John Dickerson says Obama has (justifiably) given up on working with Republicans:
At a recent lunch with reporters, Budget Director Peter Orszag was asked if he could name a useful idea submitted by Republicans. He couldn’t — and didn’t even pretend he’d considered many. When House Republicans put out a budget last week, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, “The party of no has become the party of no ideas.”
Gibbs probably wouldn’t have said that 40 days ago, when the White House was treating the issue of bipartisanship more carefully. But after party-line votes in the House and Senate and minimum flexibility from GOP leaders, Obama aides say that Republicans are not “acting in good faith.” Which leads them to two conclusions: One, their acts of conciliation buy them nothing in negotiations with the GOP; two, and more important, they’ve decided they’ll pay no political price for acting in a more partisan fashion.
Jon Chait says he’s not getting much support from his own party either:
The last Democrat who held the White House, Bill Clinton, saw the core of his domestic agenda come to ruin, his political support collapse, and his failure spawn a massive Republican resurgence that made progressive reform impossible for a decade to come. The Democrat who last held the White House before that, Jimmy Carter, saw the exact same thing happen to him.
At this early date, nobody can know whether or not Barack Obama will escape this fate. But the contours of failure are now clearly visible. In Obama’s case, as with his predecessors, the prospective culprit is the same: Democrats in Congress, and especially the Senate. At a time when the country desperately needs a coherent response to the array of challenges it faces, the congressional arm of the Democratic Party remains mired in fecklessness, parochialism, and privilege.
A landslide victory isn’t what it used to be, I guess. Opposition has made Republicans near monolithic, while victory has done nothing for Democrats except sharpen their longtime infatuation with the circular firing squad. It’s times like this that make me wish I were a heavy drinker.
