Bipartisanship Under Obama

(As always, this post can also be found at www.timetokeepscore.com. You're invited to post your comments there as well as you'll probably get a bit more feedback and interplay there.)

I've been vexed of late as to whether GOP leadership will merely slide into the role that the Dems held under Bush, whether they will sell out their conservative heritage and just be "softly" liberal, or whether they will push conservative solutions that are viable alternatives to some of Obama's more frighteningly liberal agenda.

Mickey Edwards, a player in the Reagan administration and co-founded the Heritage Foundation (conservative think-tank), wrote a very interesting op-ed piece in the L.A. Times this week in which he stated:

If proposals seem unworkable or unwise (if they do not contain provisions for taxpayers to recoup their investment; if they do not allow for taxpayers, as de facto shareholders, to insist on sound management practices; if they would allow government officials to make production and pricing decisions), conservatives have a responsibility to resist. But they also have an obligation to propose alternative solutions. It is government's job -- Reagan again -- to provide opportunity and foster productivity. With the nation in financial collapse, nothing is more imprudent -- more antithetical to true conservatism -- than to do nothing.

I maintain that "doing nothing" is exactly what the Dems did as a minority and then a majority during the problems of the Bush era. If the GOP wants to be a relevant player, it needs to eschew that tendency. And President Obama, with all his talk of unity and inclusion, needs to publicly and quickly take Dem leaders to the woodshed for any inkling of taunting, exclusion, and pettiness.

Republicans would be wise to distance themselves from platforms that are,

anti-intellectual, nativist, populist (in populism's worst sense) and prepared to send Joe the Plumber to Washington to manage the nation's public affairs.

Further,

They [must cease] to worship small government and [turn] their backs on limited government. They have turned to a politics of exclusion, division and nastiness. Today, they wonder what went wrong, why Americans have turned on them, why they lose, or barely win, even in places such as Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina.

The fact is, President Obama has as much potential to support conservative solutions as he does liberal ones. He's a family man, he's religious, he's a self-made man, he has stated that he opposes same-sex marriages (though he's been a bit confusing on that one), and the liberal voting base of the poor, the minorities, etc. will be just as likely to embrace conservative solutions as they are liberal ones, as long as they are solutions.

I believe that those solutions exist. What I'm frustrated with is GOP leadership's lack of ability to push those forward.