The Democratic push for bipartisanship and massive Republican resistance during the Obama Presidency

Obstruction works for Republicans opposing a Democratic President. It works because they are willing to do it. And it works because Democrats all too often are unwilling to use entirely legitimate tools at their disposal to overcome the obsttrucion.

In the introduction to their important 2012 book, It's Even Worse Than Itz Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, define the problem as follows. They use an example of what I would describe as really bad economic policy combined with really bad politics, a resolution known as the Conrad-Gregg proposal.

A contemporary article from The Hill described it this way (Gregg: Fiscal panel bill lacks the votes 01/12/2010):

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) told The Hill on Monday that the proposal he’s pushing with Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) doesn’t have the 60 Senate votes necessary to pass. An amendment creating the fiscal commission will get a full Senate vote next week during a debate over a bill raising the debt limit.

Gregg and Conrad’s plan would set up a process to come up with a bipartisan fiscal reform package that would be ensured a vote on the House and Senate floors. The commission’s supporters, mainly centrist lawmakers in both chambers, have said that the special legislative process is necessary to any fiscal reform because lawmakers aren’t willing to consider the politically perilous tax increases and spending cuts necessary to bring down the deficit, which hit a record $1.4 trillion last year. The Senate bill has 33 co-sponsors in addition to Gregg and Conrad. [my emphasis]

Obama's push for the Grand Bargain

This effort was part of President Obama's pursuit of a "Grand Bargain," a fundamentally conservative idea that Obama held that was also bad politics. The idea was that Republicans would agree to raise taxes on the wealthy and the Democrats would agree to make cuts to "entitlements," which means primarily Social Security and Medicare, but is also used to include Medicaid. Obama floated this idea during his 2008-9 Presidential transition period, pointedly raising it to a group of conservative journalists. Digby Parton was sounding the alarm about it even at the time. (Fiscal Madness Hullabaloo 01/11/2009)

This is what Obama was telling ABC's George Stephanopoulos on national TV even before he was sworn in as President, but knowing that he was going to have very solid Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate ('This Week' Transcript: Barack Obama ABC News 01/11/2009):

OBAMA: So what our challenge is going to be is identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient.

I'm not suggesting, George, I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace that we had hoped.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me press you on this, at the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your presidency some kind of a grand bargain? That you have tax reform, health care reform, entitlement reform, including Social Security and Medicare where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?

OBAMA: Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And when will that get done?

OBAMA: Well, the -- right now I'm focused on a pretty heavy lift, which is making sure that we get that reinvestment and recovery package in place. But what you describe is exactly what we're going to have to do.

What we have to do is to take a look at our structural deficit, how are we paying for government, what are we getting for it, and how do we make the system more efficient?

STEPHANOPOULOS: And eventually sacrifice from everyone.

OBAMA: Everybody is going to have to give. Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game. [my emphasis]

So Obama first pushed through a stimulus package that economists including Paul Krugman was about half as big as it needed to be to start an adequately strong recovery, and one heavily weighted toward tax cuts whose stimulative value was dubious, and one that despite his compromises with Republicans failed to win any significant Republican support in Congress.

And in a move that was a kind of apology for passing stimulus at all, Obama stressed the need for cutting the deficit, and appointed the notorious Bowles-Simpson Commission, officially called the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, with a charge to come up with an austerity plan. Critics called it the Catfood Commission, as in "Let Grandma Eat Catfood," to highlight the fact that the two programs so critical for older people - and two programs that were and are spectacularly popular and successful and identified with the Democratic Party - Social Security and Medicare - were the prime targets of this austerity project. As Obama told Stephanopoulos, "Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game." Especially people with old skin.

How did any Democrat ever convince themselves that this was good policy or good politics?

The economics of federal deficits

To be fair to establishment Democrats, for a long time even liberal economists held to the idea that the deficit was important to control or eliminate. Even in "pure" Keynesian terms, many liberals held to Keynes' own position that the federal budget should be balanced over the business cycle. That is, the government should run deficits to stimulate the economy in recessions and reduce deficits during expansions. John Kenneth Galbraith explained in his classic The Affluent Society (1958) a very practical problem with this, which is that it's easier for politicians to vote to increase spending and cut taxes during recessions than it is for them to reduce spending and raise taxes during expansions.

His son Jamie Galbraith explained in the same context that Obama was addressing in his 2009 Grand Bargain talk why the deficit obsession of that moment was wildly misguided in terms of real-world economics. (The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008)) Without getting into the weeds, the end of the Bretton Woods international currency system in 1973 meant that the dollar became a de facto international reserve currency, and it remains so. There is an accounting identity which he explained this way:

There is a basic relationship in macroeconomics, as fundamental as it is poorly understood, that links the internal and the international financial position of any country. A country's internal deficit, that is, its "public" deficit and its "private" deficit - the annual borrowing by companies and household - will together equal its international deficit.

