Obama Practically Practicing Party Politics

bigtree

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Thu Feb-05-09 09:04 PM
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Obama Practically Practicing Party Politics

It appears that practicing traditional party politics will be the most effective course for President Obama when dealing with the republican opposition in Washington.

I think it took the emergence of John McCain's substitute stimulus bill in the Senate to wake Pres. Obama out of his idealistic dream of relying on his strident appeal to bipartisanship to advance his agenda and initiatives through Congress.

Obviously the action of the House republicans - in unanimously mimicking the behavior of the last Democratic president's Congress in their unanimous stand against Clinton's first, deficit-busting, economy booming budget bill - sent a sobering message to the new president that politics as usual in Washington had not been vanquished by his accommodating appeal.

Speaking today in support of the stimulus bill moving through the Senate, Pres. Obama reverted to a more familiar tact as he reasserted the mandate he'd fought so hard to achieve against his republican rival.

"The time for talk is over," Obama said. "The time for action is now, because we know that if we do not act, a bad situation will become dramatically worse . . . We can't delay and we can't go back to the same worn-out ideas that led us here in the first place. In the last few days, we've seen proposals arise from some in Congress that you may not have read but you'd be very familiar with because you've been hearing them for the last 10 years, maybe longer. They're rooted in the idea that tax cuts alone can solve all our problems; that government doesn't have a role to play; that half-measures and tinkering are somehow enough; that we can afford to ignore our most fundamental economic challenges -- the crushing cost of health care, the inadequate state of so many of our schools, our dangerous dependence on foreign oil," Obama said.

"So let me be clear: Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed," he said. "They've taken us from surpluses to an annual deficit of over a trillion dollars, and they've brought our economy to a halt. And that's precisely what the election we just had was all about. The American people have rendered their judgment. And now is the time to move forward, not back. Now is the time for action."

Indeed, now is the time to stand up and fight against the familiar and predictable obstruction that the republican party regularly employs as a substitute for their own lack of initiative. It's become clear that Democrats can pick off the few republican votes in the Senate they need to avoid a filibuster on the stimulus bill. I don't think they could maintain that margin of opposition party support without the insistent pressure Pres. Obama has displayed from the presidential podium over the past few days since the partisan victory in the House.

There may well be some nebulous, future political benefit from the WH posturing as willing to 'reach out across party lines' to attract republican support. But, for now, practicing progressive partisan politics from the old-fashioned bully-pulpit seems to be winning the day.