President Obama's road to working productively with Republicans just got a lot harder
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
In the past couple weeks, in interviews with House and Senate
staffers for the Republican leadership, there has been a depressing
message: Nothing is going to get done for the next four years. Again and
again, the same mantra could be heard. Partisanship and election
jockeying for 2014 and 2016 is going to keep everything locked up.
Watching the live feed from the White House on Friday it became hard
to argue otherwise. President Obama held an event with mothers defending
the Affordable Care Act, the start of a monthslong effort to protect
his signature achievement, which Republicans have promised to fight all
the way to the 2014 elections and beyond. Then, shortly thereafter,
White House press secretary Jay Carney jumped between answering
questions about the administration’s response to the attacks in Benghazi
to the Internal Revenue Service targeting the Tea Party and other
conservative political groups for audits.
It’s going to take some time to get to the bottom of these
controversies, but we can conclude the pessimists are probably right.
Nothing is going to get done in this siege environment.
That has long been the state of play in Washington for many
observers. Still, there were a few politicians cupping their hands
around the flame of bipartisanship. The president was one. He took two
Republican senators golfing this week, the latest in a string of efforts
to fashion some kind of a budget deal. GOP senators on the receiving
end of that charm were also working with the White House to reach a
deal.
This week, I talked to Sen. Lamar Alexander, one of the senators the
president invited to dinner last month. He testified to the president’s
good faith on the budget. He thought President Obama was making an
honest effort to achieve a grand bargain. He not only said that the
president was sincere but that his chief of staff Denis McDonough was
working with Republicans like no Obama envoy before him.
The substantive differences between the president and Republicans on
the budget may be insurmountable, but now it seems like even if the pipe
dream of a substantive budget agreement could be reached it wouldn’t be
enough. Even if Republican senators can engage in a trust-building
exercise with the White House, how can they convince their constituents
that the president is offering them a fair deal on the budget? A
poisoned well is now roiling. Any Republican who tries to convince their
constituents about a deal will now likely get funny looks. Their
constituents would wonder why they were engaged in negotiations with an
administration that has told evolving stories about its response to the
attack in Benghazi and that houses an IRS targeting conservative groups.
These twin controversies will spur more congressional hearings. That,
in turn, means months more of disclosures, rabbit holes, and partisan
attacks. For many liberals, this is the obvious point of the politically
motivated Benghazi inquiries: to pin the president down and leave him
ineffective. Perhaps it was always likely that something would blow the
long-shot budget negotiations off course, but the continued effort by
the president and a handful of Republican senators suggested at least a
glimmer of opportunity. The light appears to have gone out.
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