GOP Strategy: Embrace Obama
Stimulus Reveals Republican Party Plans to Appear Bipartisan, While Slamming Dems
By David Weigel 1/23/09 6:00 AM
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House Republicans are in unfamiliar and politically unpromising territory. Unlike their counterparts in the Senate, they have very few methods of slowing down or stopping legislation they don’t like. Their influence was reduced two weeks ago by a rule change that effectively prevents members of the minority party from forcing votes on controversial amendments, one of the few cudgels the party had in the House.
In response, Republicans are attempting to link themselves to the popular Obama administration while criticizing the work of the Democratic Congress. The goal is to oppose Democratic policy without being seen as opposing or obstructing the president, a posture that, they hope, will put them in better position to win back voters if the Democrats’ popularity falters.
“What Rep. Boehner and {Minority Whip} Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) are doing is absolutely essential,” said Alex Brill, an economic research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who worked for the House Ways and Means Committee before the Democratic takeover in 2007. “They’re bringing to light the true effects of the Democrats’ proposals. They’re creating a dialogue. It’s the best that we can hope for right now.”
The strategy is only a little bit older than the Obama presidency. On Nov. 5, the then-president-elect met with House Republicans. In a comment that leaked out of the closed-door meeting, Obama told Republicans that “the monopoly on good ideas does not belong to a single party.” Immediately, Republican leaders started putting together a Working Group on Economic Solutions that would be, in Cantor’s words, “razor focused on job protection, preservation, and creation.”
Republican sources did not label the strategy “triangulation,” as a report in Roll Call did yesterday. But they did not deny that the portrayal of Obama as a working partner and the congressional Democrats as obstinate partisans was a reflection of the popularity of the two branches. The new president boasts approval ratings north of 70 percent; the Congress is mired in the 30s. “His message is bipartisanship,” said one Republican, referring to the president. “Their message is ‘trust us to spend your money.’”
Last week House Republicans pushed their cooperative measures on two fronts. On Jan. 14, members of the Republican Study Committee, the conservative caucus in the House, introduced an Economic Recovery and Middle-Class Tax Relief Act which included cutting income tax rates by five percent, partially repealing the capital gains tax, and slashing corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 25 percent. Cantor’s ad hoc group held one hearing on Jan.15, in which Mitt Romney, former eBay executive (and Romney/McCain economic adviser) Meg Whitman, AEI’s Alex Brill, and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform fielded friendly questions, with answers mirroring the content of the going-nowhere tax bill.
This week, Norquist praised the work of the House Republicans.
“We should not treat Obama, Reid, and Pelosi, the way that the Bush administration treated Iran-’You’re a bad person and we don’t want to talk to you,’” said Norquist.
“We engage the Democrats by being cheerful and pleasant and open to conversation. They say they want 10 ideas? OK, here are 10 ideas. The next time they say they want 10 ideas, we say that they asked before, and, just for the record, they rejected our ideas. When you get to May, who’s the obstructionist and who’s the collaborator?”more...
http://washingtonindependent.com/26964/gop-strategy-embrace-obama
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