Now that Democrats are the majority in Congress, the president has reverted to the 2000 model Bush, the Uniter not the Divider. Incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been talking a cheery language of bipartisanship.
Now that Democrats are the majority in Congress, the president has reverted to the 2000 model Bush, the Uniter not the Divider. Incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been talking a cheery language of bipartisanship.
This cozy togetherness is what the public evidently wants to hear, but it cannot -- and should not -- last long. Consider:
Iraq. When Bush dismissed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid quickly called for a bipartisan summit on Iraq. Democrats might think twice about that.
The Iraq mess has just entered phase two. In the first phase, Bush manipulated intelligence reports and got most Democrats to support a war resolution, giving his scheme bipartisan cover. As the war turned out to be ill-conceived and bungled in execution, most Democrats recovered their wits and turned to opposition. That's one big reason for their election sweep.
Now, we begin Iraq 2.0: The Extrication. Bush, again, desperately needs Democratic fingerprints on what, until now, has been entirely his mess. The Dunkirk phase is not going to be pretty. Leaks from the Baker-Hamilton commission, created to look for a Plan B, confirm there is no easy way out.
The aftermath of Bush's disastrous war will be the Democrats' responsibility -- only when and if they take back the White House. Until then, Bush is commander in chief, and it's his job, prodded by Congress's power of the purse and of investigation, to find a way out.
In this regard, Robert Gates, Rumsfeld's designated successor, is no prize. The good news is that he is James Baker's man. Baker is a traditional realist conservative, willing to engage other powers in the region and completely opposed to the messianic vision of the neo conservatives, now in ashes. The bad news is that Gates turned in a disgraceful performance during the Iran-Contra debacle and as director of Central Intelligence under Bush I.
Still the economy, stupid. The sleeper issue in the Democrats' big House and Senate gains is their leadership on the pocketbook distress of workaday Americans. A few winning Democrats offered conservative views on guns and abortion, and several proudly ran as war veterans; but virtually all the winners ran as pocketbook populists.
That's how Democrats triumphed in socially conservative counties of Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, North Carolina, Missouri, and other corners of middle America where ordinary people are getting clobbered by outsourcing and the failure of the economy's winnings to trickle down. That's why a nominally low unemployment rate did not help Republicans -- because it did not help working people.
Unlike in 2004, leading Democratic challengers championed regular people. Populist Democrats like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Jim Webb in Virginia, Jon Tester in Montana, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, plus socialist Bernie Sanders in Vermont and nearly every House candidate who picked up a Republican seat, ran as fair-traders, opposing deals that export American jobs. Also key were ballot initiatives raising the minimum wage, which passed (raising Democratic turnout) in all six states where they appeared, including Ohio and Missouri, thanks to the hard work of organizing group ACORN and the unions.
This pocketbook vision categorically rejects Republican economic policies. It also challenges the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party, whose dominance in presidential politics helps explain the ho-hum response of economically pressed voters -- until now. Ironically, Rahm Emanuel, head of the Democrats' House campaign committee, and Charles Schumer, his Senate counterpart, both conventional free-market men with ties to Wall Street, helped elect a wave of heartland pocketbook populists.
Bye-bye, bipartisanship. Mercifully, the sunny bipartisan mood will last only until the lame-duck Republican Congress, now repudiated by voters, makes one last effort to lock in such administration goals as permanent abolition of the estate tax, passage of illegal spying on Americans, and the confirmation of John Bolton as UN ambassador, and as the Senate begins exploring the sordid past of Robert Gates.
Forget treacly calls to come together to solve national problems. There are huge, principled differences here. The voters rejected the policies of the governing party and gave Congress a mandate to help regular people for a change.
Pelosi has said her first actions will include legislation to raise the federal minimum wage and create an effective prescription drug benefit under Medicare. If Bush signs these progressive bills, we can all sing bipartisan Kumbaya. If he vetoes them, Democrats can keep reminding voters which party serves whose interests.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in The Boston Globe.
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