The bipartisanship epiphany

In a piece published earlier this week, Jonathan Chait at NY Magazine conducted an exit interview with Dan Pfeiffer, a top presidential advisor who’s been with him since the 2008 campaign. He has a lot of interesting insights into the political battles of the past 6 years, but this revelation is particularly fascinating in light of the relationship the administration has had with the progressive base of the party:

The original premise of Obama’s first presidential campaign was that he could reason with Republicans—or else, by staking out obviously reasonable stances, force them to moderate or be exposed as extreme and unyielding. It took years for the White House to conclude that this was false, and that, in Pfeiffer’s words, “what drives 90 percent of stuff is not the small tactical decisions or the personal relationships but the big, macro political incentives.”

Pfeiffer is correct. And it’s exactly what political activists who aren’t in that town had been saying for years. Despite the idealism of the campaign and the genuine excitement and emotion about President Obama, some progressives were queasy about all these promises of “transpartisan” comity, knowing as they did that it was highly unlikely that any president could single-handedly change this structure much less one who so offended a great swathe of the GOP base. They did not understand how anyone couldn’t see that the modern Republican Party had gone insane and that every incentive and structural political edifice out there made it impossible for them not to be insane.

Progressives knew there was no margin in trying to appease Republicans and that all attempts to try merely moved the political center further to the right. That had been the pattern since the 90s when the Republicans were crazy enough to detonate the nuclear option of impeachment over illicit sex when the president only had two years left on his term. They followed that up by unapologetically using threats and every lever of political power they had, including the Supreme Court, to install George W. Bush even though he’d lost the popular vote in the country. They went to war with a nation that hadn’t attacked us out of sheer opportunism. And yet it took Boehner not being able to deliver on Simpson-Bowles to convince them that maybe these people weren’t quite operating in good faith?