Obama: Can he bridge the partisan gap?

Bill Clinton urged an end to “acrimony and division” and ended up being impeached. George W. Bush vowed to “change the tone” in Washington and bitterly divided the country. “Presidents typically kick off their terms with calls for greater civility and cooperation,” said Mark Leibovich in The New York Times, only to have their bipartisan overtures rejected amid a resumption of bitter political warfare. Will Barack Obama suffer the same fate? If he does, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post, it won’t be because he didn’t try. “His Cabinet is so centrist it almost resembles a government of national unity.” His call for $300 billion in tax cuts has pleasantly surprised Republicans as much as his recent power dinner with leading conservative columnists. “But it remains an open question whether Republicans will do more than applaud politely when he asks for help.”

The new president shouldn’t expect any cooperation from the GOP, said Alan Wolfe in The New Republic Online. In Congress, Republican centrists have either lost their seats to Democrats or been driven out of the party, leaving “hard-right activists not especially interested in bipartisanship, policy, or responsibility.” They opposed the federal bailout of the banking and auto industries, and are convinced that all government programs and taxes are inherently evil. As an embattled minority, it costs them nothing to cause “as much mischief as they are capable of imagining.” Obama can expect nothing but trouble from the GOP.

And what can Republicans expect of him? said Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online. Obama claims to have transcended ideology, but his economic plan would require Republicans to unconditionally support nearly $1 trillion in government “stimulus” spending. He says he favors good ideas from either party, but like a true Democrat, he thinks government programs are the solution. “It’s like Henry Ford’s line that you could buy any color car you wanted, as long as you wanted black.” Besides, congressional Democrats haven’t the faintest interest in bipartisanship, said Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are intent on “ramming the liberal agenda through Congress.” Does Obama really have the guts to stand up to his own party?

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If you take a hard look at his political career, said E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post, you’ll see that he does. From his first campaign, when he successfully sought to become president of the Harvard Law Review, he’s spent his entire adult life “tilting left while courting conservatives.” Sure, he’s a progressive, but he’s extremely strategic, and he knows that he’ll accomplish more by compromising with Republicans than by going to war with them.

In that regard, said David Brooks in The New York Times, Obama is truly our first postmodern president. The administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush represented the culmination of the slash-and-burn politics that both major parties have been waging since the cultural divide of the 1960s. But for Obama, “politics is not personal.” He doesn’t want revenge for previous Democratic defeats or to win the culture war for the Left. His goal is to create a new climate of personal responsibility, open-mindedness, and civic spirit—to create a new consensus, so he and the nation can get things done. It’s astonishingly audacious, and whether or not you believe Obama will succeed, it’s truly what he has set out to do.