Is this how a honeymoon is supposed to feel?
Since his election, Barack Obama has called for members of Congress in both parties to abandon the partisanship that has shaped their successful careers and join him in a post-cynical crusade to reform American government.
By and large, they haven't bought it. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) declared himself "shocked" by the Democrats' $825-billion economic stimulus plan and denounced it (in distinctly pre-Obama terms) as little more than "liberal Democrat ideas that were stuck in the back of a cabinet somewhere."
On the other side of the ancient divide, liberal Democrats said they weren't sure the plan was big enough and asked why they needed to worry about Republican feelings at all.
"We're being a little too politically sensitive to the conservative right," said Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy (D-R.I.), drifting well off the new administration's message. "Coming to the middle on a political spectrum does not make it right."
At which point the House of Representatives fell back into its comfortable partisan ways: The majority pushed its bill through committees last week on largely party-line votes, and the minority complained that it had been railroaded.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi summoned her no-nonsense voice to remind the losers of how majority rule works: "Yes, we wrote the bill. Yes, we won the election." (The California Democrat then remembered to add: "That doesn't mean we don't want ... bipartisan support.")
In fact, there is bipartisan consensus for some kind of big stimulus plan; in the worst economic crisis in a generation, no politician wants to be on the wrong side of that issue. But there isn't any consensus on how big the plan should be, or how much of it should be government spending (Democrats) or tax cuts (Republicans).
What bipartisanship we are seeing so far is ceremonial, not substantive. The leaders of both parties trooped down to the White House on Friday to get a pep talk from President Obama, but it wasn't a negotiating session. Obama cleverly agreed to meet again with unhappy House Republicans to let them press their case for bigger tax cuts, depriving the GOP of a cause for complaining that they're shut out without giving them anything in return.
