The shine comes off

Another setback for Barack Obama, as Judd Gregg withdraws as commerce secretary.

ANOTHER day, another blow for Barack Obama's hopes for a “new politics”. On Thursday February 12th, Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire announced that he had withdrawn as Mr Obama's proposed secretary of commerce. Mr Gregg is a Republican—and one, to boot, who once voted for the Commerce Department to be abolished. Bringing him into the cabinet had been billed by the Obama team as an important sign of Mr Obama's commitment to government from the centre. Mr Gregg would have been the third of Mr Obama's “post-partisan” appointments: his transport secretary, Ray LaHood is a Republican, and his defence secretary, Robert Gates, served in the same job under George Bush (though he does not describe himself as a Republican).

Mr Gregg's withdrawal is rather odd. He said that he was doing it because of political differences over the president's mammoth stimulus package, worth some $789 billion over two years and likely to be passed on the ominous date of Friday 13th. Yet when he agreed to take the job only ten days ago, it must surely have been clear to him what the nature of the stimulus package was to be; the bill, after all, had been in discussion for months.

He also claims that the split had to do with a row over the taking of America's census next year—an undertaking of vast political importance because it determines the allocation of congressional seats and electoral college votes to the 50 states. It also determines where certain government funds are deployed. The census is overseen by the Commerce Department, but the White House for the first time will have the final say over operational matters. It may be that Mr Gregg was surprised by this fact, though on the vital question, whether or not to use sampling to estimate populations (this tends to favour the Democrats), the White House was always likely to have been in control.

Mr Gregg's departure may also be to do with his realisation—astonishingly late in the day for a man who has been in politics for 30 years—that despite Mr Obama's talk of bipartisan government, it is politics as usual on Capitol Hill. The first sign of this was the vote, on January 28th, for Mr Obama's stimulus package in the House of Representatives: it went through with not a single Republican supporter; and the bill later cleared the Senate with only three Republicans in agreement. The House vote was almost a week before Mr Gregg said yes to the president, but perhaps it took the senator a while to grasp the implication of it.

Mr Gregg must have come under considerable pressure from his Republican colleagues not to join the cabinet—especially because, by leaving the Senate, he gave the governor of New Hampshire, a Democrat, the chance to nominate a new senator to serve for the next two years. True, the governor had agreed to appoint a Republican. But by choosing a reliably moderate Republican (which Mr Gregg is not), he would have probably have been able to secure a vital extra Senate vote for Mr Obama on crucial issues. (There are only a few East Coast Republican senators left; but they know that their states voted strongly for Mr Obama in the presidential race, and they fear being tossed out by their voters if they are seen to be frustrating him.)

None of this should really be surprising. The Republicans are in opposition, so of course they are not inclined to help the president when he wants to do things that they oppose, such as spending hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers' cash on projects that they think are not good value for money. The Democrats have a solid majority in the House and, thanks to a few Republican renegades who fear for their political lives, a working majority in the Senate; one that is big enough to make it extremely hard for the Republicans to block legislation by use of the filibuster. The dream of bipartisanship, in other words, was always just that. The simple truth is that there are big idealogical differences between the two parties, and no amount of sweet-talking can conceal that.

The bigger blow to Mr Obama comes not so much from the failure of a project that was never, given the nature of politics, really viable. It is that the latest episode contributes to a surprising picture of incompetence that is building up around his presidency. This is the third of his cabinet nominations to go down in flames, and he has also lost the woman whom he had hoped to appoint to the job of chief performance officer to the government. He should additionally count himself extremely lucky that he did not lose his treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, who failed to pay some of his taxes and who would surely not make it through to confirmation if he had to do now rather in the first post-inauguration flush.

Mr Geithner has proved a disappointment in other ways, almost igniting a trade row with China with a thoughtless statement, and producing on February 10th a bank bailout package of such vapid generality that it sent the markets into a tailspin. Mr Geithner needs to raise his game. And so does Mr Obama.

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