By Courting the Republicans, Obama Could Get the Worst of All Worlds

Pity the Republicans.
Defeated in the presidential election, depleted in Congress and
departing from the White House in disgrace, they are a shell of their
previously bullish selves. As much of the country, and indeed the
world, celebrated the inauguration two weeks ago, they looked askance.
It was unclear how many of them realised that one of the reasons this
particular ceremonial theatre was so popular was because they were
leaving the stage.

This weekend they held a conference in
Washington entitled "Republican for a Reason", where it rapidly became
evident that nobody was entirely clear what that reason was. Having set
out as social conservatives, they ended up as conservative socialists -
big spenders who made the first moves towards nationalising the banks.

The
party elected Michael Steele as its national chairman. Promising
outreach and renewal, Steele - the party's first African-American
leader - claimed Republicans have an "image" problem. That's true.
According to a recent Pew survey, the Democrats are enjoying the
greatest favourability advantage it has ever recorded. Republicans
trail in every demographic group apart from white evangelicals.

The
problem with the party's image is that it is a faithful reflection of
its policies and culture. Steele, who once compared stem-cell research
to concentration camp experiments, was the moderate in the election. He
defeated the South Carolina chairman, Katon Dawson, who became
politically active in protest at racial integration of schools and was
a member of an all-white country club for 12 years before leaving last
year. It was a close run thing. Steele won 91-77 on the sixth and final
ballot.

According to a recent Rasmussen poll, almost half of
Republicans think their problem is not that they have been too
rightwing, but too moderate. More than half think the Alaska governor
and defeated vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin offers the best
model for their party. To the extent that they have learned any lessons
from their defeat, they seem to be the wrong ones.

One of the few people prepared to give Republicans the time of day at the moment is President Barack Obama.
For the past two weeks, Obama has been desperately trying to persuade
them to support his economic stimulus package. After several trips to
Congress for negotiations he called on Democrats to strip some elements
from the bill that Republicans objected to. He also added more of the
tax cuts they wanted.

Why he would go to such extraordinary
lengths is baffling. He's well aware of who's in charge. During one of
his first meetings, he responded to one criticism from the Republican
whip by saying: "We just have a difference here, and I'm president. So
I'm going to prevail on that." And people are far more keen on him
prevailing than them. According to Research 2000, Obama has an approval
rating of 75%. Meanwhile, fewer people have even heard of the
Republican minority leader of the Senate (Mitch McConnell) or the House
(John Boehner) than approve of the job they are doing.

Nonetheless,
despite being courted and indulged, when the stimulus plan came to the
floor not a single House Republican voted for it. Later that evening
Obama invited some of those Republicans over for cocktails and started
the wooing all over again.

Alongside invoking God, patriotism and
the spirit of the founding fathers, every presidential candidate
pledges to reach across the aisle, dampen partisan rancour and put the
interests of the voters first. But this was particularly true for
Obama, who pledged a different, more consensual, approach to politics
in Washington.

Bringing more civil and constructive engagement
to politics is, as a means to an end, a perfectly laudable goal -
particularly after eight years of crude majoritarianism. Democracies
are not elected dictatorships. They should be places of discussion and
debate, compromise and consensus.

But while it makes sense as a
process, as a principle bipartisanship is worthless, since it depends
entirely on who you are engaging with and to what purpose. The war in
Iraq, the war on terror and the deregulation of the economy were all
bipartisan efforts. All have been disastrous.

Many Democrats
went along with these things not because they thought they were good
for the country, but because they believed that not to do so would be
detrimental to their party.

Indeed, far from elevating the
interests of the country above the party, bipartisanship mostly
achieves the opposite - suggesting that the principal aim of
policymaking is consensus among the political elite rather than
delivering for the electorate. The fact that the political class comes
together in a cordial manner to support something does not in itself
make that thing good.

The problem that has plagued Washington
over the last few years is not "partisanship" that supports one idea or
another, but a more sectarian "partysanship" that supports the
interests of one party over an idea. The problem with George Bush was
not that he did not listen to anybody else's ideas, it was that his
ideas were terrible.

Viewed in this light, the Republican
response to Obama's overtures makes a grim kind of sense. Given the
ballooning budget deficit and failure of tax cuts under their watch,
the Republicans have no ideological integrity. So in the absence of a
clear alternative or coherent leadership, they have decided to distance
themselves from the entire project. They have calculated that if the
stimulus package works, Obama will get the credit anyway. And if it
doesn't, they don't want to be associated with it. It's not
constructive - but it is at least politically cogent.

It is the
overtures themselves that are bewildering. The burning priority for
Americans at this juncture is not that their two main parties work
together. It's that their government does something to revive the
economy. The concessions Obama has made to the Republicans have
actually made that outcome less likely. Virtually every reputable
economist agrees that the most effective way of pumping money into the
economy quickly, in order to create jobs, is through public spending.
Individual tax cuts are more likely to be saved, and business tax cuts
take a long time to take effect.

As the economic stimulus bill
goes to the Senate for negotiation, there is a real possibility that
Obama may end up with the worst of all worlds: an inadequate stimulus
package that has been watered down by the Republicans; a huge budget
deficit; and still no support from the Republicans.

What the
Republicans fear is precisely what many Democrats hope for:
paradigm-shifting legislation that rolls back some of the excesses of
the last generation by returning government to the centre of American
public life, creating jobs and uplifting the poor, while extending
healthcare and educational opportunities to working-class families.

"Never
let a crisis go to waste," said Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.
This economic crisis has given the president the opportunity to do for
the poor what 9/11 gave Bush the chance to do for the oil companies.
When capital is in such short supply, he shouldn't squander it on a
sub-prime party.