THE MYTH OF BIPARTISANSHIP
Obama’s quest for bipartisanship, in the face of exceedingly discouraging facts, has been so relentless that it suggests less a strategy than a core conviction: reasonable people can be civil, exchange ideas, and, eventually, find points of agreement. But shortly after the Inauguration, when Obama went to Capitol Hill to discuss his stimulus bill with house Republicans, party leaders, informed him before negotiations had even begun that Republicans would vote against it as a bloc. And, within weeks after [Virginia congressman] Tom Perriello took office, freshman Republicans in the House had already stopped returning his phone calls, presumably on instructions from their leadership. Nevertheless, the White House continued to bargain for Republican toes throughout 2009, as if the two sides were negotiating in good faith. Last fall, a Republican senator was invited to discuss health care in the oval office. Obama went a long way toward meeting the senator’s wishes and objections, and then asked, “Now can you support the bill?” The senator said, “Unless I can get ten other Republicans to stand with me, I can’t do it.” In the end, one Republican in the House, and none in the Senate, voted for health-care reform…
Shortly before the 2008 Presidential election, [Obama’s top political advisor David] Axelrod told me that the country’s problems were too grave for Republicans not to cooperate in solving them. When I reminded him of this recently, he said, “Republicans made a very cynical judgment. And that judgment was that no matter what we did, given the depths of the crisis that we were inheriting, that it was going to be a long, hard slog for a while, and there was greater political advantage in standing in opposition, so that the President and the Democrats in Congress would have to take sole authorship of recovery efforts, than to pitch in and help solve the problem. That’s about as blunt an assessment as I can give you.”
Tom Perriello, typically, was even more blunt. He described conservative intransigence, in the face of critical national problems that were the legacy of Republican rule, as “unprecedented soullessness.”
— George Packer, “Obama’s Lost Year,” in this week’s New Yorker
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