What Happens When You Throw a Bipartisan Party and Half the Guest List Stays Home?

[Demeter]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/change-vs-bipartisanship_b_165144.html




It may or may not have been possible for Barack Obama to continue to blend both of these messages as President. Doing so would have required offering the American people a compelling, honest, blemishes-and-all story about what has happened between the New Deal of FDR and the Raw Deal of George W. Bush. That story might have begun with a description of Roosevelt's pragmatic, experimental approach to leadership in a time of economic crisis--essentially, "let's make our best guesses, see what works, and keep what works and discard what doesn't"--and how that led to unemployment insurance, Social Security, roads, rural electricity, federal insurance for our bank deposits, and a host of other programs we have today that guarantee our economic safety in troubled times--and most importantly, how it put able-bodied, hard-working Americans back to work. The President could then have gone on to describe how that spirit of experimental pragmatism often got lost over the next 50 years, as constituencies grew for programs that were no longer working so well and politicians refused to make hard choices, leading Ronald Reagan to tap into a public sentiment that too much money was leaking out of the bucket into which they were pouring their tax dollars. He could have described how ultimately Reagan's revolution degenerated into Bush's disastrous return to Hoover economics, with its blind faith in unregulated markets and corporate greed, and how the rallying cries of "tax and spend" and "government is the problem, not the solution" have prevented us from investing in America for 30 years, leaving us dangerously reliant on foreign oil, behind other nations in educating our children, and vulnerable to all of the dangers faced by a nation with a collapsing infrastructure and virtually no protections against natural disasters like floods and hurricanes because we have failed to invest in both the infrastructure to keep our cities and towns safe and the energy solutions that could protect our endangered atmosphere. He could give that speech today, and it would likely reach voters in the political center whose support he needs to maintain if he is to prevent those on the right from galvanizing support for obstructionism.

But a failure to distinguish alternative meanings of bipartisanship, an apparent miscalculation about the political and ideological extremism of the Republicans left in Washington in the wake of the Democratic landslides of the last two electoral cycles, and an unwillingness to fight back when attacked led the Obama administration unwittingly to participate in a setback to both change and bipartisanship, as they urged Democratic lawmakers to cut and paste elements of the conservative ideology that has unhinged our economy into a package designed to resuscitate it and emboldened the Republican leadership in a way that has sown the seeds of renewed partisan polarization. Whereas two weeks ago substantially more Americans supported the President's recovery plan than opposed it, according to Rasmussen polls, by early last week those numbers had reversed, with support or opposition falling squarely along party lines. The situation has become dire enough that the President has wisely chosen to go on a campaign-style tour in support of the measure.

The problem lies in the way the White House has attempted to offer a bipartisan solution to the nation's problems. They could have construed "bipartisanship" in one of several ways. One is pragmatism, taking good ideas from wherever they come, and making clear to Republicans that if they have ideas other than the ones that had led us over the precipice over the last several years (and several Senate Republicans have, in fact, offered constructive suggestions), the President's door was open. This is precisely what the public wanted from the new President...A second meaning of transcending partisanship is to end to the politics of personal destruction and attacks on the other side's patriotism and integrity that we have seen since the Republicans opened fire on the Clintons in the 1990s and which they used effectively to quell Democratic opposition to every ill-begotten, unconstitutional, and illegal action undertaken by the Bush administration, from torture to wiretapping to the politicization of the Justice Department. Our polling data showed that the public clearly had a strong desire for this form of bipartisanship as well.

President Obama has clearly made tremendous efforts to achieve both of these forms of bipartisanship, and for that he deserves high marks. But he has also implicitly adopted a third construal of the term, which not only undercuts his promise of change but fails to recognize that the public overwhelmingly elected not only a Democratic President but supermajorities of Democrats in both houses of Congress, and they did this for a reason: They did not want a continuation of the failed Republican policies and ideology of the last eight years. The third meaning of "bipartisan" the President embraced was to invite an ideological fringe minority not only to the table (and to Superbowl at the White House) but to the microphone, allowing them to get their message out more loudly than the message of both the President and the governing majority, and to give them unwarranted power to amend or veto legislation for the indefinite future--all while they were taking potshots at the man who magnanimously gave them a seat at the table. This construal of "bipartisan" runs the danger of producing legislation that seeks the "golden mean" between truth and falsehood, good policies and failed ones, and exhorts Democratic legislators who were elected to enact the best policies they possibly can to "split the difference" between good ideas by some of the best economic minds in the country and the failed ideas of the rigid ideological descendants of Herbert Hoover. There is, in fact, nothing John McCain has to offer as words of wisdom on the economy that President Obama has not already heard in McCain's three decades crusading to block or dismantle the kind of federal regulations that could have prevented the current crisis, and McCain represents the left wing of what's left of his party in Washington.

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The reality is that if 56 or 57 Senators vote for the recovery package, there is nothing that could more effectively put the Republicans back on the defensive where the President should have left them than a filibuster. All the President would need to do would be to tell the stories of some of the people from the states of the filibustering Senators who had just lost their jobs, homes, or health care as their elected representatives were obstructing passage of a recovery package and the filibuster would be over as fast as you can say "the party is over."



Drew Westen, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University, founder of Westen Strategies, and author of "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation."