The biggest barrier to bipartisanship is the collusion among politicians, lobbyists, and activist organizations, which pump up hate in the service of hyper-partisanship. Former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey is a one-man emblem of this new iron triangle. Through FreedomWorks, Armey has taken a lead role organizing the Tea Party protests, where he rallies crowds by first reaffirming their worst fears: "Nearly every important office in Washington, D.C., today is occupied by someone with an aggressive dislike for our heritage, our freedom, our history and our Constitution." Once you've convinced your audience that anti-Americans are in the White House, bipartisanship—which Armey once described as "another name for date rape"—is a nonstarter. What's arguably worse is that Armey, a former economics professor with a Ph.D., knows better. As he told a reporter from The New York Times magazine, he doesn't believe the "death panel" claims and other fear-mongering exaggerations. "You know that expression: The enemy of my enemy is my friend?" he said. "Are their fears exaggerated? Yeah, probably. But are Obama's promises exaggerated? I may think it's silly, but if people want to believe that," he said, referring to death panels, "it's OK with me."
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"I hope he fails." With four words, the king of right-wing radio summed up his philosophy for the Obama years. Who knew it would be adopted by the Republicans' congressional leadership and help bring government to a standstill for most of Obama's first year? It's evidence of a new shift in American politics—instead of talk radio getting talking points from party leaders, professional polarizers like Limbaugh are giving talking points to party leaders. His influence inspires the grass roots—when Limbaugh says, "If al Qaeda wants to demolish the America we know and love, they better hurry, because Obama's beating them to it," his words will—and did—show up on a sign at a Tea Party protest days later. Since the inauguration, few have rooted harder and louder for constipation in the American body politic.
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The poster child for San Francisco liberalism, strong-arming House Speaker Pelosi was a tough vessel for Obama's reform agenda. Her mere presence at the forefront of the debate helped kill any impulse toward bipartisanship at infancy. When the stimulus bill was debated at the outset of the administration, her liberal house leadership locked Republicans out, undercutting President Obama's promises of post-partisanship and encouraging conservative calls for a "No-Bama" strategy. She's also earned the ire of many centrist Democrats—Tennessee Representative Jim Cooper summed up the perspective of the liberals aligned with Pelosi when he said, "They don't mind the partisan fighting ‘cause that's what they are used to. In fact, they're really good at it. And they're a little bit worried about what a post-partisan future might look like." Pelosi's Congress currently enjoys approval ratings lower than President Bush when he left office.
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Granted, it's his job—but as Senate minority leader, McConnell is primus inter pares of the growing filibuster clique. "Mitch McConnell is the architect of the Republican filibuster, which now is applied to virtually all controversial bills," Thomas Mann, a senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told The Daily Beast. McConnell stands athwart more than just health care. He's held back an unemployment bill, which eventually received a 98-0 vote. He put off the confirmation of the surgeon general during the H1N1 crisis, too.
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As the House minority leader, Representative John Boehner set the standard for Republican opposition from the beginning of Obama's term. While the president met personally with Republicans to discuss their concerns about the stimulus and included a large number of GOP-friendly tax cuts in his initial proposal as a goodwill gesture, the outreach was ultimately for naught. A small number of senators were willing to cross party lines to negotiate a stimulus deal more to their liking, but not a single Republican House member voted for it, and Boehner's GOP made clear that total opposition would be the standard in dealing with Democratic proposals. Their subsequent actions have led Democrats to question just how principled their opposition was to the bill—more than 100 Republican representatives have requested funds for their districts from the stimulus money despite frequent criticism from their party that the money was a waste.
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This is the man who declared that health care could be Obama's "Waterloo." Forget the president-as-Napoleon connections—even fellow Senate Republicans have come to fear their colleague from South Carolina. His use of the right wing to menace moderate Republicans has made him, in the words of one observer, a "perpetual burr in the butt of his party's leadership." Obama felt that burr this summer, when DeMint refused to release holds on State Department officials whose services were needed to help steady relations with a country that had just experienced a military coup.
