Needlenose

For the last two years I’ve been begging the Dem majority leadership in the Senate to use every tool to smackdown the vile Repugs.  It looks like Harry Reid or somebody in the leadership has finally grown a pair and is playing hardball!  I’d like to see more of this!  Somebody should fly former California legislative leader Willie Brown in do D.C. to run a series of seminars on how to partisan smackdowns!

I never bought the whole ‘bipartisanship’ BS – after all, most of the Repugs are holdovers from the ‘date rape’ bipartisanship of the 4 years prior.  However, by the same token, this new WWF spirit needs to be tempered with actual change in the way Congress does other business.  In other words, we need to see an end to the corrupting special interest lobbying, pork barrel politics and earmarks buried in other legislation.   Otherwise, we’ve just substituted one set of venal pigs for another.

Via the news pane at TPM, the Wall Street Journal‘s Washington, D.C., blog reports this afternoon:

The top congressional leaders from both parties gathered at the White House for a working discussion over the shape and size of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan. The meeting was designed to promote bipartisanship.

But… challenged by one Republican senator over the contents of the package, the new president, according to participants, replied: “I won.”

Kind of nice of him to remember that, isn’t it?  But wait, there’s more:

… other Democrats echoed the sentiment. As he left the White House, House Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina was asked about Republican complaints that Democrats aren’t listening to what their GOP colleagues have to say. “We’re responding to the American people,” he said. “The American people didn’t listen to them too well during the election.”

Good for Obama and the Democrats.   A clear test is being applied by the GOP and the Beltway establishment to see whether the new administration has the stomach to make “change” more than just a slogan.

If Obama & Co. define bipartisanship as simply accepting whatever crumbs the Republicans will allow them, they’re doomed.  If, however, they define it as understanding the center of where the country (rather than the D.C. elite) is politically, then pushing to accomplish what needs to be done regardless of partisan obstacles, they might be able to pull it off.

When Obama proclaimed in his inaugural address, “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them,” my reaction was, well, fine, but he better bring the earth-moving equipment with him — because his opponents aren’t going to believe the ground has shifted until they see it firsthand.

Less than a week into his administration, it’s already become time for Obama to back up his claim.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)