When will Beltway Republicans start listening?

The only thing missing from Obama's combination seminar-pep rally last night was an audible "Ahem, ahem" directed at those You-know-whos on the House floor, occupying much less square footage than a year before:

"As we stand at this crossroads of history," said the president, "the eyes of all people in all nations are once again upon us, watching to see what we" -- yeah, we, as in we -- "do with this moment, waiting for us" -- did we, all of us, hear that? -- "to lead."

Aware as they were that the principal was watching with all those roving camera eyes, looking for incorrigible traces of their characteristically sullen adolescence, they Eddie Haskell-ed it. They were on their best behavior, and part of the reason why they could pull that off was the comfort they unquestionably took from knowing that Bobby Jindal would soon follow, trying to undo what Obama had just done.

"What it" -- Obama, his partisan pals, and their agenda -- "will do is grow the government, increase our taxes down the line and saddle future generations with debt," said the Louisiana governor in insulting obliviousness to his party's vast and frivolous debt which helped get us where we are, against which only more and quite necessary debt can now help get us out.

But that's quibbling, they say when asked abut their spending; that's trifling history. Everyone knows, they say in effect, that God put us on this earth to spend like sloppily intoxicated conventioneers when in the majority, then revert to our offensively persnickety and temperate Church Lady routine when in the minority.

And guess what? It makes not one nano-ounced difference to them how sprawlingly massive the present crisis may be. They'll just dig in. And pout. And throw the occasional, tactical grenade in the course of their strategic warfare against rule by the popularly elected.

Obama had to feel good going into his pep rally, though, given that a twin set of polls had just appeared showing a popular phalanx of disgruntlement and dismay at Republican fastidiousness.

The president's overall job approval -- registering 63 percent in the NY Times/CBS News poll and 68 percent in the Washington Post/ABC's -- was neither abnormally high nor low for a new chief executive, but his unmet exhortations to work bipartisanly seem to have struck a largely sympathetic chord.

"Most, nearly three in four," reported the Post, "said Obama is trying to reach across the partisan divide; nearly six in 10 respondents said Republicans are not returning the gesture." And the Times: "A majority of people surveyed in both parties said Mr. Obama was striving to work in a bipartisan way, but most faulted Republicans for their response to the president." What's more, "Most said Mr. Obama should pursue the priorities he campaigned on ... rather than seek middle ground with Republicans."

"Most," "nearly six in ten," "a majority," "most" and again "most" -- that's called a popular consensus, against which the rather vulgar opposition is drowning upstream.

For now, anyway. But doing something completely different about the now -- the immediate now -- is, after all, what the body politic voted for. Thus the polls' confirmation of this gelling of national sentiment should come as no surprise.

What has pleasantly surprised, however, is that our present crisis is not being met by uncomprehending or ideologically resistant eyes among all conservatives. The Times' David Brooks, for instance, understands through a laudable sense of perspective that what we're facing transcends old arguments:

[I]t’s ... clear that we’re on the cusp of the biggest political experiment of our lifetimes. If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.

It’ll be interesting to see who’s right. But I can’t even root for my own vindication. The costs are too high. I have to go to the keyboard each morning hoping Barack Obama is going to prove me wrong.

If only Beltway Republicans could appreciate the arch, human intelligence underlying Brooks' own little pep rally -- his call to arms against malignant division for ethereal ideology or entrenched politics' sake -- then we, including Republicans, and that's the unmistakable paradox, would all be much better off.