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This month the Alabama lawmaker became the new face of obstructionism in a Congress already beset by a minority party that proudly employs every trick at its disposal to slow business to a halt. Shelby put a hold on 70 of Obama's nominations with the intent of keeping a $40 billion Air Force earmark for his state. Brookings Institution senior fellow Thomas Mann told The Daily Beast that Shelby's move marked "a new low in the decline of Senate norms that have prevented individual senators and minority parties from completely obstructing the functioning of government. All for a little military facility in his home state. It's an outrage and a very sad day in the history of the Senate."
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The most powerful special interest in the Democratic coalition was looking out for No. 1 in the health-care negotiations. After much wrangling, labor finally signed off on the Senate bill mere days before Scott Brown's election—and only after securing a sweetheart deal. The Senate bill was paid for by a 40 percent excise tax on expensive "Cadillac" insurance plans. Democrats agreed to exempt union members from this new tax until 2018; non-union members, however, would begin paying it in 2013. In trying to shore up support for health-care reform, the Obama White House extended the exemption to all Cadillac-plan owners until 2018.
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The influential liberal blogger at Firedoglake.com, Hamsher has led the "kill the bill" charge from the media, and her public option-or-bust rhetoric has spread to The Huffington Post and more mainstream outlets. She wrote "10 reasons to kill the bill" in December, a piece that also was published on The Huffington Post, and her site started a petition to kill the bill. Ezra Klein refuted her reasons point by point, hoping to counteract a liberal backlash for the bill, and called her list "purposefully misleading." Hamsher, who is described by Politico as a "pixie-ish 50-year-old former Hollywood producer who named her blog after her dog," wields more than the power of her pen, she also raises thousands of dollars, with the help of MoveOn and other groups, through the Web site ActBlue, which supports members of Congress who fall into the Firedoglake line. The group raised $430,000 to support candidates who would kill the bill if it didn't contain a public option. A sort of Tea Party of the left, Hamsher's site, as she describes it, is leading "an independent political force." She has frequently criticized Obama, accusing him of misrepresenting what was in the bill in his health-care speech. "If I wanted Joe Lieberman writing a health care bill, I would've voted for John McCain," she said.
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The ambitious New York congressman's media omnipresence and unrelenting support for the public option offered prime evidence for conservative arguments that it was just the thin edge of the wedge on an intended course toward a single-payer system. As Joe Scarborough said, interviewing Weiner on Morning Joe: "You are making the point of the people at the town-hall meetings who say this is Barack Obama's opportunity to get rid of private health care and turn it completely over to the government. I'm sitting here stunned, saying ‘Oh my God, you're making the point of the health-care protesters.'" If that wasn't enough, Joe Lieberman himself said that one of the reasons he opposed an expansion of Medicare coverage was that Weiner was for it.
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The debate over the public option, although a relatively minor portion of the House and Senate health care bills, turned into an ugly DINO-hunting battle between liberal and conservative Democrats. Upping the ante in the battle, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee ran ads against a number of centrist Democrats. You may not have heard of the ads, but you surely heard of Rahm Emanuel's response: The campaign was the subject of his infamous "f—ing retarded" outburst.
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The charter RINO-hunting organization has been running right-wing candidates in closed primaries against centrists. Its conservative candidates often beat the centrists and then promptly lose the general election to Democrats. In 2006 and 2008, among the victims were centrist Reps. Heather Wilson and Wayne Gilchrest. The group's past president, Pat Toomey, is running a strong race for the Senate in Pennsylvania against former Republican Arlen Specter, and its model has been influential in moving the GOP to the right, opening the door to the ideological litmus tests being pushed by many today. 2010 could end up being its vindication as an organization.
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After calling out the Club for Growth and Progressive Change Campaign Committee, it seems only fair to acknowledge the Founding Father who gave name to the rigged system of redistricting that has allowed party activists to dominate closed primaries and restrict representative government. As James Madison's vice president, Gerry presumably understood checks and balances, but he also advocated the all or nothing school of congressional votes: He refused to ratify the Constitution because it did not contain a Bill of Rights.
