The Glass-Is-Half-Empty Strategy

In the days after President Barack Obama announced the details of his stimulus package, Obamaphiles everywhere praised him not only for what they saw as urgently needed legislation, but also for what they perceived, at the time, as a bold foray onto a new political path. Through overtures to Republicans in Congress and perceived concessions in the stimulus package, Obama had given the opposition an offer they couldn’t refuse. Hope had indeed won a mandate. It was only a matter of time before everyone in Washington started seeing the world in a purple hue.

Or so the thinking went. But, by the time the bill cleared the Senate with the minimum 60 votes last Friday night, at least some members of the Obama camp were wondering where all the bipartisanship had gone. Not a single House Republican had voted for the bill. It barely cleared the Senate, where only two weeks before some in the administration thought it might garner 80 votes.

But why should anyone be surprised that it happened this way? It’s not every day that circumstances allow you to co-opt your opposition. The New Deal and the Great Society were not bipartisan initiatives. Look at it from the Republicans’ point of view. What do they gain from bipartisanship? If Obama successfully builds bipartisan support for his agenda, who gets the credit? John Boehner and Mitch McConnell?

The nature and timing of the stimulus package also made it a peculiarly inopportune occasion for the inauguration of a post-partisan era. Politicians are bipartisan either because they don’t think anyone (in particular Rush Limbaugh) is noticing or because there is overwhelming public support for something. Seduced by the fervor of the inauguration and the unprecedented nature of the economic crisis, many of us assumed there would be overwhelming public support for the stimulus package, as indeed there was before the Republicans got in their licks. But we should have learned from the pre-election bailout package that the mere fact that the public is in a panic about economic conditions doesn’t mean that Republicans will easily sign on to remedies that cost unfathomable amounts of money. The October bailout package, indisputably and critically necessary, was opposed by a solid majority of Americans and by a majority of Republican congressmen even though it was being proposed by a Republican president. As a Republican senator vividly observed, if you gave someone a million dollars every day since the birth of Christ, you wouldn’t reach a trillion dollars until sometime after the year 2700. A stimulus package priced somewhere between $800 billion and $1 trillion was not an easy thing to grasp. By its nature, it was the biggest target that any simple-minded or cynical politician ever had to shoot at in the entire annals of American domestic spending.

And then there was the timing. It was being proposed at a time when a humiliated GOP base was being asked to sit and watch a “transformative” Democratic president walk on water. How many details of a $900 billion spending bill would it take to provoke a furious negative response from the Republican base?

Lastly, the upside for being a naysayer was just too sweet. At any point in time, what will be the measure of success for the stimulus package? The Republicans knew that this legislation was going to pass with or without their support and that, in so far as anyone would receive credit for its perceived success, it would be Democrats. As the party out of power, the Republicans are relegated to arguing that, whatever our economic circumstances will be in the future, the glass is half-empty. Why not drum it into everyone’s head from the get-go that the reason the glass is half-empty is that the Democrats only want to spend money on things like the National Endowment for the Arts and upgrades to the National Mall?

Is this, then, an equivocal triumph for Obama? I don’t think so. In the final calculation, what passed on Friday night was a somewhat reduced version of what Obama first submitted to the House. The bill that Obama will sign reflects his own policy priorities, not any significant effort to placate Republicans. Things were cut, but nothing significant was added to get it past the Senate filibuster. You can argue with Obama’s priorities, but you can’t argue that his effort at bipartisanship reshaped the final product.

In spite of its unfathomable cost, 51 percent of the American people still support the stimulus package. And the faux drama about bipartisanship played well for the president. A healthy 61 percent of Americans blame Republicans for the lack of bipartisanship, while a still greater majority, 66 percent, continues to believe that Obama is bringing “a new approach.” With no serious concessions on principle, Obama is now being given credit for having walked the walk of his post-partisan talk, and his failure to achieve it thus far is being blamed on the other guys. He has no reason to abandon the approach he has taken. His effort to lay the groundwork for political pressure on Republicans to join bipartisan coalitions on issues like health care, energy policy, and entitlement reform has had a good beginning.

Republicans drawing blood from Obama make a better story for the press, but there should be no question that Obama won the first round in his presidential confrontation with the Grand Old Party.


Clay A. Dumas ’10, a former Crimson associate editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.