Republican Partisanship and the Serengeti Plains

In order to perform the complicated steps of the Tango, as Al Pacino and the magnificent Gabrielle Anwar could attest, it takes two people working in close collaboration. President Obama has asked the Republicans to dance, but, unfortunately, most of them are too hobbled by bitterness at the outcome of the election to join with him. It takes two to Tango.

The Republican Party reminds me of the watering places in the Serengeti Plains. During the wet season, the watering holes provide water for a broad assemblage of animals, while in the dry season, the holes contract into muddy puddles filled with rapacious crocodiles. Now that they have been rudely tossed out of office, the Republican Party has contracted into a puddle and is being led by crocodiles like Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, and David Vitter.

President Obama has reached-out to Republicans in many ways. During the campaign and afterward he continuously called for an end to partisan bickering in Washington. He appointed three Republicans to his cabinet. He entertained Republicans at the White House and went to meet with them at the Capitol in a serious effort to get bipartisan support for his stimulus package. Despite this, Republicans in Congress and in the media have almost totally rebuffed his efforts.

In the Senate, the only Republicans to support the stimulus package as of the writing of this commentary were three northern “moderates,” Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Susan Collins of Maine, and Olympia Snowe of Maine. Those three managed to use their crucial leverage as swing votes to weaken the bill and deduct tens of billions of badly needed dollars for state and local governments, education, health, and renewable energy programs. All other Republicans have refused to compromise.

The brilliant syndicated columnist and Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman, has summarized the situation as follows: “Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts. It’s as if the dismal economic failure of the last eight years never happened.”

On February 5, 2009, President Obama noted that 3.6 million workers have lost their jobs since the recession began, and said: "What do you think a stimulus is?....It’s spending — that's the whole point!” He went on to say: “I welcome this debate, but we are not going to get relief by turning back to the same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin…. The American people have rendered their judgment. And now is the time to move forward, not back. Now is the time for action.”

My feeling is that the President and the Democrats should abandon any further efforts at bipartisanship. The Republicans lost the presidential, congressional, and many state elections. It appears that they will lose even more in 2010. The Democrats will soon have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. At that point all governmental and legislative decisions should be made from a left-liberal political point of view. There should be massive additional stimulus spending if necessary to the economy. Only the most liberal Democratic judges and government officials should be appointed. Taxes should be raised to 50% on wealthy Americans and big corporations. The government should outlaw discrimination against gay people and should endorse the right of such people to marry. Interference with abortion clinics should be outlawed, and, instead, the government should subsidize them. The government should adopt a single-payer health insurance system.

The Republicans have constricted into a mean-spirited coterie of sour sore losers led by political party hacks and toxic cheerleaders like Rush Limbaugh. Meanwhile, the Democrats are led by a brilliant, charismatic, widely popular president surrounded by exceptional and talented advisors who are fighting to undo the damage that has been done to this nation by Bush and his band of hooligans.