Washington: A search for bipartisanship

Bipartisanship has been a recurring theme since Barack Obama became president about five weeks ago. But although it's easy to talk about bipartisanship " as he did yet again in his address to Congress on Tuesday " he's finding that it's very difficult to achieve consensus in politically polarized Washington.

Although Obama promised to change the political culture of Washington during last year's presidential campaign, bipartisanship has been in short supply since he took office. Take the president's trillion-dollar economic stimulus package for example. After inviting GOP leaders to the White House for a social hour, Obama's economic plan garnered exactly three Republican votes among the 535 members of Congress. That's because most Republicans don't think we can spend our way to prosperity using taxpayer dollars, and neither do I.

President Obama had slightly more success with Republican governors, most of whom, like Nevada's Jim Gibbons, are looking for federal bailouts to cover huge budget deficits. Whether "free" federal money is the solution to our state budget crunch is a question that I'm not qualified to answer, but I'm always suspicious of made-in-Washington solutions to state and local problems.

Obama sounded an optimistic note in last Tuesday's speech:

"While our economy may be weakened and our confidence shaken ... I want every American to know (that) we will rebuild, we will recover and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before," he said.

While continuing his plea for bipartisanship, the president indirectly blamed his predecessor, George W. Bush, for the current economic crisis; however, he neglected to mention his fellow Democrats, who encouraged lax lending policies (think FannieMae and FreddieMac) that generated the bad home loans that have led to millions of foreclosures.

"As far as most of Washington is concerned, Barack Obama's big talk about bipartisanship is kaput," wrote veteran Washington Post political columnist David Broder. "Many pundits and political analysts have told him to drop it. Get real, they say. It brought you next to nothing on the stimulus bill."

For his part, Broder's liberal Post colleague, Richard Cohen, urged Obama to muzzle "all the gauzy talk about bipartisanship " the desire to think that political differences ... can be sweet-smiled into consensus is touching but unrealistic." Unfortunately, Cohen is right. I win, you lose; that's how it works inside the Washington Beltway.

It isn't that much different here in Nevada. When I supported former President Bush on defense and national security issues, my Republican friends liked me a lot. But when I turned against Bush because of his ineffectual illegal immigration policy, his support for Yucca Mountain and his mismanagement of the Iraq War, and endorsed Obama last October, some of my Republican friends questioned my sanity and/or my patriotism. I had become a moderate Colin Powell Democrat, and "moderate" is a bad word in partisan political circles.

Broder, for one, isn't ready to give up on bipartisanship, pointing out that Obama's economic stimulus bill would have died in the Senate if the president hadn't successfully courted three moderate Republicans: Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. "This was a success for bipartisanship, not a failure," Broder wrote.

The columnist went on to cite President Truman's success with Republicans on the Marshall Plan, bipartisan progress on civil rights under President Lyndon Johnson and passage of President Reagan's tax and budget bills through a Democratic House as positive examples of bipartisanship. Nevertheless, these achievements are exceptions to the general political rule that one party wins when the other loses.

I wish President Obama well in his quest for bipartisanship but I fear that it may turn out to resemble Monty Python's quest for the Holy Grail. Or was it the Holy Quail? In any case, we shouldn't hold our collective breath waiting for Republicans to fall in line behind a Democratic president.

- Guy W. Farmer, a semi-retired journalist and former U.S. diplomat, resides in Carson City.