Money flows are part of the international deficit, and as long as the US dollar is the world reserve currency, other countries will hold significant amounts of dollars as reserves. Along with the US trade deficits, this means that the US has run chronic international deficits for decades and will continue to do so. So the only way the federal budget goes into surplus, as it did briefly at the end of the Clinton Administration, is if private companies and households are collectively borrowing more than they are spending, i.e., creating a "private" deficit. That only happens at a time of net investment in the private economy, where the borrowing in a given year is higher than the spending.

In other words, the federal government doesn't actually control whether there is a public deficit or not. State and local governments are required to balance their budgets annually. So if spending exceeds borrowing in the private economy, the federal government will run a deficit. (Accounting relations like this sometimes sound downright mystical. But in this case, they reflect real-world macroeconomic effects.)

The 2011 "Grand Bargain" fiasco

Mann and Ornstein in their book describe how the Republicans obstructed the Conrad-Gregg proposal to force a vote on the kind of deficit reductions the Republicans had been saying they themselves wanted.

The true Republican positions on deficits since "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," as the former Bush-Cheney Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill reported that Dick Cheney told him. The Bush-Quayle Administration did cooperate with Democrats on a tax increase, but it was distinctly unpopular among the Republican base. "Deficits don't matter" has been the real position of the Republican Party since 1980.

How did the Republicans block the Conrad-Gregg proposal? By using the filibuster. With the full support of that legendary Bold Maverick John McCain, who always bragged about his ability to "reach across the aisle," i.e., work in a "bipartisan" way with Democrats:

But on January 26, [2011] the Senate blocked the resolution. Fifty-three senators supported it, but it could not garner the sixty votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Among those who voted to sustain the filibuster and kill the resolution were Mitch McConnell and John McCain. McCain was joined in opposition by six other original cosponsors, all Republicans. Never before have cosponsors of a major bill conspired to kill their own idea, in an almost Alice-in-Wonderland fashion. Why did they do so? Because President Barack Obama was for it, and its passage might gain him political credit.

Even after that setback, the Obama-Biden Administration continued to bang their heads against that wall, in pursuit of the chimaera of a Bipartisan Grand Bargain that was especially unpopular among Democratic voters. (Jay Newton-Small, The Inside Story of Obama and Boehner’s Second Failed Grand Bargain Time 07/23/2011)

David Atkins gave an idea of the wretched politics of this later effort in The New York Times reports. You decide. Hullabaloo 07/22/2011.

It was this political context that gave rise a few months earlier to what I like to call The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs." (Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010)

Mann and Ornstein themselves cautioned in 2011, "Maneuvering tirelessly to stake out some elusive political center, in other words, won’t help Obama win over swing voters. It’ll just set him up for another year of looking weak and ineffectual." (David Brooks’s Awful Advice to Obama New Republic 10/28/2011)

What Mann and Ornstein highlight throughout their 2012 book is the asymmetric partisan polarization of American politics. That involves the continual radicalization of the Republican Party which has not remotely been matched by a similar ideological polarization on the Democratic side. And still isn't today. (See: the January 6 Capitol insurrection directly incited by Republican President Donald Trump.)

And the seemingly eternal conservative Democratic argument for promoting conservative policies that their own Democratic base voters dislike is that it's a way to appeal to swing voters who supposedly love bipartisanship. Obama relied on this argument, although for him it seems to have been more than a cynical political argument. He really did seem to value "bipartisanship" as a good thing in itself. But he also claimed it was good politics. Whatever the ontological virtue of Bipartisanship may be, the latter assumption was clearly wrong in 2011, as Mann and Ornstein relate:

America got [a] crisis-the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression-and a pretty clear signal from the voters, who elected Barack Obama by a comfortable margin and gave the Democrats substantial gains in the House and Senate. What the country didn't get was any semblance of a well-functioning democracy. President Obama's postpartisan pitch fell flat, and the Tea Party movement pulled the GOP further to its ideological pole. Republicans greeted the new president with a unified strategy of opposing, obstructing, discrediting, and nullifying every one of his important initiatives. Obama reaped an impressive legislative harvest in his first two years but without any Republican engagement or support and with no apparent appreciation from the public. The anemic economic recovery and the pain of joblessness and underwater home mortgages led not to any signal that the representatives ought to pull together, but rather to yet another call by voters to "throw the bums out." The Democrats' devastating setback in the 2010 midterm elections, in which they lost six Senate seats and sixty-three in the House, produced a Republican majority in the House dominated by right-wing insurgents determined to radically reduce the size and role of government. What followed was an appalling spectacle of hostage taking - most importantly, the debt ceiling crisis - that threatened a government shutdown and public default, led to a downgrading of the country's credit, and blocked constructive action to nurture an economic recovery or deal with looming problems of deficits and debt. [my emphasis]

Good policy is often good politics for the policy's supports. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes - far too often, actually - bad policy can be good politics for its supporters, especially in the short run.

But the Democratic Party's decades-long fondness for Reagan-lite positions that were both bad policy and bad politics for their own party is a different sort of thing.

Related: Norm Ornstein on the 2020 Republican Party: "This is a cult" Contradicciones 12/05/2020