It’s possible that there is some merit in the criticism that the Obama administration built in certain concessions on the front-end of the stimulus package in an ultimately vain effort to win significant bipartisan support for the bill. Yet, considering that they passed the bill with the absolute minimum number of votes in the Senate, it’s not a particularly convincing argument. Perhaps there was a concession here or there that wasn’t strictly necessary in getting the votes of Sens. Specter, Snowe, and Collins, but in the big picture it’s hard to see how there were any significant missteps in the construction of the original package.
It’s true that the administration hoped that they could win over a small bloc of Republicans in the House and set a goal of 80 votes in the Senate. And they made good-will efforts to reach out to the Republicans. Obama visited the Republican caucuses on the Hill and invited their leaders to the White House. He took some Republicans on Air Force One and invited others to watch the Super Bowl. And he didn’t get any votes in return for these conciliatory gestures. Yet, how did it cost him anything?
Rahm Emanuel acknowledged that their efforts at outreach led to a lot of articles and commentary about why they were not succeeding in winning over more Republicans. He described this as ‘losing control of the message’ for a few days. However, they regained control of the message with the simple device of sending Obama to Indiana and Florida to do townhall meetings. Obama got his number one priority passed in the basic form that he wanted, and he got in done in record time. If he failed to pass it with substantial bipartisan support, that comes with its own opportunities going forward.
There has been a lot of ridicule in the blogosphere of the idea of bipartisanship. Most of the ridicule has been directed at the way that idea is most often expressed by Beltway pundits, and it has been spot on. The goal for the Democrats is not to water down their mandate and priorities by making unnecessary concessions. That kind of bipartisanship is a joke. Rather, the goal for the Democrats is to build the widest possible consensus for what they are trying to do.
Our Iraq policy can serve as a good example. It is helpful in foreign policy to have a wider amount of support than just your own caucus. The Republicans want to paint the Democrats as weak on terrorism and national security, but that is very difficult to do if the most respected foreign policy hands in the GOP (people like Dick Lugar, Colin Powell, and Robert Gates) are on board with the policy. This would also have been true about the stimulus package which probably explains the whole Judd Gregg gambit. Sen. Gregg is the acknowledged budget expert in the GOP caucus. You buy something with this kind of bipartisanship. At it’s most basic, you buy political cover.
The Republicans made a strategic decision to deny Obama (or Specter, Snowe, and Collins) any political cover for the enormous economic recovery act. They now lose the ability to take any credit if the economy improves, which it should eventually do. That’s their choice, but that is the extent to which Obama lost anything in this debate. On the whole, he won convincingly.