Bipartisanship???

On his blog, this past week, Paul Krugman wrote the following: "The House has passed the stimulus bill with not a single Republican vote. Aren't you glad that Obama watered it down and added ineffective tax cuts so as to win bipartisan support?" (PK's bold print)

Along with PK, I've been worried about Obama's "bipartisanship." Is he saying and doing what he is doing because he really believes in bipartisanship or is this a charade, the object of which is to gain popularity in order to pass what he really wants? I fear, alas, it's the first and, worse, I fear it will do us damage (and if you believe Krugman it is already doing us harm--the word "ineffective" is in there.)

Take today's op-ed column in the Times (Friday the 30th) by, again, Paul Krugman. He expresses his fear that by not putting forward a comprehensive national health plan, and instead putting such a bill on hold, Obama is endangering its ultimate passage.

He refers to why it failed under Clinton, but I think PK's argument needs both clarification and amplification.

In general, the best time, I believe, for a president to get something passed that he really wants is in his first year in office. Clinton, listening to Robert Rubin, decided to make balancing the budget his priority in 1993. Rubin argued that a lower deficit would lower interest rates and therefore encourage businesses to borrow and invest. The tax increase was mainly one on the very well-to-do (an income tax), although there was also an increase on income taxes paid by more affluent social security recipients and also there was a small increase in taxes on gasoline. The last two increases were very small compared to the tax increase on the wealthy.

Every single Republican in both the Senate and House voted against this tax bill. In the Senate, it passed with Al Gore's vote breaking the 50-50 tie and in the House, the vote was 218 to 216. Leading Republicans denounced the increase and many of them said it would send us plummeting into another recession. Of course, it didn't. Whether you can attribute the huge surpluses at the end of the decade, and the low unemployment rate and prosperity, to this tax increase or instead attribute the surpluses to the huge amount of taxes collected from short term trades in the bubbling stock market has to be left to others to figure out.

But what is pertinent is that the tax increase downgraded the national health bill to the 2nd year of Clinton's presidency. And while a good part of its failure was the way it was mishandled by Hillary and others, I strongly suspect that had this been the priority in 1993, and not Rubin's tax increase, it would have passed.

Whether Obama will still have enough political capital to pass a national health bill in 2010 (or even later in 2009) is yet to be seen, but I doubt all his praises of bipartisanship will be of help. Those guys in the GOP are doing their best, right now, to sabatage the recovery. Ultimately, I believe, they are doing this for simple partisan reasons. They hope to be able, as early as 2010, to proclaim Obama a failure and use this as an argument to retake control of the Congress and then the White House in 2012.