On a scale of 1 - 10, tell me how "Bipartisan" Obama has been lately. Explain why.

He muscleed through the stimulus package solely along party lines and it appears that the republicans are not very happy with the bill (despite about 1/3 of the bill being a tax cut).

What say you?

Considering that the bill was beefed up to about 43% tax cuts (which is less of a percentage than the Republicans have in the house), he's been surprisingly bipartisan.

I would say a 7. The problem is that Republicans have been at a 2 on bipartisanship. They expect the Democrats to concede to everything they want. Ironically, I don't remember them being so kind when they gained a majority in both houses recently. But that's how politics is.

The stimulus debacle created one huge mess. The Republicans in Congress are pretty much the most conservative Republicans out there (excepting a healthy number in the Senate who are much more reasonable) since they are in safe districts that were able to withstand the reckonings of 2006 and 2008. So in many ways the party is more extreme than it used to be since its been shrunken down to the parts of the country where people would vote for a registered sex offender if he has an (R) next to his name.

Republicans have certainly (or at least they think they have) benefited from this situation in the short term. I really don't see their exit strategy though that will allow them to gain the upper hand unless they really start changing their party identity. Their party approval rating is still in 20's while Democrats in Congress are at least in the high 30's.

So essentially I see three things that might happen:

1) (what I see as the most likely) Obama will continue to approach things from a bipartisan perspective. Republicans will continue to revolt. If they continue to do so for too long, they risk being labeled as the opposition party who are just getting in the way for no good reason. Obama and Democrats will benefit if that happens. Obviously if Democrats start going out of control then it will be problematic for them too. But Obama really is the Democrats' ace of spades as he is pretty good at soothing the American people and finding his way out of sticky situations.

2) The GOP will stick to its guns and will criticize anything the President does. The Democratic brand will sink as a result. The public will not necessarily flock to Republicans either. Both parties will be stagnating at the bottom in terms of public opinion.

3) Republicans are able to broaden their message and are able to start rallying support for their causes. Frankly, I see this as the least likely considering that the people elected to office currently are about as conservative as they could be. I don't see them changing their hard-line stance on issues like immigration, the environment, national defense, and other issues which the middle of the country could go either way on. If anything, this stimulus debacle has probably made it even LESS likely that they will try to adopt any new approaches on issues.

Historically, the party with a person in the Oval Office loses seats in Congress during the midterm elections. There is a decent chance this will happen in the House. Republicans actually have more seats to defend in the

I 100% agree with this article's assessment of the current situation.  This temporary "victory" for the Republicans (if you can call it that...the stimulus was passed because of Republicans in the Senate) could actually end up hurting Republicans if they take it for something that it is not:

They Sure Showed That Obama

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15rich.html?_r=2&ref=opinion

By FRANK RICH

AM I crazy, or wasn’t the Obama presidency pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had “all but lost control of the agenda in Washington,” declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. “Obama Losing Stimulus Message War” was the headline at Politico a day later. At the mostly liberal MSNBC, the morning host, Joe Scarborough, started preparing the final rites. Obama couldn’t possibly eke out a victory because the stimulus package was “a steaming pile of garbage.”

Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson’s first mate.

But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.

On Wednesday, as a stimulus deal became a certainty on Capitol Hill, I asked David Axelrod for his take on this Groundhog Day relationship between Obama and the political culture.

“It’s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,” he said. “We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer of ’07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national polls.” But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept repeating itself. When Obama came out against the gas-tax holiday supported by both McCain and Clinton last spring, Axelrod recalled, “everyone in D.C. thought we were committing suicide.”

The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”

For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”

Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.

A useful template for the current political dynamic can be found in one of the McCain campaign’s more memorable pratfalls. Last fall, it was the Beltway mantra that Obama was doomed with all those working-class Rust Belt Democrats who’d flocked to Hillary in the primaries. The beefy, beer-drinking, deer-hunting white guys — incessantly interviewed in bars and diners — would never buy the skinny black intellectual. Nor would the “dead-ender” Hillary women. The McCain camp not only bought into this received wisdom, but bet the bank on it, pouring resources into states like Michigan and Wisconsin before abandoning them and doubling down on Pennsylvania in the stretch. The sucker-punched McCain lost all threestates by percentages in the double digits.

