By Dave Lindorff

If the disaster of the so-called "stimulus" bill just passed by the
Senate doesn't convince President Obama and his advisers that the
strategy of "bipartisanship" that he has been espousing is a political
suicide, nothing will.

The Republican Party, with the willing help of conservative
Democrats like Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Democratic turncoats like
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), has forced Obama to agree to a joke of a
stimulus package that is nearly half composed of tax breaks which will
do nothing to bolster the economy (since most of the money will end up
either paying down credit card debt or buying Chinese and Sri Lankan
imports) and that is stripped of $40 billion to help struggling state
and local governments.

Fresh from its rout in November, the GOP is, in fact, openly trying
to sabotage Obama's economic stimulus plan, because the last thing
Republicans want to see is an economy on the upturn in 2010 or 2012.

Meanwhile, Obama, who had the chance to add 2-4 Democratic senators
to the Senate by naming Republicans to his cabinet or to other key
administration positions, and having Democratic governors replace them
with progressive Democrats, has wasted several opportunities. When he
did name a Republican senator from a state with a Democratic
governor--Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, named to be Commerce Dept.
Secretary--he instead cut a pathetic deal to have the state's
Democratic governor name another Republican Senator to replace Judd.
Almost as bad, in New York, when he named Sen. Hillary Clinton to be
Secretary of State, he allowed New York's Democratic governor, David
Patterson, to name a conservative Democrat to replace her.

What is this guy trying to do? Obama is from Chicago, a town where
politics is a blood sport, and where as a young politician, he played
that game with brass knuckles himself. Now he's trying to be
everybody's best friend?

The result is he's being steamrollered.

So what should he do? Tell conservative Democrats in
Congress that if they want any of their pet bills or projects passed in
the next four years, they will pass a stimulus bill as he wants it
written, with limited tax breaks and with all the money he proposed for
states and localities. Republicans, meanwhile, should be told bluntly
that if they vote against the measure once it is reconciled in a
House-Senate conference, they get shorted on stimulus money in their
districts. Let them explain it to their constituents.

Hard ball.

That's how Republicans have played for the past eight years, and how
they've turned Congressional Democrats into a quivering mass of
gelatinous goop.

Obama won a landslide electoral victory and a big popular vote
majority. It wasn't his promise to be bi-partisan that gave him that
win. It was his promise to be a real leader.

Leaders have to be respected, and they get respect from the
opposition not by being courteous and by bending over, but by carrying
a big stick and using it occasionally. Those who fail to use that stick
end up getting whacked by one themselves, which is what happened to
Obama's two Democratic predecessors, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

The other thing Obama is going to have to recognize, and recognize
fast, is that his strength lies his progressive base. He has been
dissing that base since the minute he won the election. Progressives
have cut him a lot of slack--far more than he deserves--as he appointed
(mostly white male) Clinton hack after Clinton hack to his cabinet,
held over key (all white male) Bush appointees like Robert Gates as
Secretary of Defense and Gen. David Petraeus as head of Central Command
(CentCom), and backpedaled on key campaign promises like ending the war
in Iraq and winning passage of the Employee Free Choice labor rights
restoration bill.

With this odious betrayal of his base, he is losing support from the
very people who can sustain his presidency through four tough years of
struggle. Without them, he is doomed to a one-term failure of a
presidency.

Obama now faces three key tests. If he fails on any of them, I would argue that his presidency is finished before it starts.

* The first is the stimulus bill. If it passes largely in the Senate
version, it will be a waste of $820 billion, because so much of the
money will be blown on tax breaks and so little on real stimulus
spending that it won't do anything to break the fall of the collapsing
economy. Obama needs to get Democrats to report out of conference a
bill that is close to what the House passed last week, and then he
needs to use his "bully pulpit" and his power to punish those who vote
against the measure to win passage in both houses. If conservative
Democrats are worried about the costs, he should revoke Bush's tax cuts
and raise taxes on the rich immediately (he should do that anyhow and
call it a retroactive and long-overdue Bush war tax).

* The second test is ending the Iraq War. The latest reports are
that Obama is being sucker-punched by the war's leading generals,
primarily Gen. Petraeus and Iraq theater commander Gen. Ray Odierno,
into considering a longer pullout than 16 months, with both a 19-month
and a 23-month pullout being proposed for his consideration. Given that
there are also credible reports that these generals and lower-ranking
supporters are actively lobbying against a pullout--an act of
insubordination against a commander in chief that borders on treason
during wartime--Obama should fire these guys immediately and order a
prompt pullout. Even 16 months is far too long to maintain the
occupation. I'd suggest three months to get everyone home.

* Finally, Obama should recognize that the Afghanistan War is an
unwinnable disaster that long ago morphed from a police action
attempting to capture and destroy Al Qaeda's organization in that
country into a war against the country's indigenous political/military
force, the Taliban, which was never a threat to the US, and which
cannot be defeated, no matter how many resources the US throws into the
fight. He should call a halt to this fiasco before he owns it, order
UN-sponsored regional peace talks among the conflicting parties within
and around Afghanistan, and pull all US forces out of that nation as
fast as the planes can carry them.

At that point, Obama will have won the passionate support of his
base, and the grudging respect of conservatives in Congress. The
remaining years of his presidency will inevitably be full of conflict,
but he will be fighting his political battles from a position of
strength. This will allow him to campaign forcefully for progressive
House and Senate candidates in the 2010 off-year congressional
elections, when he could win more seats and stronger control in the
Senate.

Meanwhile, he should replace Gates at Defense, ideally with some
liberal Republican senator from a Democratic state (I'd suggest one of
the two women, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, who represent the state
of Maine--a woman Secretary of Defense would be a great move), so that
another Democrat could be appointed to the Senate. He could do the same
thing with the Department of Health (another good place for a woman
senator from Maine!). That would give the Democrats 61 seats in the
Senate, assuming Al Franken finally gets named the winner in Minnesota.

The key thing is, no more nice guy. Obama needs to return to his
roots and start acting like the Chicago pol that he began as. It's what
his base wants, it's what the broad mass of the electorate wanted when
they voted for him, and it's what the country needs.
________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and
now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net