Obama is now apparently considering foregoing Republican support and passing health insurance reform with only Democrats.
Seems he has been "bending over backward" to gain Republican support.
Apparently, the Democrats' view of bipartisanship is to cajole people into supporting your liberal agenda.
And because Republicans refuse to support Obama's far-left goals, they aren't acting in a bipartisan way.
But I see bipartisanship as using ideas from both sides to get a plan everyone can live with (if not a plan everyone is totally happywith).
For example, Republicans want tort reform, individual tax subsidies and cross-state competition. If Democrats would allow those provisions in the bill, Republicans would be more likely to support some of the things Democrats want, like doing whatever is necessary to insure everyone. Republicans would probably never consider a public option, but that is not the only way to ensure everyone is covered (expanding Medicaid would be just as effective).
But that is not the kind of bipartisanship Obama wants. He just wants everyone to agree with him. And as long as that is his goal, he will not win on this issue. He might succeed in ramming something through, but he will forever lose public trust and the Democrats will likely be swept out of Congress in 2010.
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Bi-partisanship (n): to do whatever the Democrats want you to do.
Bi-partisanship (n): to do whatever the Republicans want you to do.
Don't be a hypocrite. Everyone sees bipartisanship only when it's going there way. Republicans never knew what bipartishanship was when they were in power. The difference is the dems are cowards enough that they would go along with the devil but republicans are like pharaoh with a hardened heart even if it's the right thing to do
I agree that things became hyper-partisan during the Bush years, but many things (good or bad) were accomplished with broad support from both sides of the aisle, including Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, the original Patriot Act, Sarbanes-Oxley, McCain-Feingold and even the proposed immigration reform (McCain-Kennedy) was bipartisan.
There are flaws in some of these pieces of legislation, but at least one party can't blame the other for the problems.
Obama ran as "post-partisan" but you have to agree that he has had zero interest in Republican input on anything - as he said during the stimulus debate: "We (Democrats) won" and he later told Republicans to "move out of the way"
Hmm, No Child Left Behind wasn't well liked among Democrats.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/02/21/dems.radio.reut/index.html
Hey Luigi, thanks for becoming a follower!
Actually, NCLB had huge bipartisan support - passed 384 to 45 in the House and 91 to 9 in the Senate - it was sponsored in the Senate by Ted Kennedy.
It was only after the Teachers' Unions began freaking out that Democrats later panned the law.
And the only reason the unions started freaking out was because of the level of accountabilty for the teachers. Someone was going to actually see how the students performed year-round as opposed to one time during the year. There would be no way to blame "the test". Now they would have tests that were aligned to their core curriculum. I mean, who thinks that the concept of no child left behind is a bad idea? Not a bleeding heart liberal, for sure! But, they saw the support of massive groups of people diminishing if they didn't back off of nclb and pin it all on poor George W.
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