The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama “losing control,” also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount to “generational theft.” F.D.R.’s New Deal had been an abject failure.

This barrage did shave a few points off the stimulus’s popularity in polls, but its approval rating still remained above 50 percent in all (Gallup, CNN, Pew, CBS) but one of them (Rasmussen, the sole poll the G.O.P. cites). Perhaps the stimulus held its own because the public, in defiance of Washington’s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can’t create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal.

In any event, the final score was unambiguous. The stimulus package arrived with the price tag and on roughly the schedule Obama had set for it. The president’s job approval percentage now ranges from the mid 60s (Gallup, Pew) to mid 70s (CNN) — not bad for a guy who won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the vote. While 48 percent of Americans told CBS, Gallup and Pew that they approve of Congressional Democrats, only 31 (Gallup), 32 (CBS) and 34 (Pew) percent could say the same of their G.O.P. counterparts.

At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that “perhaps we’ve overanalyzed it, we don’t know what we’re talking about.” But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating “victory.” Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus’s unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that “the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus ‘package’ is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties.” There hasn’t been this much delusional giddiness in these ranks since Monica Lewinsky promised a surefire Republican sweep in the 1998 midterms.

Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party’s hard-liners in Washington loathe him. Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor. Steele’s argument against the stimulus package is that “in the history of mankind” no “federal, state or local” government has ever “created one job.” As it happens, among the millions of jobs created by the government are the federal investigators now pursuing Steele for alleged financial improprieties in his failed 2006 Senate campaign.

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that’s not the hand America has been dealt.

As Judd Gregg flakes out and Lindsey Graham throws made-for-YouTube hissy fits on the Senate floor, Obama should stay focused on the big picture in governing as he did in campaigning. That’s the steady course he upheld when much of the political establishment was either second-guessing or ridiculing it, and there’s no reason to change it now. The stimulus victory showed that even as president Obama can ambush Washington’s conventional wisdom as if he were still an insurgent.

But, as he said in Fort Myers last week, he will ultimately be judged by his results. If the economy isn’t turned around, he told the crowd, then “you’ll have a new president.” The stimulus bill is only a first step on that arduous path. The biggest mistake he can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

they shouldnt be happy with it. it was full of pork. (this is the one with things like nancys mouse project?)

Hmmm, well the University of Washington thinks that the stimulus did some pretty smart things:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15kristof.html?em

That’s a hefty sum — by comparison, the Education Department’s entire discretionary budget for the year was $59 billion — and it will save America’s schools from the catastrophe that they were facing. A University of Washington study had calculated that the recession would lead to cuts of 574,000 school jobs without a stimulus.

“We dodged a bullet the size of a freight train,” notes Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington.

So for those who oppose education spending in the stimulus, a question: Do you really believe that slashing half a million teaching jobs would be fine for the economy, for our children and for our future?

if the teachers were any good...this situation wouldnt have happened.

I've heard really wild numbers on how many cuts were actually in this bill.

But as only three republicans have voted in all Congress, I'd say that's hardly bipartisan at all.

Michael Steele was chosen to run the RNC because of two things.

1) Republicans had a wide range of talented people. Steele is talented, strong willed, super conservative, and black.

2) He's a complete jackass. I mean this in a nice way.

Basically, he's thinking long term. In 8-12 years when the next recession/disaster hits, the Republicans will be able to say, "look, it's all the failed ideology of the other party."

In committee, in person, the two parties are being very civil to each other under Steele, McCain, McConnell and Obama. The Republicans had a lot to do with the shaping of the bill in committee - these things don't leave committee on a simple majority (usually).

I personally think Obama has been pretty open to Republican input, he's prob

ably spent more time with Senate and House Republicans in the last two months than Bush or Clinton ever spent with the opposition in a year (minus post-9/11).

Steele has basically said that he's happy that they are opposing him just for the sake of it.

It's normal.

For the next 4-12 years, Obama and dems will keep trying (knowing full well that it takes two to tango) and I think that strategy will work until the next elction changing disaster.

This makes absolutely no sense.  Now you are blaming teachers?

seems like a good choice to me.  them and their unions that protect incompetent teachers from being fired.

had they been taught better they wouldnt have acted stupidly.