Despite the excessive length and distracting number of policy proposals that marred Barack Obama’s State of the Union address last night, the President sent a two-part message to congressional Democrats and Republicans that I think deserves some attention:

To Democrats: you are the majority in Congress.  Govern like one.

To Republicans: don’t confuse obstructionism with political participation.

My own obvious political sympathies aside, I think it’s safe to make a couple of hopefully uncontroversial observations regarding the 111^th Congress: first, congressional Democrats would get a lot more done if they enforced party discipline and didn’t live in perpetual fear of the GOP; and second, congressional Republicans (who are masters of party discipline) have done a better job obstructing Democratic initiatives than they have in articulating their own agenda as minority party.

If Congress wants to get any sort of legislation passed this decade, both of these tendencies have to change, and change fast.  For the President’s part, last night he extended an exceptional number of olive branches rightward, and looking toward the Democratic House and Senate leadership, he reiterated his core priorities. This provides what I think is a decent blueprint for the sort of give-and-take deal-making that is going to be the only means of getting anything done in Congress short of a one-party supermajority in both Houses (and as we’ve seen from the last couple of years, even that didn’t work out for the Democrats – thanks Joe Lieberman).

I don’t have any illusions that even 1% of what needs to be done will actually get done this year, nor do I naively believe that Obama’s conciliatory gestures toward the Republicans are necessarily going to be followed by action, either from the President himself or from his fractious Democratic allies in Congress.  But at minimum, Obama’s speech poses some questions for congressional Republicans, and hopefully sent a wake-up call to Democrats:

Republicans:

The President went out on a limb last night and said things about offshore drilling, a partial spending freeze, capital gains, and so forth that you should be happy to hear.  Drop the total obstructionism and at least try to meet the guy halfway on some issues.

If Obama is serious about investment in offshore oil drilling, biodiesel and clean coal, why can’t you get behind some form of cap and trade, which is after all a market solution to an environmental problem?  Again, if Obama is willing to give additional tax cuts to small business, eliminate capital gains on small business investment, and pursue free trade agreements globally, why not concede some level of beefed-up regulatory oversight for the investment banks and hedge funds whose rampant speculation and under-capitalization got us into this economic crisis?

Democrats:

In addition to a general admonition to Democrats to “do your goddamned job,” and a perhaps sexist jab concerning the party leadership’s amazing lack of cojones, if I had the ear of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, I would ask them to focus on their President and party’s core legislative priorities – getting some form of health care and financial services bills passed, and moving on to job creation.  Neither of these bills is going to be what you want, but you fundamentally have the American public on your side on these issues: very few people are happy with Wall Street bankers right now (except possibly Goldman Sachs employees), and most people think the health care system in this country is a mess, despite their fears that what you’re proposing will make things worse.

And one more thing, I get that many of you, particularly in the House, may be balking at following the Democratic leadership on issues like health care, particularly after the recent election in Massachusetts, but I promise you that your party will lose more seats in Congress if you do nothing than if you pass something, no matter how imperfect.   I’m strongly of the opinion that most Americans, those not infected by violent partisanship (like me, perhaps), like a Congress that does nothing even less than they like a Congress that does something, even if this amounts to small-ball initiatives that fall far short of the leadership’s original goals.

So I’ll once again close in the spirit of Hot Fuzz, and say let’s go to work!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 6:44 pm and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.