A New Spirit Of Bipartisanship In Washington?

It felt different being in Washington the week of Barack Obama's inauguration. Certainly, having a couple of million people drop by for the occasion had something to do with it. Mammoth crowds do tend to change the mood of a place, especially when they are drawn there by a shared sense of history in the making.

The new president says he wants to harness that sense of shared endeavor. He wants to enlist that spirit of national purpose to address the country's problems. He begs for bipartisanship in the politics of the capital.

But does such a thing exist?

In Washington, in reality, bipartisanship usually reduces to this: You are welcome to cross the aisle to vote for the other guy's program. But do not try to devise or revise that program, or even to alter it substantially. The other guy won the election, and your job is to fall in line or just vote no. An amendment here, an appointment there, and thank your lucky stars for that.

Anyone can find a few examples of the parties acting in concert, always with a great show of self-congratulation. But there is a reason these examples stand out. And on closer inspection, they usually turn out to be driven by fear.

Take the most recent instance, the passage of the financial bailout known as TARP last autumn. Democrats might have gladly let the Bush administration take the fall for a few investment bank failures, but the Treasury and the Fed convinced them the entire banking system was on the brink of collapse.

That prospect was too scary, so they went along. Some held back, of course, but the leadership of both parties (including the presidential nominees) carried the day.

Before that, we saw Democrats and Republicans join hands in the fall of 2002 to approve the use of force against Iraq (which became the invasion of March 2003). Again, a substantial rear guard voted no, including a bare majority of Democrats in the House. But the big-name Democrats in both chambers -- including Sens. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden -- voted yes.

Surely, some did so fearing the prospect of Saddam Hussein armed with weapons of mass destruction. There was also the prospect of elections that autumn, with the shadow of Sept. 11 unavenged still hanging overhead.

Either way, fear prevailed.

Go back to the legendary tax cuts enacted by Ronald Reagan and a split-control Congress in 1981, and you will see an outright frenzy of bipartisan enthusiasm for lower revenues. The congressional Democrats of that day voted as though their political graves were gaping at their feet. Yet the post-game mood was celebratory, a festival of praise across Capitol Hill for this marvelous monument to bipartisanship.

In a sense, it does not matter whether bipartisan action springs from a sincere love of human harmony or an urge for self-preservation. The results look much the same either way. And surely this new president would welcome any motive that made the Republicans of 2009 make nice.

That is why he included Republicans in his Cabinet and a religious conservative in his inauguration ceremony. It is why he devoted roughly one-third of his economic stimulus package to tax cuts, the GOP prescription for most economic ills. It is also why he spent the second day of his first full week in office meeting behind closed doors with Republican members of the House and Senate -- and not with Democrats.

But in the end, all this amounts to little more than flowers and candy. If the GOP is to be won over to the Obama stimulus or to other aspects of cooperation on the economy, the case will not be made in Washington. It will be made on Wall Street, where stocks have been unable to sustain a rally. In the credit markets, where banks are still unwilling to resume normal lending. And on the unemployment line, which grows longer by the day.

On the first day of the first full week of the Obama era, major U.S. corporations announced layoffs of more than 50,000 workers. That is a number to instill fear. And fear is the one reliable path to bipartisanship.