that satisfies their membership or their base.”
There are plenty of reasons that bipartisanship gets talked about more than it gets practiced. Start with a redistricting process that allows the two parties to conspire to make a big chunk of House seats virtual locks for one party or the other, meaning the typical member has scant reason to gravitate to the ideological center. Add to that the decision by activists in both parties to increasingly target centrists in primary fights — giving ideologues an even stronger hand.
One vivid sign of the times has been the GOP massacre in the Northeast. It wasn’t long ago — the 106th Congress of nine years ago to be precise — that Republicans held 37 House seats and eight Senate seats in the Northeast (our count includes the New England states plus New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland).
Today, there are 17 House Republicans, most of them in the conservative rural areas of those states and three senators.
But the problem transcends numbers. The Senate, which despite its public reputation as the reasonable, statesmanlike chamber, has been indisputably more partisan the past decade, in part because so many House members are graduating to the upper chamber and bringing their tactics with them. This is true for both parties.
The House itself seems to grow more absurdly partisan with each passing year. Like children screaming, “he did it first,” party leaders keep making it harder for the out-of-power party to have its voice heard in the legislative process — and justifying it by saying that’s how they we’re treated in the past.
Roll all of this together, and douse it with a new media culture that guarantees plenty of cable TV time and fundraising success for the most flamboyantly confrontational figures, and the partisan fire burns wildly.
With no clear national leader in elected office, talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, TV personalities such as Glenn Beck and websites such as the Drudge Report are dominating the GOP. They have much more power than John Boehner or Mitch McConnell to drive a story narrative — or get conservative activists worked up.
A similar dynamic is playing out on the left, too. The Huffington Post, the fast-growing and highly influential site for liberals, and the most popular figures on MSNBC in prime time such as Keith Olbermann are often popularly caricatured as being in the tank for Obama. That is often true.
But it is also true that liberal commentators have criticized Obama for being too accommodating. Like the echo chamber on the right, they thrive on partisan fights, reward partisan sniping and make it harder for party leaders to seek common ground.
“So they’re bringing on people who are very polarizing, very conservative or very liberal. ... Newspapers highlight writers and columnists who are very opinionated,” says Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware, one of the few moderate Republicans left in the Northeast.
The health care debate has brought all of this into stark relief.
One thing Republicans and Democrats agree on is this: The best way for the GOP to win back the House is do to health care what Democrats did to Social Security and other issues to win control in 2006: Energize the party by creating a unified front in opposition to the White House.
“They’re just trying to run the same playbook,” said a Democratic Hill aide. “The way we took down Social Security, they’re trying to do the same thing with health care. You take down the idea first, and then you go after the president. We went after Social Security privatization first, scaring seniors. That injured the president, and we came back.”
It is possible there won’t be a single Republican vote in the House — zero out of 177 for those keeping score at home — for the Obama health plan, even if he compromises on the public option and other controversial components.
The Senate is hardly more promising. Consider the three Republicans most often mentioned as possible supporters. Sen. Chuck Grassley, normally the compromising type, faces a reelection challenge from someone selling himself as more authentically conservative. The result: Grassley seems less inclined than ever to vote for a bipartisan deal. Sen. Mike Enzi is a conservative from Wyoming, the same intensely rural, intensely conservative soil that produced **** Cheney.
The only realistic target is Snowe, who has signaled that she is gettable.
If Obama succeeds with this one vote, he and other Democrats will hail this as evidence of their commitment to bipartisanship. It is a testament to how frayed Washington has become that anyone would take the boast seriously.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27110.html
By JIM VANDEHEI & MIKE ALLEN
President Barack Obama is on the warpath over myths and distortions about health care reform, but he’s spreading one of his own: that there’s any chance of genuinely bipartisan health care legislation reaching his desk this fall.
In truth, Democratic offers to reach across the aisle — and Republican demands that they do so — are largely a charade, performed for the benefit of a huge bloc of practical-minded voters who hunger for the two parties to work together and are mystified that it never seems to happen.
The answer is hardly a mystery to Obama or his adversaries. They know that the political incentives driving them toward conflict are vastly stronger than any impulses they may personally harbor for conciliation and compromise.
This ritual — publicly trumpeting the virtues of bipartisanship while privately navigating a Washington status quo with a bias for partisan combat — is playing out across virtually every major issue the White House and Congress confront.
White House officials privately acknowledge they would be lucky to get 1 percent of Republican lawmakers to vote for a final health plan. Right now, they would be happy to get just one vote: that of Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine.
From the GOP perspective, most lawmakers have long since calculated that their most ardent supporters so dislike Obama and an expanded government role in health care that they would rather see the president fail — or have health care legislation pass with all Democratic votes — than to have Republican legislators engage with the White House to affect the bill.
From Obama’s perspective, he would be delighted if he won significant Republican support — but he does not want it bad enough to substantially scale back his policy goals or risk alienating Democratic congressional leaders.
But White House and congressional polling shows independents demand the public appearance of cooperation. Hence, the many nods to bipartisanship in Obama’s Wednesday night speech to Congress: replacing “acrimony with civility,” bringing “the best ideas of both parties together,” incorporating “ideas from senators and congressmen, from Democrats and Republicans.”
“If you ask the typical voter out there in a targeted district or state, they want bipartisanship — they want people to work together,” said one Democratic official. “That’s what he ran on. So that’s what Obama’s trying to portray.”
