Bye bye bipartisanship

Judd Gregg's decision to withdraw his name from consideration for Commerce Secretary puts the nail in the coffin of Obama's unprecedented effort at bipartisan legislation. Thank God for that.

Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, withdrew his nomination because of irreconcilable differences between his own views and those of the Obama administration. Apparently he just realized on Thursday that Obama is a Democrat. And maybe his sudden departure will help to remind Obama as well.

I respect and admire Barack Obama for reaching out to Republicans, but clearly the Republicans have no interest in reaching out to him.

I supported President Obama when he kept Robert Gates, from the Bush administration, as Defense Secretary. I supported him when he chose Ray LaHood, a Republican, as Transportation Secretary. And I supported him when he picked Senator Gregg as Commerce Secretary, although I secretly hoped that Gregg's departure would open up the door for a Democrat to fill his seat in the Senate.

But that's not all the outreach Obama has offered. I applauded the president for going to Capitol Hill to meet with Republicans shortly after he was inaugurated. I was happy when he invited Republican leaders to the White House for a cocktail reception. And I was glad to see Republicans on the guest list at Obama's bipartisan Super Bowl party.

And yet there's more. President Obama and the Democrats put hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts into his stimulus bill to try to win Republican support. And after all that, after nominating three GOP cabinet members, after giving the losing party influence over 1/3 of the stimulus bill, and after numerous meetings to win GOP support, what did he get? Not one Republican voted for the stimulus bill in the House again today.

Let's face it, these guys have no interest in bipartisanship. They say the want to be heard, but they have been heard. No president in my lifetime has reached out to the opposition party as much as Obama has in his first month in office. What else do these guys want?

Apparently, they want Obama to fail, which is why they have worked tirelessly to water down the stimulus bill and then complained about its ineffectiveness. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has written, Republicans have become fiercely partisan in the past 30 years. 

But for all their partisanship, Republicans aren't offering any new ideas. It's the same line over and over again from the GOP. The economy is bad? Let's cut taxes. The economy is good? Let's cut taxes. We're in peacetime? Let's cut taxes. We're in war? Let's cut taxes? Except for a few senators and governors, a lot of these Republicans are hopelessly stuck on that one note. 

But it wasn't always that way. It used to be that Republicans and Democrats could work together on economic issues. President Eisenhower, a Republican, tried to build a consensus by refusing to fight the old arguments about the New Deal that today's Republicans never tire of debating. Eisenhower kept taxes high with a 91 percent top tax rate, almost three times the current rate. President Kennedy, on the other hand, cut taxes, but even then the top rate was more than 70 percent -- twice the current rate.

Then came the legislation of the civil rights movement, and the Republicans quickly developed their famous "Southern strategy" to capitalize on white angst by convincing southern whites to vote their racial and social fears over their economic interests. Ever since then, bipartisanship has been on the decline in the GOP.

Republicans love to argue that Democrats became too liberal, but that's not what happened. What really happened is that Republicans became more intensely partisan and less willing to compromise. The Democrats are still Democrats.

When Ronald Reagan became president, Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, a Democrat, allowed Reagan's agenda to advance in Congress. But when Bill Clinton became president, Republicans in the House dug in and refused to give him a single vote in passing his economic plan. Not one vote. That was in 1993, and now some 16 years later they're still up to their old tricks.

Bipartisanship has been "a grand and noble experiment," says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, "but now the Obama administration should abandon aggressive bipartisanship." He's correct.

Sabato rightly reminds Obama what liberal Democrats have been saying for the past month: We won! In the American system of government, the winner makes the decisions. That doesn't mean the president has to be rude or dismissive, but he does have to deliver what he promised.

The American people had a choice last November between McCain's "more of the same" and Obama's "change" message. They clearly chose change. They don't want to go back to the failed policies of the Bush administration that got us into this fix in the first place.

No matter what the Republicans say about being included, they lost. Obama has a strong mandate to take bold action after securing what Sabato calls "a higher percentage of the vote than any Democratic presidential nominee since 1860, save for Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson."

"Splitting the difference on issues of principle waters down his mandate and dilutes the changes his supporters expect him to deliver," writes Sabato. "We have a two-party system, not a one-party scheme," writes Sabato. "Leave 'national unity' governments to parliamentary nations, and let the American two-party system work."

Barack Obama is a smart person and a quick learner. I have great confidence in him. Hopefully he's listening.