As Josh Nelson has so studiously pointed out, Republicans are already lining up against President Obama’s economic recovery plan, with 34 Senators out of 41 already on the record. While I do think it will pass, the fact that no Republicans voted for the plan in the House and very few are likely to in the Senate is a foreshadowing of things to come from the GOP.

But why this obstructionism? Political parties, especially the Republican party, rooted in all things status-quo, change very slowly. A quick look at some history is instructive here.

In Mike Lux’s new book, The Progressive Revolution, he relates this key fact concerning FDR’s New Deal:

Conservatives protested mightily against these policies. Every single Republican in the House voted against Social Security, for example, and the leading Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee argued that “business and industry are already operating under very heavy burdens.”

How little has changed. The Republican party of 1935, coming off three of the worst (and most conservative) Presidents our country has ever seen - Republicans Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover - did not understand that with FDR’s election, as President Obama put it, “the ground [had] shifted beneath them.” Every single one of them, in the midst of the worst depression this country has ever seen, voted against Social Security.

The Republican party of 2009 is strikingly similar, coming off perhaps the worst Republican President ever, failing to realize the new order of things, and voting unanimously (in the House at least) against a bill that will start the process of turning America around.

We should expect no less. Political parties don’t really get the message that they need to change their core values until they’ve been beaten down much lower and for far longer. For example, the Democratic party  didn’t embrace the kind of politics championed by Barack Obama after Al Gore lost to George W. Bush in 2000. It took another beating in 2004 for the party to finally turn itself around. If Republicans are nimble (and I have my doubts), then we can expect to see a new version of conservatism emerge from their depths after they are beaten by Obama again in 2012. Until then, we’re going to get more of the same.

Given the history, what is there to make of Obama’s post-partisan strategy?

Unfortunately, Obama sold the public so much on this odd idea of “post-partisanship” that he’s going to have to at least pay lip-service for a while. And it will remain a vulnerability, with Republicans crying partisanship every chance they can. Still, working to get, say, 70 or 80 votes in the Senate on bills like the economic recovery package seems like a fools errand. If post-partisanship is to happen (and it does have to happen a little, we need at least 1 Republican vote in the Senate if every Democrat votes together - and that’s a big if), it should happen on a small scale. Just as FDR and LBJ and other great progressives found a few Republicans willing to work with them, Obama will have to find his GOP allies and play small ball to get them to come around.

But this strategy of going for grand bi-partisanship, complete with major compromises, especially on huge bills like the economic recovery? As history, both ancient and recent, shows, is not going to work.

WHAT'S NEXT?

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