I'm sure that question is beginning to nag Barack Obama about as much as a kid's repeated "Are we almost there yet?" on a long car trip. So the Prez does days, if not weeks, of sucking up to Republicans on the stimulus package, and how many of their votes do we get on the House vote?
Zippo. No guarantees in the Senate either, unless the bill gets stripped of all the progressive, job-producing initiatives that Obama won the election on and they get replaced with an exclusive diet of Republican tax cuts.
And now a New Hampshire Republican Senator is being named Commerce Secretary. The governor of New Hampshire is a Democrat, so the assumption was that Obama had made a brilliant (if Machiavellian) move to get the Senate to 60 votes, but now the governor announces he will appoint a Republican! Turns out Senator Gregg wouldn't take the Commerce job if his replacement would provide the filibuster-proof majority. So what does Obama get from the deal? A very conservative guy in a sort-of important economic cabinet position. (This was supposed to be Bill Richardson's job.)
These stimulus votes, designed to get the country out of an economic crisis, are supposed to be the easy ones for bi-partisan cooperation. Ideally we're building a bipartisan spirit of cooperation that will create a foundation for consensus when we come to the more
ideological votes on energy policy, immigration, health care, etc. Hello?
You may remember the old Zen koan: "What is the sound of one party being bipartisan?"
