[Originally published in The Randolph Herald.]
Quite apart from whether the passage of the new economic stimulus package will do much for the job creation, just think what it has done to President Obama’s long-held hope for a new sense of bipartisanship in Washington.
Many Americans voted for Barak Obama for President because he promised he would change the way Washington does business. There would no longer be the bitter disputes that characterized the old battles between the Democrats and Republicans. The newly elected Democrats would not run roughshod over the Republicans, as the Republicans had done to them during the Democrats’ long years out of power. “Bipartisanship” would be the new Obama mantra.
Now, in the first test of this new bipartisan approach to governance, we have the first old style partisan battle of Obama’s presidency. And it took less than two weeks to get it started! However, there is a slightly new twist here.
We appear to have both a traditional ideological battle between Republicans and Democrats, as well as a practical tiff between the White House and the House Democrats.
The long suffering and clearly angry Democratic majority in the House initiated the bill that kicked off the present dispute. It contained a number of items on the Democratic wish list, items that the Democrats had been unable to pass in the face of a Republican majority or a presidential veto. Many of those items bring little promise of job creation.
Unless you consider the Democratic House leadership to be inordinately stupid, you would have to conclude that they knew exactly what they were doing and that they did it because they saw in the urgency surrounding the economic stimulus package the opportunity to turn their previously thwarted dreams into reality.
If you match that up against President Obama’s clearly articulated goal of restoring bipartisanship to Washington, then it is clear that the Democrats who supported the bill as written saw that support as more important than supporting their new president – the one, incidentally, who brought so many of them to Washington on his coattails.
Nevertheless, House Democrats, smarting from years of suffering in the political wilderness, put together a bill that pretty much used up their wish list of legislation designed to benefit their base. The opportunity presented by the financial and economic crises was far too tempting to let pass. Perhaps they thought that in the spirit of bipartisanship, the bill would have to be passed and that in order to not look partisan and mean spirited, the Republicans would have to go along, thus ensuring the passage of all those Democratic wish list items.
Of course, the problem is that the Republicans refused to play along and called the bill what they saw it to be, a new pork barrel. They really played their hand well and many Americans, Democrats included, became concerned that the bill was pure pork politics and not the stimulus package everyone was looking for.
For the sake of a few billion dollars of legislation favoring their base, the House Democrats tried to slip this one past the Republicans and failed. In the process, they have seriously jeopardized President Obama’s hopes for more Congressional cooperation on upcoming legislation designed to cope with the critically important economic problems that face us.
The sad part of the situation is that thanks to an overly partisan Democratic approach in the writing of the bill in the House, President Obama’s hopes for real bipartisan approach to governance has taken a heavy hit. Given the recent comments of virtually all the Republicans on the Hill, it would appear that hopes for future bipartisan cooperation are increasingly dim.
Will the three “liberal” Republican Senators who signed onto the stimulus package be eager to support the Democrats again? That’s unlikely, unless, of course, the package as passed solves all our problems. Given the probability that no one in either party really knows for sure how to deal with our economic problems, this seems highly unlikely.
No, the Democrats have clearly forgotten how to wield power to their own advantage. In forgetting those old, immutable lessons, their impatience has seriously threatened their own legislative hopes for the future.
Haviland Smith is a former long-time resident of Brookfield. He lives now in Williston.
