A Very Partisan Stimulus Bill by Matias Bulnes, NYC

The exhausting negotiation over the Stimulus Plan in Congress made one thing clear: Obama didn’t get his honey moon with Congress. In his first big initiative, less than a month after he arrived in the White House, Republicans decided to play tug of war with the Democratic majority in Congress. The Bill still passed but the resistance it found is striking in the light of Obama’s call for bipartisanship in Washington. Did Republicans not buy his call? Or did Obama abuse his credit line with such a “liberal” plan? Or, perhaps, there has never been such a thing as bipartisanship and Obama’s call for it (as McCain’s boast of his bipartisan record) was yet another political move to get an edge in the game.

Before attempting to decide among these possibilities let’s get clear as to what bipartisanship is. We say that a legislative motion is bipartisan simply when it is meant to appeal to both Democrats and Republicans. But if we are to factor in the usual implications of the word in political rhetoric, it also involves the assumption that bipartisan are those who put the interest of the country first, over and above the interest of their parties. To a large measure, the word has become etiquette to set apart the open-minded, transparent politicians from the narrow, egoistic ones.

Notice that being bipartisan is a matter of having the right intentions, not of actually voting with or against ones’ party (though the voting record is probably telling). Someone can frequently walk across the aisle to bridge gaps between opposing parties but do so in order to pursue a longer-term partisan goal--or even one of his own (e.g. becoming president). In the light of this the question whether politicians are ever bipartisan, that is, if bipartisanship is at all possible, is pertinent.

A political realist would give a negative answer to this question. According to political realism, politics is just a struggle for power and, as such, there is no room in it for higher ideals such as the country, world, the people, etc. (though the interest of the country is expected to follow from such egoistic wrestles). But many find political realism unnecessarily bleak or, in any case, implausible. Should they believe in the “bipartisan” talk?

During his campaign, Obama stressed the need to change the culture of attributing impure intentions to political opponents. Consistent with Obama’s optimism, one could explain the Republican resistance to his Bill as due not to their partisanship but to a genuine disagreement over what the interest of the country is. After all, no doubt Republicans and Democrats roughly represent distinct political ideologies which differ over what the good is. While Democrats tend to see the interest of the country as involving social justice, Republicans tend to omit this item in their conception of the nation’s good.

But even so, it is hard to fully explain the hysteria Obama’s plan sparked among Republicans as a legitimate bipartisan disagreement. Republicans were at fault for at least misinterpreting the context in which the debate was taking place. Bipartisanship is putting the country’s interest even above one’s ideology: it requires the ability to recognize that the country is in a state of emergency, curb one’s ideological impulses, unite with the opponents and get the country afloat. Republicans clearly failed on this score. This perhaps explains the feeling of disgust toward them many of us have been experiencing.