via Obama To GOP: You Have To Start Meeting Me Halfway.
One hundred days into office, Barack Obama’s list of accomplishments is certainly immense. From the budget, passed by the Senate on Wednesday night, to a stimulus package, the current administration has put in place an economic framework that will shape domestic policy for decades to come. Those achievement, however, have come at a cost to another tenet of the Obama agenda: the dawning of a bipartisan age.
I would not go as far to say that bipartisanship is a “tenet” of the Obama agenda up there with health care, but rather something missing in government that his vision included. He campaigned on bringing change to Washington, and he has accomplished that in the first 100 days even after getting out in front of train loads of problems that would turn anyone prematurely gray. The recovery act alone should have been enough of an accomplishment in this short time, but Obama is drawing fire for not healing the political divide in Washington in only 100 days when he actually tried to move heaven and earth to get Republicans to the table.
Although the stimulus passed with only three Republican Senators (Arlan Spector revealed that maybe more would have voted for it had they not feared a challenge from the right in their home states) and zero Republican House members voting for it, the country knows that the spending stimulus was needed and that the republican leadership was trying to play politics with the conservative voters’ livelihoods, and their unemployment checks, and their kids’ education.
The Republicans put out talking points that the stimulus bill was another example of the Democratic Party’s over spending without offering any ideas of their own besides tax cuts. The Republicans did not embrace the tax cut provisions that were in the stimulus because those cuts would not have been the huge give-away to the rich that they wanted. Who cares about tax cuts for working folks, right?
Republican Governors want the stimulus funds, the Republican voting poor want and need the funds, but the Republicans in Congress want to swim against the stream because Ronald Reagan and the bug crap crazy, nut-job, bottom-feeding, hate spewing, xenophobic, homophobic, rabid “kill him”, trickle-down believing crowd that has become the Republican Party is all about anything anti-Obama. The media chimed in with the right-wing, as usual, appealing to the Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber lovers and repeated that the stimulus was way too big without doing a moments worth of mathematics or checking the polls to see where the majority stood.
The Democrats in Congress passed a stimulus that was actually too small, but to hear the right-wing media talk it was “massive”. As Media Matters notes, during the run-up to the vote on the stimulus:
Indeed, The Washington Post reported on February 17, “[A]s big as it is, the final bill is smaller than what initially passed in the House and Senate, and it falls well short of filling the $2 trillion gap in demand that many economists foresee.” Economist Mark Zandi wrote in an op-ed on February 15, “[M]y most significant criticism of the current stimulus plan is that it is too small.” He added: “Our struggling economy will produce nearly $1 trillion less than it is capable of this year and will underperform again by at least as much in 2010. The $789 billion in spending and tax cuts to be distributed over those two years is not going to fill this expected hole in the economy. I would thus not be surprised if policymakers are forced to consider a second stimulus plan soon.” (Zandi added, “Nonetheless, when combined with other aggressive policy steps, including efforts to shore up the financial system and stem foreclosures, this fiscal-stimulus plan will go a long way toward relieving the current economic crisis.”) Zandi was not alone. Other economists — including Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, James Galbraith, Eileen Appelbaum, and J. Bradford DeLong — also assessed the stimulus package as too small.
The stimulus that is too small but yet somehow, vaguely, too big at the same time is a shining example of how the GOP is not only not meeting Obama halfway, but they aren’t even walking toward each other. Obama wants to do the right thing, the right-wing wants to do in Obama. They aren’t on the same planet, let alone trying to meet.
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