Democracy ain't pretty

The first two weeks of the Obama administration have been exciting to watch. In his first few days, President Obama has ordered the closing of the prison at Quantanamo, ordered prisoners to be treated according to the Army Field Manual, and has had some if not all of his administration's nominees confirmed by the Senate.

But now, President Obama is trying to build bipartisan support for a $800 billion stimulous bill and is meeting stiff opposition for Republicans in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The going has been tough and

Liberal MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow, has been politely criticising the President for playing nice with the Republicans. On the right, Victor Davis Hanson writing for the National Review online sees in Obama's first two weeks,

"We are quite literally after two weeks teetering on an Obama implosion—and with no Dick Morris to bail him out—brought on by messianic delusions of grandeur, hubris, and a strange naivete that soaring rhetoric and a multiracial profile can add requisite cover to good old-fashioned Chicago politicking."

A Jan. 29, 2009 editorial in The Economist offered an interesting insight regarding the bipartisan efforts of both parties and it subsequent breakdown.

Whom to blame for the breakdown? The stimulus row apart, the Republicans can claim to have behaved reasonably well, confirming Mr Obama’s appointments without much fuss, though they did try, unsuccessfully, to vote down his new treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, for failing to pay his taxes on time. Mr Obama, for his part, has offered a lot of fine words about bipartisanship but has not produced very much of it, preferring instead to deliver on cherished Democratic aims. The same holds for the stimulus plan. True, the package contains a large dollop of tax cuts: some $275 billion of the $819 billion comes in this form. But most of that was proposed long ago by Mr Obama on the campaign trail, and so can hardly represent an attempt to forge post-election consensus. The Republicans have been given little say in drafting the plan, and the Democratic majority has taken advantage of the rules of procedure to frustrate their attempts to amend it.

Accordiing to The Economist, behind all the partisan rhetoric, it's "politics as usual." Time magazine columnist Joel Klein, writing in Swampland had a different take on the "politics as usual" idea.

The legislative process is as ugly as a wart. We only notice it when an earth-shattering monstrosity like the stimulus bill comes gallumphing down the track, but there is no such thing as elegant legislation. You always have to throw in a little sweetener--the museum of organized crime in Las Vegas, the military kazoo band, whatever--if you want to cobble together the votes needed to win. This is business as usual--and Barack Obama is guilty as charged: he's trying to get this thing through the old-fashioned way. So what? What's new is his priorities: his efforts to put the needs of the working poor and the unemployed ahead of the wealthy, to build a new green economy, to fund inner city education and remake the health insurance system. That is what the American people voted for after an era of Republican neglect. The messiness of the current process is not only inevitable, it also says very little about Obama's ability to deliver on those very necessary goals.

In public administration classes, I learned that Founders designed the government with three branches so that they wouldn't work well together. So what we're seeing is American democracy at work, it's not pretty but it works, after a fashion.

Capitano Tedeschi

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