What Would a "Bipartisan" Obama Look Like?

 (Hint: A Lot Like the One We're Seeing)

More essentially, however, bipartisanship, as Obama intended the term, should not necessarily be confused for "compromise". Rather, it implied behaving in good-faith -- hearing out opinions from different sides of the aisle and identifying the best ideas regardless of their partisan origin. Bipartisanship, to Obama, was a process rather than an outcome. He could plausibly have been acting in a bipartisan manner, even if he hadn't gotten many Republicans to go along with his agenda.

As Mark Schmitt wrote in his excellent article on the Obama's "theory of change" in December 2007:

What I find most interesting about Obama's approach to bipartisanship is how seriously he takes conservatism. As Michael Tomasky describes it in his review of The Audacity of Hope, "The chapters boil down to a pattern: here's what the right believes about subject X, and here's what the left believes; and while I basically side with the left, I think the right has a point or two that we should consider, and the left can sometimes get a little carried away." What I find fascinating about his language about unity and cross-partisanship is that it is not premised on finding Republicans who agree with him, but on taking in good faith the language and positions of actual conservatism -- people who don't agree with him. That's very different from the longed-for consensus of the Washington Post editorial page.

The reason the conservative power structure has been so dangerous, and is especially dangerous in opposition, is that it can operate almost entirely on bad faith. It thrives on protest, complaint, fear: higher taxes, you won't be able to choose your doctor, liberals coddle terrorists, etc. One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that's not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists -- it's a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It's how you deal with people with intractable demands -- put ‘em on a committee. Then define the committee's mission your way.

Perhaps I'm making assumptions about the degree to which Obama is conscious that his pitch is a tactic of change. But his speeches show all the passion of Edwards or Clinton, his history is as a community organizer and aggressive reformer (I first heard his name 10 years ago because he was on the board of the Joyce Foundation in Chicago, which was the leading supporter of real campaign finance reform at the time, and he has shown extraordinary political skill in drawing Senator Clinton into a clumsy overreaction. If we understand Obama's approach as a means, and not the limit of what he understands about American politics, it has great promise as a theory of change, probably greater promise than either "work for it" or "demand it," although we'll need a large dose of hard work and an engaged social movement as well.

Note that, in Schmitt's explication of Obama's "bipartisanship", we are operating somewhat in the conditional tense. We start by assuming that one's opponents are acting in good faith, extending an olive branch to them and therefore pressing the reset button on the ongoing game of tit-for-tat. If the opponent demonstrates that they are not acting in good faith, however, all bets are off and we are back in the partisan game.

Have the Republicans in Congress been behaving in good faith? It is easy to argue that they have not been:

Exhibit A: The Stimulus Package. The stimulus package proposed by the Obama administration contained less public spending, and more tax cuts, than most liberal economists were calling for. And yet, it received zero Republican votes in the House. Nor did any House Republicans vote for the conference report after the bill had passed the Senate, even though it represented tangible movement toward the Republican position.

Exhibit B: TARP. Sixteen Republican Senators -- Bennett, Bond, Burr, Chambliss, Collins, Coburn, Ensign, Graham, Grassley, Hutchison, Isakson, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Specter and Thune -- voted to withhold the second half of the $700 billion in TARP funds, even though they had voted to authorize the TARP program in October when George W. Bush was still in office. Although one can certainly have changed one's position on TARP based on the facts and circumstances on the ground, it is unlikely that almost half of the remaining Republican delegation would have changed their position within 60 days based on the sanctity of the ideas alone.

Exhibit C: The Budget. One fairly inscrutable characteristic of good faith negotiation is that one is willing to offer an intellectually coherent alternative. This is not something which can be said of the Republican budget, where the numbers, such as they are, don't really add up.

Exhibit D: Nomination Holds. Republican efforts to delay the appointment of two key members of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, as well as his Labor Secretary, are hard to justify from any position other than partisan gamesmanship.

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