Obama: Come Down Hard on All Sides

So, it looks like the Republican party's current lack of direction is symbolized by the latest rise of Rush Limbaugh as some kind of unofficial party leader. He's gotten more publicity during the last two weeks than since his little "Vicodin problem" became public fodder several years ago. No one in the Republican party is stepping up to the plate, except for individual Congressmen who have made ominous statements like "leading an insurgency" against the Obama administration and openly hoping that Obama will fail. As if that's going to help our country out of the economic morass and increasingly crisis-like situation we face on a day-to-day basis. Republican calls for stripping down the stimulus package on several fronts -- health care, schools, and infrastructure being three very big examples -- are catastrophic. We will not be out of this economic mess until 2011, according to the most lenient projections, so it makes no sense to strip the stimulus of long-term plans that will need to be in place for upcoming years.

Obama has a very tricky game to play. He needs to win 60 votes in the Senate by forgiving Joe Lieberman, making nice with Republican senator Susan Collins, and even making amends with John McCain. He even helped McCain by appointing Janet Napolitano to his Cabinet, therefore taking away McCain's biggest potential opponent in his 2010 Senate campaign and allowing him to not have to immediately veer further to the right in his Senate votes. McCain owes him for it, and knows it. If Senate Republicans want to filibuster the stimulus package, it will only provoke public outrage. Obama won on the idea of fixing the economy with a stimulus package that immediately helped, as well as providing long-term relief. He may have Senate trouble, but hopefully he can work around it and get the necessary votes.

The other trick? Holding back the progressive left in the House from causing trouble. Now, I know Obama won the election on a much more progressive level than any candidate in the modern era (Clinton was NEVER this progressive, and Carter won by basically saying, "I'm an outsider and will never reproduce Watergate"), but some of Nancy Pelosi's strategy is simply out-of-touch and not helpful. The "Buy America" plan, for example, which Pelosi has advocated as a major part of the package, could touch off a protectionist trade war that would only cause further disaster to the American economy. Pelosi is also bitching about Obama's flip-flop on not immediately cutting back tax cuts, but this is not the right time to be eliminating said tax cuts, and Obama's campaign promise to do so was made at a vastly different time before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in October, and the subsequent events that have crushed Wall Street and led to the largest unemployment rates in decades. Pelosi needs to provide a bit of compromise if the stimulus package as a whole is going to succeed.

Let's hope that Obama can pull together and win both House and Senate support. He is dragged in two directions by Democrats who insist on too much, too soon, and Republicans who plan an "insurgency" against his plans at the peril of American citizens. Here's hoping that Obama's words can be translated into the right kind of action. If not, we could be facing an even bigger economic catastrophe.