David Sanger writes of the passage of health care reform that
[I]n the course of this debate, Mr. Obama has lost something — and lost it for good. Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and a half ago — the promise of a 'post-partisan' Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering."
Sanger is mistaken.
The promise of post-partisanship was killed by the Republican party months ago when it decided that scoring political points with obstructionism was more important than helping to shape health care reform on behalf of its constituents. Ultimately, post-partisanship can neither be promised nor implemented by one leader or party. What remains to be seen for the Democratic leadership is whether dogged, nearly Quixotic adherence to this idea will be replaced by a similarly strong commitment to pushing the Democratic agenda forward legislatively. It is on this agenda, and not on a collectively hallucinated post-partisan future, that President Obama and the Democrats rode to victory. The results of the mid-term elections will be determined by the ability of the Democrats to continue the momentum of tonight's victory and act as an effective governing party.
1 comments:
bipartisanship has been dying a slow, but steady, death since the civil rights era. i wouldn't mark it's TOD as any time within the Obama administration. there's tons and tons of research showing the extent to which both parties have been drifting apart for a while (in fact, it's the dems shifting slowly to the center and the GOP shifting dramatically to the right).
sadly, i think the results of the mid-term elections were already set by obama's dithering on HCR due to (what seemed like) his insistence on the post-partisan fantasy you're describing. we're already screwed.
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