For President Obama to treat individual Republicans with civility is one thing. Etiquette, however, has its limits. Embracing "bipartisanship" as a political goal can be a snare and a delusion.
It's certainly seemed so of late, as GOP congressmen responded to Obama's friendly overtures by voting unanimously against his desperately needed economic stimulus -- maintaining their party's cult-like faith in tax cuts and aligning themselves with a bombastic radio talker who brags that he wants the president to fail.
In response, the mannerly official scorers at ABC's "The Note," awarded the president "a goose egg in the first inning of bipartisanship," although the stimulus package passed in the House by a margin of 244-188. Never mind that the White House had dropped a couple of spending items -- subsidized contraceptives and refurbishing the National Mall -- Republicans disliked. Washington Post editors lamented that "Obama had the controversial provisions removed, but too late to win over Republicans."
Too late? The new administration was one week old. The changes preceded the vote. Persons more concerned with substance than manners might suspect that hopeful chatter about bipartisanship is a sucker's game. How often did pundits urge President Bush to be sensitive to Democrats' delicate feelings? The Post's idea of "centrism" appears to be the balance of opinion at a K Street lobbyists' cocktail party.
The last time we had a new Democratic president, essentially the same thing happened. Republican congressmen voted unanimously against President Clinton's 1993 tax and budget proposals, uniformly predicting doom. Raising marginal income-tax rates a few points on the wealthy, they charged, would lead to economic ruin. Instead, the exact opposite happened; over the ensuing eight years, the nation witnessed the creation of 25 million new jobs, a balanced federal budget and steadily rising prosperity.
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Today, an act of historical memory's required to recall that when President Bush took office in 2001, people actually worried about paying down the national debt too fast. No problem. The new president embraced what it's tempting to call "Limbaugh-nomics," the absurd belief that tax cuts invariably lead to greater government revenues and more and better jobs.
Instead, Bush presided over a sluggish economy, the worst record of job creation since World War II, growing inequality and the current banking crisis -- a direct result of "free market" deregulatory fundamentalism combined with a speculative real-estate bubble that sustained the illusion of prosperity until it burst. Oh, and yes, runaway budget deficits, thanks mainly to the combination of Bush's tax cuts and the war in Iraq.
In a recent interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, Rep. Barney Frank, the rare Democrat who appears to relish spirited give and take, correctly pointed out that "the largest spending bill in history is going to turn out to be the war in Iraq. ... And I don't understand why, from some of my conservative friends, building a road, building a school, helping somebody get health care, that's wasteful spending, but that war in Iraq, which is going to cost us more than $1 trillion before we're through -- yes, I wish we (wouldn't) have done that. We'd have been in a lot better shape fiscally."
In short, the past 16 years couldn't have done more to expose the wrongheadedness of the Republican "War on Arithmetic" had it been a laboratory experiment. GOP tax-cut theology is sheer superstition, on the level with sacrificing goats and reading tea leaves. Meet grandstanding GOP congressmen halfway? What for? Democrats swept the 2006 and 2008 congressional elections precisely because the public finally gets it. Pretty much everybody except Limbaugh's faithful listeners has caught on.
That's how I understood Obama's dismissive reference to the AM radio entertainer: Times are serious; Rush Limbaugh's not. Needless to say, the portly chatterbox made the best of it, remarking that Obama supporters expect everybody to bend over and grab their ankles just because the president had a black father. To which Jay Leno made the perfect rejoinder: Rush grab his own ankles? That'll be the day.
Future debates with Limbaugh are probably best left to his fellow comedians. Meanwhile, all the bipartisanship Obama needs appears to be coming from Republican governors, who need all the revenue they can get to cope with rising unemployment, Medicaid and education costs, but who don't have the luxury of temporary deficit-spending. With the economy spiraling sickeningly downward, the last thing we need is thousands of laid-off state employees.
Under the circumstances, with capital markets largely frozen, consumers too fearful to spend and swollen inventories making businesses leery of new investment, government spending on infrastructure and new technology is pretty much the only useful tool left to get the economy moving again.
This isn't a tea party; it's the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and there's little to be gained worrying over the hurt feelings of Republican True Believers who caused it.
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-- Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President."
