I'm sure you heard the bloviating, that if Barack Obama didn't get a bunch of Republicans on board, that the stimulus package would be a failure?
That premise was stupid then, and it's stupid now.
Here's what White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has to say about the Obama administration and bipartisanship:
His task has been made no easier by Obama’s desire for bipartisanship, which Emanuel argues the press has misunderstood. “The public wants bipartisanship,” he said. “We just have to try. We don’t have to succeed.” Still, he insisted, they have been succeeding. All Obama’s other major accomplishments to date—winning approval for three hundred and fifty billion dollars in additional funding for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, expanding S-CHIP, signing an executive order to shutter the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and a memorandum to increase the fuel efficiency of cars—were supported by at least some Republicans. The G.O.P., Emanuel said, decided that opposing the stimulus “was definitional, and I will make an argument to you, both on political and economic grounds: they will lose. I don’t think the onus is on us. We tried. The story is they failed.”
As DemFromCT showed this morning, Americans now trust politicians more than they trust business people. How about the political party people have traditionally associated with business executives? What do Americans think of them, and about whether they're trying to be bipartisan in addressing the needs of the country?
According to the latest NYT poll, Rahm was right; Americans see through the Republicans, and blame them for being obstructionists:
A majority of people surveyed in both parties said Mr. Obama was striving to work in a bipartisan way, but most Americans faulted Republicans for their response to the president, saying the party had objected to the $787 billion economic stimulus plan for political reasons. Most Americans said Mr. Obama should pursue the priorities he campaigned on, the poll found, rather than seek middle ground with Republicans.
[...]
As the president addresses Democrats and Republicans in Congress on Tuesday evening, he does so with a sense among most Americans that he is trying to make good on his pledge to bridge the partisan divide. About three-quarters of those polled, including 61 percent of Republicans, said Mr. Obama has been trying to work with Republicans. But only 3 in 10 Americans said Republicans are doing the same, with 63 percent saying that Republicans opposed the economic stimulus package primarily for political reasons rather and policy concerns.
About 8 in 10 Americans said Republicans should be working in a bipartisan way rather than holding fast to their policies, the poll found, with almost three-quarters of Republican respondents agreeing that bipartisanship was preferable.
The poll found widespread support for Mr. Obama’s attempts to reach across the aisle during his first month in office. But 56 percent of those surveyed said the priority for the president should be following the policies he proposed during the campaign last year, rather than working with Republicans.
On bipartisanship, we tried, and they failed. Now, it's time for the Republicans to get out of our way. The Democrats and the American people have work to do.