The Last Supper of Partisanship?

No one assumes that the dinner between President-elect Barack Obama and conservative columnists was a Kumbaya moment where they all held hands and swayed joyfully around the dinner table, but the dinner once again showed Obama in a familiar role, a leader who is going to try to bridge the partisan divide on issues where he and his opponents can find common ground.

Obama, with the choice of evangelical pastor Rick Warren to give the prayer at his inaugural and his decision to forward a fiscal recovery plan that includes tax cuts, is demonstrating a trend to be different than his most recent Democratic predecessor who occupied the Oval Office. You will not see a repeat of Bill Clinton’s first year in which the former president had two major scandals involving White House staff (Travelgate and the mysterious death of Vince Foster) and the beginning of the ill-fated disaster of trying to institute a National Healthcare program led by First Lady Hillary Clinton. Obama is reaching out to guage the possibility of cooperation on policy issues before he risks his hard-earned political capital.

It is a move worthy of a good chess player and Obama seems to always be a step ahead of his adversaries. The breaking of bread between Obama, George Will, Bill Kristol and Peggy Noonan and others won’t solve decades of partisan bickering in Washington, D.C. However, one can only hope that this example of civility, can and will be duplicated, by both sides over the next four years. Probably not… but one can always hope.