Barack Obama took office promising a new age of bipartisanship. And he tried. But then push came to shove, and two things dawned on him. First, that he wouldn’t be getting a single Republican vote for his healthcare reform package. Second, that losing this fight would send his presidency into a nosedive. So he made the logical decision: we just need to get this done and ram it down the other guys’ throats.
That was accomplished last Sunday night with the House of Representatives’ 219-212 vote in support of reform. But as we go forward — and there are many other weighty matters on the president’s to-do list, from climate change to immigration to the Middle East and Iran — it’s worth asking whether this process has just left the United States’ bitterly divided polity even more riven than it was in George Bush’s time.
The depressing short-term answer is yes. The passage of this Bill, historic achievement though it is, is merely a beginning, not an end: starting immediately, we will witness a titanic rhetorical battle over its impact.
Republicans are building their strategy for this November’s mid-term election around what they’re now calling “repeal and replace” — that is, if the voters give them majorities in the Senate and House, they’ll repeal the Bill and pass their own far more modest version.
The conservative Republican attorney general of Virginia plans to file a lawsuit as soon as Obama signs the Bill, possibly this week, challenging its constitutionality. Other attorney generals are poised to follow, and yet other states are exploring the possibility of simply disobeying the law. And, of course, the Tea Partiers will be out in force between now and November, slinging their fury at all Democrats and even those Republicans who don’t toe their inflexible line.
Democrats — including Obama, who will barnstorm the country later this week to tout the law’s benefits — will try to paint the Republicans as servants of insurance companies.
Liberal pressure groups have already begun lining up advertising campaigns against vulnerable GOP legislators. Democrats now own this Bill. The best strategy is to defend it tooth and nail and attack its opponents. Yet, in the longer term, there may exist a shred of a sliver of a shard of a possibility that things will improve. Here’s why.
It’s my bet that Obama, to the disappointment of progressives, won’t take away from this fight the lesson that he needs to give up on bipartisanship. He went to the partisan mat when he had to, but his instinct is and will continue to be to try to find common ground where possible because that’s how he sees himself — as one who has spent his life bridging divides.
So he will hope, for example, that he can get at least a Republican or two to work with him on climate change and immigration reform.
That will knock the ball over to the GOP’s side of the net. Will any Republicans conclude from this episode that maybe obstructionist solidarity isn’t the best way? That strategy depends entirely on winning.
If Republicans had succeeded in making healthcare Obama’s Waterloo, as one GOP senator put it, the path forward would have been clear. United opposition wins.
But now they’ve lost two battles following this strategy — stimulus last year, and now healthcare.
The stimulus loss was tolerable — they didn’t expect to win it anyway — but universal healthcare is devastating to them.
Could it be that some Republicans decide that they shouldn’t follow the Tea Partiers off the cliffs of extremism and vitriol, and instead do what politicians exist to do — make compromises with the people on the other side?–