Luntz is a master of persuasive political language, a virtuoso of invective. The co-author of the Contract with America (a positive policy proposal Republicans should update and adopt) he most recently penned an influential how-to guide for Republicans looking to kill financial reform. He advised opponents to tie reform to a government takeover of the industry, and to associate it with the bailout, even though the bill had nothing to do with that. "Frankly, the single best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout," he wrote. He also suggested saying the bill was shaped by lobbyists. His memo on stopping the government "takeover" of health care was a blueprint for inaction and shaped the GOP's highly effective rebuttal to reform—asking constituents if they want "politicians" and "bureaucrats" in charge of their health care and raising the specter of rationing and long lines for care. Based on his polling, he told Republicans they "MUST be vocally and passionately on the side of reform" because of the political climate, but he advised them how to stop it. He told them to acknowledge there is a crisis, but then suggested the reform would lead to "the government setting standards of care" and would "put the Washington bureaucrats in charge of health care."
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The now infamous "Cornhusker Kickback" succeeded in giving centrism a bad name. By demanding special treatment for his state in paying for an expansion of Medicaid, the Nebraska Democrat made the most ambitious health-care legislation in generations look like a petty grab bag for his constituents. Its removal is likely a starting point for any negotiations between the House and Senate now on passing a final bill.
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The white knight of bipartisanship during the Bush administration could have been a powerful advocate for cross-aisle cooperation during the Obama administration. He has always been a man of honor and a rare profile of courage in modern American politics. But faced with a primary challenge from the right by radio host J.D. Hayworth and perhaps still stinging from his presidential election defeat, the McCain of 2009 was decidedly more partisan than past incarnations. This month he moved the goalposts on his conditions for supporting gays in the military multiple times once he was faced with the prospect of having to vote on the issue. After saying in 2006 that he supported Don't Ask Don't Tell because the military leadership was for it, McCain decided it wasn't enough that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates endorsed changing the policy—and offered a new rationale. "The reason why I supported the policy to start with is because General Colin Powell, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is the one that strongly recommended we adopt this policy in the Clinton administration," he said at a hearing. "I have not heard General Powell or any of the other military leaders reverse their position." But then Powell came out and strongly supported ending DADT, as well. McCain stuck to his partisan guns. One bright spot on being included in this list: Maybe it will help McCain in his primary fight and he can return to the Senate in classic form as a courageous force for constructive reform.
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The Nobel Prize-winning New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has emerged as the leading anti-Obama critic on the establishment left. While he's argued that the stimulus wasn't big enough, his real gripe seems to be not economics as much as temperament. He feels that Obama is too conciliatory and not enough of a liberal ideological warrior. He began making his case during the campaign, writing: "I find it a little bit worrisome if we have a candidate who basically starts compromising before the struggle has even begun." He has been more withering since health care hit the rocks of the Scott Brown election, characterizing the president's response as "run away!" and slamming "the destructive center." In a post titled "He Wasn't the One We Were Waiting For," Krugman wrote: "I have to say, I'm pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in."
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The leading climate change denier in the Senate, Inhofe (R-OK) took his efforts to a dispiriting new low in December during the Copenhagen summit on climate change. While normally it's considered taboo to criticize the president on foreign soil, Inhofe flew to Copenhagen with the explicit goal of undermining any effort by Obama at securing international cooperation to tackle environmental problems. Oh, and he told his Oklahoma constituents "Every institution that has made this country the greatest nation in the world is under attack," adding, "I don't know why President Obama is obsessed with turning terrorists loose in America."
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The symbol for incivility in American politics since he yelled "You Lie!" at Obama during a speech on health care to a Joint Session of Congress, the conservative South Carolina congressman found himself censured by colleagues but applauded by activists. Within days of the outburst, Wilson had raised more than $1 million in online campaign donations, and signs at the 9/12 March on Washington proclaimed, "Joe Wilson speaks for me" and "Joe Wilson told the truth." It was just the latest evidence that there is no such thing as too extreme in the world of play-to-the-base politics.
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Call him "Dr. No"—he'll take it as a compliment. In D.C., plenty of the best obstruction is done in the shadows through the use of secret holds. One man is so proud of his ability to muck up the cogs of government that he brags about his efforts on his Senate Web site. A medical doctor, Coburn has earned the nickname "Dr. No." Two summers ago, he had 80 holds to his name, outdoing all senators. This week, Coburn returned to Oklahoma to sing the praises of government inaction. "I love gridlock," Coburn said Friday. "I think we're better off when we're gridlocked because we're not passing things."
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