Blogs and Stories
Obama's Bipartisan Triumphs
)
Jim Young / Reuters
Contrary to conventional wisdom, says former Clinton budget advisor Matt Miller, Obama has reached across the aisle in his first 100 days. He's advancing GOP health, energy, and education goals-so why aren't the Republicans supporting them?
Just about everyone agrees that one of the sad casualties of President Obama’s first 100 days is the bipartisanship he championed so appealingly on the campaign trail. But everyone is wrong—at least when it comes to the ideas Obama is advancing.
Yes, it’s true that Republicans haven’t been supporting his initiatives, but that’s hardly Obama’s fault. Any fair-minded assessment of the president’s policy priorities reveals them to be to be an innovative blend of liberal and conservative thinking. As a result, Obama’s early tenure has posed nothing so much as an instructive political riddle, which runs as follows. When can you have a bipartisan agenda without Republican votes? Answer: when Republicans find that endorsing their own ideas gets in the way of pursuing their thirst for power.
When can you have a bipartisan agenda without Republican votes? Answer: when Republicans find that endorsing their own ideas gets in the way of pursuing their thirst for power.
Don’t believe me? Look at what Obama is actually trying to do in his three big reform arenas: health care, energy, and education.
Health care. The centerpiece of Obama’s approach to overhauling health care, now being fleshed out by Congress, is to create a new insurance exchange or marketplace so that people who don’t receive employer-sponsored plans have access to group coverage outside the job setting. In the exchange, folks would choose among competing health plans, with lower earners enjoying subsidies that taper off as income rises.
This model was championed and enacted by Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts several years ago, with Ted Kennedy helping to persuade the state’s Democrats to join in. And it builds on an approach to universal coverage that Stuart Butler of the conservative Heritage Foundation has been touting since the early 1990s.
Why has Obama ended up here? Because in the wake of the Clintoncare fiasco, Democrats, realizing they had blown it, spent the next decade rethinking their government-heavy approach to reform. While there are details to iron out that would give any final bill a more Democratic or Republican hue, to view Obama’s plan as somehow “lefty” is to ignore its conservative pedigree as well as a dozen years of dedicated efforts by reformers in both parties to find common ground.
(To be fair to Republicans, the potential inclusion in the exchange of a so-called public plan option in addition to private insurance plans has raised fears that Obama is secretly plotting a slide toward a Canadian-style single-payer scheme. But the likeliest scenario is that the public plan becomes a bargaining chip, negotiated away or defanged in exchange for health insurers agreeing to meet certain goals on costs, access, and quality.)
Energy. Complicated details aside, Obama’s overarching approach to energy is simple: He wants America finally to put a proper, higher price on dirty energy that reflects its true environmental costs, and thus create market incentives that allow clean alternative energies to flourish. Obama’s related plan is to cushion the impact of higher dirty energy prices on middle- and lower-income Americans by rebating to them 80 percent of the revenue collected by his cap and trade plan. It’s basically a tax swap, with the other 20 percent of the revenue used by Uncle Sam to jumpstart investment in new energy sources.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
The Right Dumps Carrie
Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
The Runaway Senate
Matt Miller is a management consultant, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the host of public radio’s popular political week-in-review, Left, Right & Center. His new book is The Tyranny of Dead Ideas.
The GOP’s Next Obamacare Attack
Matt Miller is a management consultant, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the host of public radio’s popular political week-in-review, Left, Right & Center. His new book is The Tyranny of Dead Ideas.
The Democrats' Midterm Nightmare
Matt Miller is a management consultant, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the host of public radio’s popular political week-in-review, Left, Right & Center. His new book is The Tyranny of Dead Ideas.
Why is Obama expanding socialized health care? To date, there are not enough doctors much less nurses to work for a salary much less work for free.
On the contrary, Obama has excluded any detailed, conservative ideas from the Right.
As for the "energy grid" concept if you want to sleep with Obama, that'll be your chance.
GE who invested heavily into Obama's campaign, owns NBC, CNBC, MSNBC (who told newsers not to criticize Obama) - breach of journalism - but the fun part is GE stands to profit billions from Obama's plan to build the new energy grid.
The author's premise is wrong when he equates Romney's healthcare and McCain's environmental policies with policies of the right. They represent policies of the left that certain Republicans have embraced. That's like saying George W. Bush was bipartisan because he signed Ted Kennedy's No Child Left Behind Act. I don't think this author would make that mistake, would he?
Obama can't even handle his own party's Congress, never mind the Republicans. His promises to lead in a bipartisan manner were more of his prose about how things "should be".
After all, when he made those promises did he not know that Republicans would oppose him? Did he think Republicans would be so wept up with him to the point where they would radically change their behavior so he could succeed?
Could he have been more wrong?
Blame Republicans if you must, but Obama's promise for bipartisanship was never based in reality. In fact, Obama doesn't know how to achieve consensus with Republicans and never did. No
This guy is a left-wing shill for Obama. Check out where he works. Also, the Romney health plan for Massachusetts, put together with the help of the inevitable Teddy Kennedy, is a costly flop.
A very good question considering:
Obama raised the military budget, increased the amount of our tax revenue going to churches via the faith based initiative, supports FISA, is trying to get the Supreme Court to reverse itself on the right of a defendant having a lawyer present during questioning, he is against marriage for gays/lesbians, and has given corporate america record corporate welfare.....
so why exactly are the republicans upset???
Are we still in the sand box fighting over bipartisan toys? who cares, more over, seating Fraken and possibly Spectre...are we about to be a one party system? please some one pull the plug on MSNBC and FOX so we can be intelligent again.
I think that the democrat's need to treat the Confederate republican's in the same way Delay & Gingrich treated them. I think the democrat's should give the Confederate republican with the same respect they have treated the democrat's with. Sarah, Rush, Sean, Billo, Laura, all of the Fox pretend news, chinless Senate Confederate republican leader, Boner in the house (yes boner) call Obama & the democrat's so socialists, anti American & everything else they can dream up so lets be honest here & lets have Harry "the worm" Reid the so called leader in the Senate tell the 40 leftover Confederate's the same thing Bobby Knight told his detractors, "When we die, bury me upside down so all of you can line up & kiss my ass" That is what the Confederate republican's deserve, plain & simple....
Where can I find Obama's actual education agenda in such frank language, this one that Miller describes. Whitehouse.gov just has the general...'we will work to improve blah, blah, blah.' But if Miller is telling the truth, putting a small amount of focus on education similarities could create a lot of public goodwill for Obama, especially if he, McCain, and other prominent Republicans stand up and take credit for it together. Doing this now might lubricate Washington for Obama's health care plan which is almost the equivalent of School Vouchers in the health care market anyway.
Thank you.
As a first time user, your comment has been submitted for review. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or two for your comment to be reviewed, depending on the time of week and the volume of comments we receive.
Please log in to leave comments.