What Obama owes Congressional Republicans

This Monday the long-awaited melodrama began in earnest: Barack Obama offered a hand of friendship and compromise to Congressional Republicans, and they responded as though they cared.

Now let the clock begin: How long before the latter programmatically molests the former, and before the compromising former tells the swindling latter just where to get off?

But, who knows? Maybe this time a genuine bipartisan bond out of mutual concern for the nation can be formed, and dogs will lie with cats and Ann Coulter behave with civility and Barack Obama become one with the political universe, because all its inhabitants love and admire and respect him so much.

Or, political nerves will be shattered by, say, early February at the latest, simply because most bipartisan living arrangements have the life expectancy of a housefly or American marriage.

And that, I suppose, is the way things should be. After all, the loyal opposition on Capitol Hill wouldn't be doing its job if it merely sat back and rubber stamped -- is any of this sounding sickeningly familiar? -- whatever the big executive cheese wanted.

No, the loyal opposition is by definition meant to oppose -- even, to a degree, in times of national crisis; even, in fact, after they were the ones who largely spearheaded the wretched conditions that then so urgently required a vastly different approach. It's kind of a paradox thing.

We're adults. We understand that. It's just that modern Republicans are, well ... they're so darned, well ... they're just such asses. Such unmitigated baboons, ranging from clueless yokels to calculating racketeers. They got no class -- know what I mean?

That, I'm sure, is something that Mr. Obama already knows, having learned it, if nothing else, from a campaign trail so breathtakingly littered with unconscionable GOP calumny and malevolent lies.

But back to the happy cosmos of uncommon cooperation and today's targeted topic of concern. As the NY Times led off yesterday, on Monday Obama "took his economic recovery package to Capitol Hill ... and worked to build a bipartisan coalition to endorse his plan of tax cuts and new spending with an urgent appeal 'to break the momentum of this recession.'"

A troublesome passage -- not in the whole, but in one particular: "his plan of tax cuts."

For the question naturally arose, Just how much of "his plan' was indeed "their" -- you-know-whose -- plan? Just how much backroom pre-placating and how many ideological concessions, that is, went into the questionable thing?

Obama bluntly rebuffed the rising if not prevailing scuttlebutt of skulduggery: "The notion that me wanting to include relief for working families in this plan is somehow a political ploy, when this was a centerpiece of my plan for the last two years doesn't make too much sense."

An effective riposte, at least on the surface. It's incontrovertibly true that tax cuts were an integral "centerpiece" of Obama's campaign rhetoric; but it's also easily imaginable that Obama, while campaigning, would have rejected out of hand any suggestion that a stimulus package be loaded down with passive tax cuts to a tune of nearly 40 percent.

Because that, on the surface as well, appears to be more ideologically oriented than pragmatically grounded. And that, further, would appear to be an opening-volley concession in the form of "a political ploy."

Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps Obama's economic crew really did sit down and come to the fiscal conclusion that a stimulus package disturbingly close to a 50-50 split of tax cuts and spending was the best-advisable Keynesian way to go. Perhaps politics had nothing to do with it. And perhaps Ann Coulter will learn to be civil.

Oh, there I go again, being tawdrily suspicious. But here's the thing: If his economic crew really did sit down and come up with the above fiscal mix with their eyes and minds on nothing but the best possible pragmatic course of action, then I'm all for it. Let the additional tax cuts rain. Let them flood the stimulus package with antediluvian Lafferite intent.

But if Obama preshaped his crew's conclusions out of excessive political cleverness and a presumed need to ease Republicans' ideological sensibilities, then he's going to regret it.

Inside a year he'll be back, meeting with Congressional leaders, having watched $300 billion in additional tax cuts attenuate his recovery plan's effectiveness; he'll be asking for more spending, which Republicans will strenuously and ideologically oppose -- all of which will delay the entire point of the stimulus package: to stimulate.

And then he'll learn what he conscientiously owes Republicans, the ideological baboons, yokels and racketeers who got us into this mess to begin with: Nothing.