There is no such thing as bipartisanship in this country

One may wish to give Barack Obama credit for at least trying to reach across the aisle and include Republicans in passing a stimulus plan. You'd be tempted to do so were it not for the very real and very dire circumstances in which far too many Americans find themselves these days. You'd be tempted to do so were it not for the fact that Republicans have long made clear that for Republicans, it's their way or no way. And if it means that the middle class slides inexorably into poverty, well, so be it. Because the Republicans will take care of themselves and their own -- and no one else. It has always been thus, and after seeing Karl Rove's vision of a permanent Republican majority collapse, they refuse to see it as a temporary setback. They are bound and determined to have their restoration, perhaps one starring yet another member of the Bush family, and if the middle class has to be sacrificed on the altar of the Republican quest for power, well, so be it.

Many of us already knew that any such efforts to reach out would result in failure. Some might call us cynics, but how can you be anything else when you see Republicans like Richard Shelby insisting that an effort to rescue an economy already sliding into depression will put the country on "a road to financial disaster." Where do these guys think we are now?

When my mother heard that Barack Obama was going to host a dinner honoring John McCain before his inauguration she called me in tears -- furious that Obama would lift a finger to honor a man whose campaign was as filthy as the one that John McCain ran. I was furious too, but what I told her was that I had never expected a progressive dream administration from this guy; that he had to do this because as the first black president, he had to assuage the fears of people whose support he was going to need in order to enact anything. I didn't believe it myself, but the thought of admitting that early on that what we were going to see was four more years of Democrats cringing in the corner in a fetal position, led by a guy who no matter how much the other kids beat him up, still believed that if he were just nicer to them, they would stop.

And so here we are, with a stimulus package that was never big enough gutted to the point that it's doubtful to accomplish anything -- sacrificed on the altar of bipartisanship. And if you read Hullabaloo these days, you'll see that Obama's efforts have not mollified a press that until his last year in office, advocated mindless acceptance of everything George W. Bush wanted but when the president is a Democrat, insists that his job first and foremost is to mollify Republicans.

Can you ever recall a time when the losing party cleaned the winning party's clock the way the Republicans did last week, with the help of their friends in the media?

Barack Obama has stacked his administration, especially his economic team, with Friends of Republicans, leaving guys like Joseph Stiglitz, Nouriel Roubini, and Paul Krugman -- who have been right about everything so far -- on the shelf. Perhaps if he had listened to these guys and stuck to his guns he wouldn't already be being regarded as a pushover by Republicans. And Krugman, for one, has had quite enough of bitpartisanship, thank you very much:

What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

[snip]

A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.

Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.

Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.

[snip]

All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.

But how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.

After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.

Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

Mr. Obama’s postpartisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan.

And Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach. Not one Republican voted for the House version of the stimulus plan, which was, by the way, better focused than the original administration proposal.

In the Senate, Republicans inveighed against “pork” — although the wasteful spending they claimed to have identified (much of it was fully justified) was a trivial share of the bill’s total. And they decried the bill’s cost — even as 36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama plan with $3 trillion, that’s right, $3 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.

So Mr. Obama was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists. And the centrists, predictably, extracted a pound of flesh — not, as far as anyone can tell, based on any coherent economic argument, but simply to demonstrate their centrist mojo. They probably would have demanded that $100 billion or so be cut from anything Mr. Obama proposed; by coming in with such a low initial bid, the president guaranteed that the final deal would be much too small.

Such are the perils of negotiating with yourself.

And who was it that led the charge to gut this stimulus bill in the Senate? None other than John McCain, the honoree at that pre-inauguration dinner, who is bound and determined to carry a grudge against the man who vanquished him on November 4 for as many years as it takes:

As a candidate, McCain cast himself as a uniter of the two parties, willing to buck his GOP colleagues and reach across the aisle to build compromises on immigration, campaign finance and other hot-button issues.

"I have that record and the scars to prove it. Sen. Obama does not," he said during the campaign, referring to his bipartisan streak.

But this week, with Barack Obama in the White House and McCain back in Congress, the Arizona senator has played a prominent and uncompromising role in rallying Republican opposition to the Democratic majority and its stimulus plan.

McCain did not join the small group of centrists from both parties who worked this week to put together a compromise to let the stimulus bill move forward. Instead, he took to the floor and pushed a Republican alternative that was heavier on tax cuts and offered less government spending than President Obama wants.

McCain secured the support of every Republican. The Senate rejected the plan 57 to 40.

So now the question is this: Are we going to start seeing the smart fighter we know that Barack Obama can be, or are we going to endure four years of this and then see Sarah Palin escorted into the White House by angry Americans with pitchforks and torches, who will have already forgotten the Republicans who got us into this mess in the first place?