Brief Encounter Article

The first ten days
Brief encounter
Jan 29th 2009From The Economist print edition
Barack Obama’s bipartisan honeymoon has ended even sooner than anyone expected
AP
EVERY incoming American president promises that he will reach across the aisle. Senators and congressmen, Republican and Democrat alike, join in the hymn to the virtues of bipartisan effort. This time was no different: everyone applauded when Barack Obama said from the steps of the Capitol that “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.” But, as usual, the stale political arguments have begun all over again.
Mr Obama set a cracking pace in his first days in office. He signed a lot of admirable orders, such as one closing Guantánamo within a year and others pushing for more fuel-efficient cars and ending the prohibition on sending aid to international organisations that provide abortion. He has buttered up the Republican minority in Congress, and they have gushed about how nice it is to work with him. Nonetheless, the first big partisan row of the new administration has already begun.

It concerns the new president’s plans for the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan”, the largest economic stimulus package ever devised: no less than $819 billion over the next two years in a bid to buoy up the shrinking economy and prevent the loss of millions of jobs. Many Republicans are worried about the hole this will make in the nation’s accounts. They note that plenty of pork has crept into the bill, and that it will be impossible to spend that much that fast. It also contains some protectionist nasties in the shape of “Buy American” provisions. The bill, they say, is just a sneaky way of achieving standard Democratic big-government aims.
A bit rich, the Democrats retort, coming from the party that inherited a healthy surplus from Bill Clinton and turned it, thanks to tax cuts unmatched by savings, into a fair-sized deficit even before the recession began to bite. And besides, what else do the Republicans have to offer as a solution to the mess their president created? (Not very much, is the sad truth.)
Visible party lines
On January 28th the stimulus bill passed in the House of Representatives without a single Republican vote. In principle, that means that it could die in the Senate next week, since the Democrats are currently two votes short of a filibuster-proof majority there. That seems unlikely: the Republicans will not want to be blamed for the recession. But it signals an early end to bipartisanship and bodes ill for the future of more difficult legislation, which will require a lot more co-operation.
Whom to blame for the breakdown? The stimulus row apart, the Republicans can claim to have behaved reasonably well, confirming Mr Obama’s appointments without much fuss, though they did try, unsuccessfully, to vote down his new treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, for failing to pay his taxes on time. Mr Obama, for his part, has offered a lot of fine words about bipartisanship but has not produced very much of it, preferring instead to deliver on cherished Democratic aims. The same holds for the stimulus plan. True, the package contains a large dollop of tax cuts: some $275 billion of the $819 billion comes in this form. But most of that was proposed long ago by Mr Obama on the campaign trail, and so can hardly represent an attempt to forge post-election consensus. The Republicans have been given little say in drafting the plan, and the Democratic majority has taken advantage of the rules of procedure to frustrate their attempts to amend it.
On the other hand, Mr Obama has been careful to drop a few of the least stimulative and most contentious items. And no one doubts that some form of big stimulus is urgently needed. The Republicans could equally be accused of playing a cynical game, voting against a package they know will pass in order to appear thrifty yet not risk being accused of sabotage. In other words: it’s politics as usual.