[The Republicans should] behave as a responsible minority party...to get what they can, when they can, in the adult absent of high drama and exotic histrionics.To Carpenter's first point - that a responsible minority party should get what they can when they can - that is the bipartisanship President Obama was striving for, probably a little too much.
Republican arguments are swiftly becoming a laughingstock. Why it took so long for the White House to engage those arguments and enforce some semblance of message discipline...can, in part perhaps, be written off to election battle fatigue, but Obama & Co. now seems to be shaking off any besieged stupor.
The President is finally toughening up, and I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that his toughening process is taking the same calculated trajectory as it did in previous battles against Hillary Clinton and John McCain. First came Obama's exhortations for reasoned debate and civilized behavior, then came the inevitable unreasonable and uncivilized assaults in retort, and finally came a reinvigorated candidate, giving as much - and then more - as he got.
Obama is something of a robust self-contradiction, if not a living oxymoron: He is, it seems, a kind of delicate but thunderingly hardass Illinois pol. Hey, it worked for Lincoln, and there were many who misunderestimated that man throughout his inexorable marches to triumph, too. Hence I take a rather long-term delight in the current Republican spectacles of temper tantrums and mindless obstructionism and logic-defying arguments. Because odds are, I'd wager, they're only doing long-term damage to themselves.
If the last election had resulted in a 2000-type scenario, with Obama losing the popular vote by a half-million votes (or winning it by the same) and barely squeaking through in the Electoral College, AND if congress had been put in Republican hands, then true bipartisanship would have been the way to go.
But 2008 was not 2000. The President won the largest popular vote margin in twenty-four years, an Electoral College tally that included states that hadn't voted Democratic since 1964, and brought with him stronger Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. After turning the party of Bush out of congress in 2006, American voters clearly and decisively rejected Republican government of any kind last November. And if the GOP continue to block the agenda promised by the victors of that election, they could very well find themselves losing a third straight election in 2010.
When Ronald Reagan won a similar victory for the Republicans in 1980, the Democrats played the part of the opposition like pros. They understood the mandate the American people gave the Republicans and, without whining and moaning like Boehner and company, took what they could when they could.
