Divided Government: Will Anything Get Done?

The Economist has a very interesting article on this topic. See Below.


Lexington / Bluff and counter-bluff

Will America’s newly divided government be able to do anything at all?

Nov 18th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION THE ECONOMIST

NOT even Abroad helped him this time. Already diminished by the mid-terms, Barack Obama returned to Washington on November 15th without having added to his stature during his ten days in Asia. Though welcomed in Indonesia as if he were a native son, and garlanded in Delhi for backing India’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, he failed to achieve his main goals. In Seoul a free-trade agreement with South Korea eluded him, China brushed aside his grumbles about its undervalued currency and America’s European allies dismissed his advice to stimulate growth by maintaining public spending. Julia Gillard, Australia’s prime minister, pronounced Australia and America “great mates”, but by the standards of a world-transforming president with a Nobel prize the trip was a flop.
And yet Asia was bliss compared with the purgatory back home. It is bad enough that Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, keeps saying the Republicans’ aim now is to ensure that Mr Obama will not serve a second term without Democrats joining the chorus. But in the Washington Post Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, who worked for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton respectively, implored Mr Obama to say that he will not seek re-election. Only thus, they say, can he redeem his campaign promises to transcend party and govern solely in the national interest. Given the country’s divisions, they argue, “governing and campaigning have become incompatible.”
Mr Obama did indeed once say in a television interview that he would prefer to be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president. Having lost six seats in the Senate and more than 60 in the House, the Democrats are in shock. But mid-term elections are often followed by exaggerated despair on one side and unwarranted hubris on the other, and the likelihood of Mr Obama accepting this friendly advice is close to zero.
As to hubris, the Republican freshmen bound for Congress next January are in danger of reading into the election a message of their own creation. Many see the mid-terms as a popular rejection of the president’s “extreme” policies. This is doubtful. Voters were more likely registering a protest at the economy than repudiating an ideology. Besides, to the disgust of his own progressive base, Mr Obama enacted no extreme policies. Obamacare is a good deal less radical than the plan Richard Nixon proposed in 1974 or Bill Clinton 20 years later. In fact it closely resembles the bill the Republicans put up as an alternative to Mr Clinton’s, and its central idea—the individual mandate—was introduced in Massachusetts by none other than Mitt Romney, who hopes to become the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 2012.
Wiser Republican heads know already that however impressive the triumph at the polls, the right must not let its zealots prevent the party from showing that at the same time as mounting an effective opposition it can co-operate with Mr Obama when this is in the national interest. For his part, Mr Obama needs to demonstrate that he has heeded the voters’ message but is capable of governing despite the loss of the House. Somewhere in the grey area where these respective needs overlap the two parties will have to compromise if America is to avoid gridlock of the sort that shut down the federal government after Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to victory in 1994.
They have little time to ponder before a freight train of business thunders into Capitol Hill. High on the agenda as the lame-duck Congress convened this week were the Bush-era tax cuts due to expire on December 31st. Letting taxes rise abruptly would hurt not only the recovery but also whichever party the electorate ended up blaming. Congress also faces the small matter of passing a budget so that the government can continue to function in the new year. The early omens were not good. Mr Obama dearly wants the Senate to ratify his new START treaty with Russia, but as he prepared to jet out again for high diplomacy in Europe, the Republicans indicated that he would not get that in the lame-duck session, if at all. And they decided they were too busy for a bipartisan meeting with the White House this week.

High minds and low politics
There are grounds for doubting whether any compromise is possible given the ever-widening ideological distance between the parties. Even before the mid-terms, pundits wondered whether Mr Obama had it in him to follow the example of Mr Clinton when he faced the same predicament after 1994. Many have concluded that he does not. Mr Clinton’s admirers recall how the former president’s political smarts enabled him to beguile and outwit Mr Gingrich by stealing the Republicans’ best ideas: a balanced budget, welfare reform, smaller government, deregulation. His detractors claim that only a lack of firm convictions made it possible for him to turn on a dime. Either way, it is agreed, Mr Obama lacks the suppleness for Clintonian triangulation (“a fancy word for betrayal”, as one Clinton aide put it).
This conclusion is premature. Those who consider Mr Obama too high-minded to save himself cannot have been paying attention. Whether it was dropping the public option in Obamacare, kicking immigration reform into the long grass or going slow on gays in the military, Mr Obama has shown himself perfectly capable of bending with the wind: just ask those disgusted progressives. A better question is whether today’s Republicans have any ideas worth stealing. Of course, one good thing they say they believe in is reducing the deficit by reforming entitlements. As we report in this article, Mr Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission has now sketched out some of the painful choices that doing so would entail. Is it conceivable that in the delicate game of bluff and counter-bluff about to begin in Washington each side will at last goad the other into real movement on this? Here’s hoping.