Bloomberg:President Barack Obama may rely only on Democrats to push health-care legislation through the U.S. Congress if Republican opposition doesn’t yield soon, two of the president’s top advisers said.
“Ultimately, this is not about a process, it’s about results,” David Axelrod, Obama’s senior political strategist, said during an interview in his White House office. “If we’re going to get this thing done, obviously time is a-wasting.”
Both Axelrod and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said taking a partisan route to enacting major health-care legislation isn’t the president’s preferred choice. Yet in separate interviews, each man left that option open.
“We’d like to do it with the votes of members of both parties,” Axelrod said. “But the worst result would be to not get health-care reform done.”
Happy-clappy bipartisanship sounds good in the abstract, but in practice it's often a bad idea. First, Republicans have absolutely no interest in playing nice, because they need the Democrat-controlled congress to be a failure. Without partisanship, Republicans help Democrats be successful. They obviously don't want that, no matter what it means for the country.
Second, the GOP has some really bad ideas -- meeting a crazy person halfway is halfway crazy. All you'd wind up doing would be turning good ideas into bad ones. Compromise is an arrangement in which both parties agree to be equally unhappy -- that doesn't exactly guarantee an excellent result.
