Obama's fading hope for bipartisanship

God bless his little conciliatory heart. He's still gallantly talking to most Americans as if the GOP's throbbing heart of darkness -- my apologies to Conrad -- is but a nameless and disembodied haze, a formless foe of uncertain physique.

"We can’t wait and see and hope for the best," Mr. Obama told a cheering Indiana crowd yesterday about those who would much prefer that we wait and see and hope for the worst.

And "we can’t posture and bicker and resort to the same failed ideas that got us into this mess in the first place," he artfully, teasingly said of those posturing, bickering somebodies who wish not so much to resort, but carry on.

Oh, come now, Mr. President, tell us, tell us please, whoever do you mean?

And again last night in his primetime, campaign-style news conference he pointedly reiterated -- for the benefit, one presumes, of at least one deaf but unnamed human virus on the Senate floor who that very day had said whoever says the stimulus bill will work is "lying" -- that "I can’t tell you for sure that everything in this plan will work exactly as we hope."

In further pursuit of the unguilty passive voice, Obama also noted the overbearingly manifest with tactful understatement: "There have been a lot of bad habits built up here in Washington."

Indeed there have, and some have swelled up in only a couple weeks. For instance it already seems unambiguously clear that the Republican idea of bipartisanship is that they as the minority party dictate legislation and Democrats as the majority party pass it.

Then Obama signs it -- no questions asked, no objections raised, no majority will expressed, no election results observed -- and all are just one big happy family. In short, four more years.

Evidently, however, Mr. Obama and his Congressional compatriots have other ideas. And oddly enough, they conform quite nicely -- or at least they should conform -- with what Republican Sen. John Cornyn ominously portended in a threatening way: that the outcome of a Democratic stimulus bill, sans Republican co-authorship, as he intoned, will land "squarely in the president and the Democratic leadership's lap."

By golly, I do believe Sen. Cornyn is getting the hang of it -- this whole democracy thing, that is, in which the body politic says it now wishes to go this direction rather than that; as well as the subsequent accountability thing, in which the body politic then might say, Well, that sure as hell didn't work, and we know precisely whom to blame.

Overcooked bipartisanship, however, muddles the stew. In this peculiar, unnatural form of political brotherhood, philosophical distinctions become more membranous than profound. Its potential victims or even (temporary) beneficiaries are left wondering: Who believes what, who did what, and therefore just who is responsible for this mess, or, more happily, this rather pleasant state of affairs.

Accountability applies credits as well as debits, but accountability either way is impossible if all the players look and sound the same, if they're all on the same team.

That, admittedly, is the unlikely and extreme form of bipartisanship -- in effect, a one-party system of two-party pretense -- and because of that I have no doubt that it was never what the politically mature mind of Barack Obama possessed. What he pondered, I'm sure, and held out for, was an informal bipartisanship of mere and simple respect and consultation, of civilized differences of opinion, of occasional crossing cooperation that is possible only so long as lines of communication remain open.

I too, although fleetingly, once harbored that hope, as did most Americans. And as any neutral observer of the Senate's stimulus-bill negotiations will tell you, Democrats did, in living fact, extend a reasonable hand.

Hence when Mr. Obama's erstwhile competitor appears on network television and -- there's just no other way to put it -- outright lies about that extended hand, you know any hope of bipartisan civility is all over.

"I thought we were going to have change," said John McCain on "Face the Nation" last Sunday, "and that change meant we work together. This is a setback. This is a setback to all Americans because [Obama] promised Americans we’d work in a more bipartisan fashion, and that certainly is not the case in this bill."

My guess is that given enough accumulating garbage like that, Obama's little conciliatory heart will begin to harden and he'll start naming names and a certain political party. Perhaps, even, as soon as a week.