If there’s been one hard rap on Barack Obama as President, it’s that he’s too stuck into his own “let us now reason together” shtick. He’s interested in bipartisan negotiation and dealing for its own sake, rather than lining up Democrats and cracking the whip and saying “you’ll hew to the party line or we’ll find somebody who will.” It’s how the Affordable Care Act wound up without so much as a public option, let alone a single-payer model. It’s how the original 2009 stimulus package wound up too small. And it’s how the Republicans were able to leverage the debt limit increase in 2011 into the sequestration model that afflicts us now…and it’s why they were convinced they could do it again.
Hopefully, Obama has learned his lesson. You can’t negotiate with zombies. He was an idiot to try it to begin with – when prominent Republicans are publicly announcing that they’re rooting for your failure and they’re going to be the universal “NO” before you’re even sworn in the first time, you have to start with at least the idea that you might have to do things without their help. But I guess at some level, he had to try it his way and be forcibly disillusioned in the process. Then again, anyone who looked back at the original Clinton budget in 1993 and saw zero Republican votes for it, at all, should have known what was up.
But they held the line this time. Hopefully it’s the start of a different approach.