Republicans play the same game for the same reason: It helps set up the other side as stubbornly partisan and appear to finicky independent voters that they are sincere about bipartisanship. In private conversations, Republicans acknowledge the incentives to kill any version of an Obama health plan.
The past three elections have basically clipped off the moderate wing of the GOP, eliminating almost the entire contingent of compromise-minded Republicans in the Northeast. Most of the Republicans left don’t consider the Democratic criticism — that GOP has become “the party of no”— to be much of an insult.
The few GOP moderates left confess their deep frustration.
“It seems like moderation in Washington is a vice,” said Rep. Brian Bilbray, a centrist Republican from California.
“It’s by far the most polarized Congress,” added Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio), another centrist. “We’re sort of a double minority. We’re in a minority and a minority within our own party.”
White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Obama’s overtures are sincere and that he’s spent a lot of time on them. This summer, Emanuel sat with a number of moderate Republicans and then brought them inside for talks with the White House health-reform czar, Nancy Ann DeParle.
Emanuel recalled: “I told them: ‘You’re not going to win everything, but tell me: What would you like to see in the bill?’”
Emanuel, not surprisingly, puts all the blame on the GOP. “Today, I haven’t seen a single Republican say: ‘Here’s what I liked in what the president said. Here’s what I didn’t like,’” he said the evening after Obama’s speech. “The goal posts get continually moved.”
LaTourette says the bigger problem is that the White House “outsources” the actual bill writing to Democrats on the Hill, who basically hang a “you’re not welcome” sign on the door.
House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia told POLITICO that Democrats seem to “need a straw man to blame for their inability or lack of leadership on health care.”
“From the stimulus bill forward, I don’t think that they have been very honest and sincere in their desire to want to work with us,” he complained. “It has essentially been a one-way street. The fact is, they control everything, and they haven’t been able to put a bill together that satisfies their membership or their base.”
There are plenty of reasons that bipartisanship gets talked about more than it gets practiced. Start with a redistricting process that allows the two parties to conspire to make a big chunk of House seats virtual locks for one party or the other, meaning the typical member has scant reason to gravitate to the ideological center. Add to that the decision by activists in both parties to increasingly target centrists in primary fights — giving ideologues an even stronger hand.
One vivid sign of the times has been the GOP massacre in the Northeast. It wasn’t long ago — the 106th Congress of nine years ago to be precise — that Republicans held 37 House seats and eight Senate seats in the Northeast (our count includes the New England states plus New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland).
Today, there are 17 House Republicans, most of them in the conservative rural areas of those states and three senators.
But the problem transcends numbers. The Senate, which despite its public reputation as the reasonable, statesmanlike chamber, has been indisputably more partisan the past decade, in part because so many House members are graduating to the upper chamber and bringing their tactics with them. This is true for both parties.
The House itself seems to grow more absurdly partisan with each passing year. Like children screaming, “he did it first,” party leaders keep making it harder for the out-of-power party to have its voice heard in the legislative process — and justifying it by saying that’s how they we’re treated in the past.
Roll all of this together, and douse it with a new media culture that guarantees plenty of cable TV time and fundraising success for the most flamboyantly confrontational figures, and the partisan fire burns wildly.
With no clear national leader in elected office, talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, TV personalities such as Glenn Beck and websites such as the Drudge Report are dominating the GOP. They have much more power than John Boehner or Mitch McConnell to drive a story narrative — or get conservative activists worked up.
A similar dynamic is playing out on the left, too. The Huffington Post, the fast-growing and highly influential site for liberals, and the most popular figures on MSNBC in prime time such as Keith Olbermann are often popularly caricatured as being in the tank for Obama. That is often true.
But it is also true that liberal commentators have criticized Obama for being too accommodating. Like the echo chamber on the right, they thrive on partisan fights, reward partisan sniping and make it harder for party leaders to seek common ground.
“So they’re bringing on people who are very polarizing, very conservative or very liberal. ... Newspapers highlight writers and columnists who are very opinionated,” says Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware, one of the few moderate Republicans left in the Northeast.
The health care debate has brought all of this into stark relief.
One thing Republicans and Democrats agree on is this: The best way for the GOP to win back the House is do to health care what Democrats did to Social Security and other issues to win control in 2006: Energize the party by creating a unified front in opposition to the White House.
“They’re just trying to run the same playbook,” said a Democratic Hill aide. “The way we took down Social Security, they’re trying to do the same thing with health care. You take down the idea first, and then you go after the president. We went after Social Security privatization first, scaring seniors. That injured the president, and we came back.”
It is possible there won’t be a single Republican vote in the House — zero out of 177 for those keeping score at home — for the Obama health plan, even if he compromises on the public option and other controversial components.
The Senate is hardly more promising. Consider the three Republicans most often mentioned as possible supporters. Sen. Chuck Grassley, normally the compromising type, faces a reelection challenge from someone selling himself as more authentically conservative. The result: Grassley seems less inclined than ever to vote for a bipartisan deal. Sen. Mike Enzi is a conservative from Wyoming, the same intensely rural, intensely conservative soil that produced **** Cheney.
The only realistic target is Snowe, who has signaled that she is gettable.
If Obama succeeds with this one vote, he and other Democrats will hail this as evidence of their commitment to bipartisanship. It is a testament to how frayed Washington has become that anyone would take the boast seriously.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27110.html