President Obama botches first campaign promise

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised a new kind of politics, a progressive but vaguely post-partisan discussion of the issues facing America.

His opponent in the primary, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was far more deliberate about promising to battle her party’s culture-war opponents.

Obama’s “Yes we can” optimism — one that offered the broadest possible definition of the word “we” — won the day.

But half a year after his inauguration, the window for bipartisanship (if one ever existed) has closed.

The Republican Party has made it plain that core principles of the Democratic Party are not only unappetizing; they are viewed by the GOP rank-and-file as dangerous, unpatriotic and un-American.

The Democratic base, meanwhile, is stridently hostile to core provisions of the conservative movement. This hostility is exagerrated by regional and cultural differences.

Mr. Obama had an opportunity during his honeymoon period to demonstrate some kind of visionary new “third way” for American politics. (He even invited Nascar drivers and country music singers to the White House!)

But he has nothing to show for it: very few Republican votes, no easing of the partistan tensions, and a level of rhetorical hostility more vicious than anything we saw during the Clinton years.

Meanwhile, the patience of his own party has run out.

To what end, Democrats ask, did they elect near-historic majorities in Congress, if not to pass legislation that bears the clear stamp of Democratic thinking?

Mr. Obama seems loathe to give up on his agenda — even this most utopian item — but it appears that the White House is finally hearing this message.

Look for most of the negotiations on healthcare and other key issues in the coming weeks to be essentially intra-party debates — a set of compromises between the liberals and Blue Dog conservatives, with the GOP on the sidelines.

If not, then the President runs the risk of botching two campaign promises at the same time: failing to achieve bipartisan detente and dropping the ball on healthcare reform.