Signs of bipartisanship's apocalypse

It may be, as some are suggesting, that President Clinton's health-care plan had a moderately easier public-relations go of it, emerging, as it did, "before the Internet and cable news were mainstays in most American households" and when the befuddled and utterly befuddling "Harry and Louise" personified most of the opposition.

But an easier time is not what I recall. What I recall was an organized malevolence unmatched in American politics since the Great Society's Medicare or New Deal's Social Security. It -- health care's industrial opposition and its media jackals -- was mean and bloody and unconscionably deceptive. It was a time of frightful new lows for ascendant propagandists.

Still, it's undeniable that President Obama is confronting a newer, slicker age of propagandistic gimmickry: all this instant Twittering of gross misinformation, all that infectious "chain e-mailing," and God only knows how many Internet sites of ineffable fraudulence.

Plus, of course, he faces the older but usual suspects of talk radio and Fox News and disgraceful conservative pols willing to stand on the floors of the U.S. Congress and declare Obama desirous of euthanasia, taxpayer-funded abortions, and the slaughter of private enterprise.

And let's not forget -- then again, how could we? -- those hordes of ultraconservative anarchists (now there's an oxymoronic twist for you) who read and obey those Tweets and e-mails which order them
to show up and dismantle intelligent town-hall democracy. Well, at least there's some entertainment value to this 21st-century campaign.

At any rate, President Obama's team has announced a fresh counteroffensive against all this; what it mysteriously calls a "viral whisper campaign," which seems to me more like a whole lot of deafening racket. But "viral whispering" is some pretty nifty phraseology, so that's OK.

Hence the White House is now responding to the miserable likes of, egads, the Drudge Report; it's asking "supporters to send in leads for debunking chain e-mails or anything else that 'seems fishy' " (goodness, do they have enough electronic storage capacity for that?); it's "plan[ning] to use more video, Twitter, e-mail lists and other new media tools to 'combat the right-wing noise machine' "; and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, in working coordination with the Democratic National Committee, is openly assailing the aforementioned noise machine, "saying a series of confrontational town hall meetings were manufactured by Republicans, conservative groups and lobbyists." (You'll like this: A spokesman for the Republican congressional campaign committee called that patently accurate accusation "offensive.")

"We are going to be very aggressive" against these partisan tactics, said senior advisor David Axelrod. Meanwhile, or rather, just preceding that comment, Obama had been telling Senate Democrats at a White House luncheon "how the current tone and culture in Washington made it more difficult than it has been in the past to work in a bipartisan fashion."

And yesterday, in a live interview by MSNBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd, Obama suggested that if all the presently attempted bipartisanship fails to accomplish real health-care reform bills by September, then "we" just might have to rethink that strategic approach.

You don't say. I mean, come on, it's been hard enough for the White House to work in a partisan fashion -- to get its own people, on Capitol Hill, of its own party, behind one comprehensible program.

They're all over the place. Senate Democrats are behaving as anarchically as those town-hall bomb-throwers, and yesterday the Politico reported yet another discernable affliction: "[There exists] a divide between those elected in the anti-Bush referendum of 2006 and the Obama wave of 2008" -- a divide represented by "four Democrats in the Senate class of 2006 [who] have emerged as outspoken advocates for a government-run public insurance option," while "nine members of the 2008 class" are remarkably loosey-goosey.

And in the House? There, naturally, Obama must cope with those 50+ McCain-Palin Democrats: In 2008 the Arizona senator carried 32 Blue Dog districts, Obama only 19; and while in a recent poll Obama's approval rating held at 67 percent in non-Blue Dog Democratic districts, it fell to 57 in the canine areas.

Couple that political reality with all that health-care industrial cash filling Blue Dogs' coffers, as well of course as the Democratic Senate's, and we've the potential for a wholly one-sided partisan meltdown.

So on merely the Democratic side of things Obama increasingly has his hands full. And it would seem to be the case that the president has signaled, and before that David Axelrod signaled, and before that Robert Gibbs signaled, that this bipartisan Mr. Nice Guy routine is approaching its expiration date. Good riddance.