Every once in a while I get this intuition that something unexpected is going to happen in national or international events, and sometimes I am wrong and sometimes I am right. There is nothing magical about the intuition. It is an aesthetic response to the drama of history: every once in a while at the unexpected moment, you have to introduce something unexpected into the plot in order to keep it churning. So far, nothing unexpected has happened since Katrina or, if you care to say so, since the Surge "worked" in the sense that it happened at the same time as other events that will
allow us to call the Iraq War a draw, even if it met very few of the criteria of what success was predicted to mean in that war.

Not even the election of Obama was a surprise rather than a significant event. It was not a surprise in the sense that it was a rolling out of a process, which, in this case, is that of an American or any other democratic electoral campaign as a surrogate for a “revolution”, even though, in this case, that meant only that the feeling of a revolution was invoked by Obama’s mixed racial heritage and his repeated invocation of the mantra of “change”. The campaign built slowly and the surprise was that nothing threw a monkey wrench into his rise to the top of the greasy pole. In similar fashion, though on a downward rather than an upward course, the Arab-Israeli conflict goes on getting worse, just as it has for the past sixty years. No surprises there.

No, an event is something else, something that I can't say is just an increment within the equation. It is something that changes by some degree the course of events, hinges them into another direction. Sociologists are prone to identify national disasters and wars as such events in that they trust everything else to be one unfolding social process or another. Katrina was a good example. It was neither an increment nor incremental in its outcome. It could have hit a few seconds of a degree to the east or west, and then it would not have had the result of fixing in people's minds, locking down the idea, that the Bush people were inept, whatever it was they turned their hands to. You don't know what an historical event will be in advance, and there is no use posing suggestions.

An event rather than an unfolding social process took place last week, the third week of the Obama Presidency, and it was not an act of war or a natural disaster. It was the passage of the stimulus package, a major bill that actually came in by the deadline Obama had imposed for it and that by and large fit the parameters he had set for it: a lot of spending projects, including ones to bail out state and city budgets for social services, as well as a tax relief measure that was thrown in early on as bait for Republican support of the measure. That was quite a feat, worthy of garnering references to FDR, including ones to the parallel obduracy of the Republicans of that era. (But, at that earlier time, the Democrats had many more votes in the Senate and part of the job was getting the cooperation of conservative Democrats at a time when party discipline was considerably looser than it is now.)

The passage of the bill did not play, however, as a legislative triumph, either on the networks or in the press. The talking heads and the columnists were all taken with the fact that the only three Republicans who supported the package were the ladies from Maine and the snide old guy from Pennsylvania. The commentators all went on about how Obama had been taken for a ride or that he had learned his lesson about trying to cooperate with Republicans. Indeed, the press played into Obama’s hands. At his first news conference he was able to take the high road and claim that post-partisanship was a project that would take a while to develop, that a response to queries about whether he felt the Republicans had rejected his pleas for post-partisanship. The press took for granted that it was the Republicans who had not kept their part of the never existent bargain.

Whatever the explanation, everyone was acknowledging that a significant moment had taken place. The political scene for the next two years had been set. The Republicans were going to be in opposition to the point that it was a matter of party discipline. It was correct of Obama to leak to the press that he had complimented Specter and the others for their patriotism. Yes, Obama did give them their pound of flesh and a moment in the spotlight, but the three did need to dictate some aspects of the bill so as to say they got something for becoming renegades. Lindsey Graham, who is clearly positioning himself to run for President, had the temerity to make snide remarks about the people who, as he put it, were meeting in corners to put together a deal to get the bill passed. Graham and McCain wanted either their bill, which was all tax cuts, or no bill at all. That is the doctrine most Republicans have settled on. There is no need to do anything much. That is what is spoken of by both Republicans and Democrats as “the philosophical differences” that divide the two sides of the debate, which is a polite way of saying that the Republicans have no new ideas nor are willing to consider amending their ideas from what they were before the financial crisis arrived. They are not about to follow Alan Greenspan in rejecting or modifying prior principles.

That is the surprise: the degree to which the Republicans decided to be unyielding. It is also a decision consciously arrived at in that they seemed more conciliatory when Obama first spoke to their caucuses. Since then, they have coalesced. Now, you might want to say the Republicans are just playing true to form. They have adopted the same rejectionism with regard to the financial systems of advanced industrial societies that has characterized them since Teddy Roosevelt was defeated in 1912. They are or were or find new ways of being against everything since, from the Federal Reserve to Keynesianism to the regulation of financial institutions. But you might also think that they would yield a little bit to reality, that they would fashion a slightly new rhetoric when, in fact, they no longer even make the claim they made a few weeks ago, that their own plans for fixing the economy would be developed over the next few months. They are hoping to campaign in 2010 on the idea that if the economy is improving at that time, then the economy was going to be improving anyway, regardless of the Obama initiatives. They are too tied to their ideology and the beliefs and sentiments of those in their districts to take any other course.

Yes, you can say the Republicans are simply acting true to form, and so carrying out a process, but the proof that this is an event, that it didn’t have to happen, is how surprised everybody is that it has happened, and how unhappy commentators are with the idea that we are facing Republican attempts at gridlock, just as we did during the Clinton Administration, which some had hoped we might put behind us. It is too familiar and yet it is a state of political affairs that did not need to have been put back into play.