The impossibility of bipartisanship?

President Obama was elected partly because of support for his calls for a post-partisan form of governance, one where pragmatism and civility trump dogma and hollering. But a serious question lingers following the debate around the stimulus package: is any of this even remotely possible? Or, put differently, is there any reason to believe that the Obama administration will achieve greater consensus across the aisle than previous presidents? There are two reasons to believe not.

First, Obama presides over a near-dominant Democratic majority. Not all Democrats are of the president's political persuasion, but there is unarguably less of an impetus for him to be conciliatory. He can pass through legislation without straying too far from his comfort level for policy and thus won't need to bow to Republican demands simply to get an imperfect product signed into law.

But secondly, Obama's call for bipartisanship also rests on a faulty assumption: that the Republican core is capable of eschewing dogma. The President presumes that common ground can be found, that the Republican congressional leaders will give him the middle ground from time to time; in other words, that, on major issues, they will favor some form of government initiative over enabling the private sector. This is far-fetched. Republicans have spent the past 30 years lambasting the evils of government spending (outside of national defense). They have wholeheartedly claimed that government is the problem, that it can do no good, that the government that governs least is the government that governs best. Democrats, in turn, have not become polarized to the other ideological extreme: their rhetoric does not claim that government is the solution and that the free market is the problem, but rather modestly proposes that the government can do some good in concert with the free market. As such, if Republicans compromise, they betray their ideology and invalidate their dogma. If the government can indeed, in limited cases, perform some good that the market cannot; if spending programs do indeed shock the economy back into gear, then their ideas are bankrupt.

Conservatism has many merits to it and is healthy for governance. But a party that has run on a platform that no good can come from a tax-and-spend government can't really be bipartisan if they want to save face.