2012 Could Be Tie Breaker of Last 2 Cycles

American politics is a continual exercise in course correction. But the ship of state has been tacking especially erratically for the past few election cycles.

President Obama won a commanding victory in 2008 that some giddy Democrats said remade the political map. It didn’t. Republicans stormed back last year to take the House, but found, to their frustration, that winning control of one chamber does not constitute a mandate.

In the battles this year over the budget and an array of other issues, both parties have used those election results to conclude that the country is really on their side and that they have no reason to give in. Yet neither Democrats nor Republicans have enough power at the moment to win the big legislative and political battles on their own terms. It is 2008 versus 2010, and neither side has a clear advantage.

Both are now betting heavily that 2012 will be the tie breaker.

Just how much so became clear this week. After a year in which Democrats and Republicans weighed whether to compromise and show voters they can get something done now, or to hold fast to principle and bank on the results of the next election, they removed any remaining doubt about their choice.

President Obama’s signal on Monday that he would shift from legislating to campaigning over jobs and deficit reduction was acknowledgement — belatedly, many in his party would say — that brute partisanship is the only effective posture at this point. In that decision, he was joining Republicans, who have never really doubted it. So while budget talks will grind on at the Capitol and there remains some chance that negotiators can find a patch of common ground, both parties are going all-in on the outcome next November.

“These guys are playing a different game than the president’s playing,” Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. told a campaign fund-raiser in Chicago on Tuesday evening, referring to Congressional Republicans and what the White House sees as their political intransigence. “And we are no longer playing.”

The decision to go to the people and wait for 2013 to address the big problems in a big way elevates the stakes in both the presidential and Congressional campaigns. In many ways that is how it should be: an election in which differences are sharpened rather than blurred, where voters have the opportunity to sort out the mixed messages from the last several cycles.

It is a chance for the electorate to express more clearly whether it really wants a fundamentally smaller and less activist government or is just temporarily frustrated that government has not done a better job of cushioning it from an especially sharp, persistent and unequally distributed economic downturn.

The Republican presidential candidates are doing their part. In a series of remarkably informative debates, they have challenged many of the traditions and assumptions that have guided American politics for decades, from Social
Security’s role as a guarantee against poverty in old age to the position of religion in public life.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas continues to play an especially provocative role; on Tuesday he used a visit to New York to challenge Mr. Obama on his Middle East policy just as the president was gathering with world leaders across town at the United Nations.

So different are the approaches of the two parties, Speaker John A. Boehner said the other day, that it often feels to him that he and the president come from two different worlds.

“Sometimes the conversations that we have would be like two groups of people from two different planets who hardly understand each other,” he said, suggesting that whatever bonding they did on the golf course last summer didn’t last past the 18th green.

But telling voters that compromise is not possible and asking the electorate to try once again to sort it out carries risks for both sides.

One is that those voters who are not especially ideological — and think the job of government is to get the job done, not squabble about it — will grow further disgusted with Washington. Though with the latest New York Times/CBS News poll showing that only 6 percent of Americans believe most members of Congress deserve re-election, there’s probably not a whole lot more untapped disgust out there.

Another risk is that the standoff can end only when one party or the other achieves something close to total victory, taking the White House and both chambers of Congress with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

It was only while his party controlled the House and the Senate — with a filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority in the Senate for a period — that Mr. Obama rammed his health care overhaul through Congress and passed a tougher regulatory framework for the financial system. Republicans are now pledging to undo both if they prevail on Election Day.

But given all the crosscurrents in the country, there is no guarantee that voters will render a clear verdict next November. In fact, Americans tend to prefer divided government, on the assumption that it will curb the excesses of either side and force compromise.

But the record of the last year provides little evidence that a political system that increasingly rewards extremes and leaves the center feeling underrepresented will have much incentive to attack complicated problems in an ambitious and appropriately nuanced way. At which point the problems get deferred to the next campaign, and the next.

“It’s always election time,” said Dan Maffei, a Democrat who was elected to the House from a swing district in upstate New York in 2008 only to lose in the Republican wave of 2010. He denounces the marginalization of the political center and the risks of leaving such a broad swath of voters feeling alienated from the political process.

Having won one and lost one, he is running to get the seat back in 2012.