Partisanship, by the Bye.(The Talk of the Town)

Throughout the fortnight-long Battle of the Stimulus Package--the Capitol Hill confrontation that culminates this week in a signing ceremony for a historically unprecedented piece of legislation that will inject more than three-quarters of a trillion dollars' worth of adrenaline into America's fluttering economic heart--one question preoccupied commentators and observers, especially those desperate for relief from the daunting substance of the matter: was President Obama being "bipartisan" enough?

Some discussed the question calmly, others less so; but there was something like a consensus that if non-trivial numbers of Republican legislators failed to support the stimulus bill the fault, and the obloquy, would be Obama's. "The bill will be judged a political success not simply if it becomes law, but if it's deemed 'bi-partisan,' " ABC's "The Note" Web site warned. The Los Angeles Times, while calling the bill's quick passage in the House of Representatives a "big legislative victory" for Obama, cautioned that "it was clear that his efforts so far had not delivered the post-partisan era that he called for in his inauguration address." (The man had been in office for eight days--a tight schedule for era-delivering.) On the Senate floor, the remarks of Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, provided evidence that an age of perpetual political peace had not yet dawned. "This bill stinks!" Senator Graham exclaimed. And:

The process that's led to this bill stinks! . . . There is no negotiation going on here! Nobody is negotiating! We're making this up as we go! The polling numbers are scaring the hell out of everybody, and they're in a panic! They're running from one corner of the Capitol to the other to try to cobble votes together to lower the cost of the bill to say we solved the problem! This is not the way you spend a trillion dollars!

The "process," admittedly, was a hurried one; it had to be, what with the banking system frighteningly close to collapse, the economy in its deepest crisis since the nineteen-thirties, and job losses, which approached three million last year, accelerating to more than a half million a month. Still, the President found time for cordiality, inviting Republicans from both Houses of Congress to join him for cocktails, a Super Bowl party, and more cocktails. Nor was his "outreach" purely social. "This was not a drive-by P.R. stunt, and I actually thought it might be," Zach Wamp, of Tennessee, told the Times after he and his Republican House colleagues finished a long session with the President. "It was a substantive, in-depth discussion with our conference." More to the point, the bill they were discussing had already been tailored to soothe Republican sensibilities. It included tax cuts as well as direct spending, and its size, however huge by normal standards, was not even half the output--two trillion dollars--that the recession is expected to drain from the economy in the next two years.

After the Senate passed the stimulus, which Sean Hannity, on Fox News, denounced as "the European Socialist Act of 2009," Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, pronounced it "a dramatic move in the direction of indeed turning America into Western Europe." Whether or not greater income equality, better health, and fewer prisons would really be a dystopian nightmare, McConnell's vision of "the Europeanization of America" has already come true in a way that bears directly on the question of "bipartisanship": what might be called America's parliamentary parties have come to resemble their disciplined European counterparts. As recently as the nineteen-sixties, for reasons of history and origins, the Democrats were a stapled-together collection of Southern reactionaries, big-city hacks, and urban and agrarian liberals; the Republicans were a jumble of troglodyte conservatives, Yankee moderates, and the odd progressive. Ideological incoherence made bipartisanship feasible. The post-civil-rights, post-Vietnam realignment, along with the ...