Hip, Hip - if Not Hooray - for a Standstill Nation STASIS When irresistible force meets immovable object, that might be Washington working as intended. WASHINGTON - Early in June, President Obama and House Republicans met at the White House to bridge differences. Republicans complained that Mr. Obama was demagoguing their Medicare plan. The president said he knew a little about demagoguery as the "job-killing, death-panel, probably-wasn't-born-here president." Seventy-five minutes later, they parted no closer to agreement. If anything has defined the second half of Mr. Obama's term, it has been the politics of paralysis. On jobs and debt, health care and education, Washington seems stalled. In coming weeks, the president and Republicans presumably will cut a deal to slash spending while raising the debt limit, though even then it may not be a long-term solution to the nation's crushing problems. And then Democrats will go back to attacking Republicans, and Republicans will go back to attacking the president. Is this any way to run a country? As it happens, yes. Ideal it is not. Inspiring, hardly at all. But the fractious, backbiting, finger-pointing, polarizing, partisan, kick-the-can-down-the-road brinkmanship of Washington politics these days is, let's face it, the reality of American governance in the modern era. For all the hand-wringing about how the system is broken, this is the system as it was designed and is now adapted for the digital age. All the high-minded vows to put politics aside for the greater good ignore the fact that the system is built on politics, with the idea that politics, however ugly, eventually can produce a greater good, however imperfect. No less an authority on Washington than Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a nearly four-decade veteran of the nation's capital, emerged last week to defend the system's ability to get things done despite all appearances to the contrary. It may be maddening, it may be drawn out, but he argued, at the end of the day, Washington does what it has to do. What is the shtick out there? "This is a dysfunctional place, can't get anything done," " Mr. Biden told reporters on Thursday after a bipartisan meeting on deficit reduction. The single most important thing to do for the markets is to convince them that, no, no, that's not true, we can handle difficult decisions and make them. That remains to be seen, of course. And there is certainly room for doubt. In the nearly six months since divided government returned to Washington, Mr. Obama's domestic agenda has largely gone nowhere. On the home page of the White House Web site, the most recent entry under the heading "Featured Legislation" dates back to Jan. 4, a food safety act passed by the last Congress. No legislation passed and signed since then rates a mention. As a Wall Street Journal editorial noted last week, the administration has also delayed moving forward even when it does not need Congress, including tightening regulation of carbon emissions and the financial investments known as derivatives. The Journal called this a "hiatus from liberalism" heading into an election year, a conclusion the White House rejects. Both sides present the other as masters of inaction. Senator John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, complained last week that Democrats have failed to even pass a budget. "We have not done a budget in 777 days," he said. Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, parried by noting, "It's been 163 days since the Republicans have taken over the majority of the House of Representatives, almost six months, and still no jobs bill on the floor." Both sides, naturally, call the other's claim misleading. But left hanging are the 14 million unemployed Americans, leading to manufactured expressions of outrage about the other side's supposed indifference. When Mr. Obama said there were "bumps in the road" to recovery, former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, a Republican presidential candidate, aired an ad with unemployed people standing up from the street to say, "I'm an American, not a bump in the road." When the very well-off Mr. Romney later joked with jobless workers in Florida that "I'm also unemployed," it became the Democrats" turn to express outrage. Little wonder so many feel turned off by a process that seems so shallow and self-serving. Yet it is part of a cycle that is not new. For decades, Washington has lurched from periods of frenetic action to periods of aggravating stalemate. President Bill Clinton signed legislation overhauling welfare in 1996 only after vetoing two earlier versions. President George W. Bush pushed through far-reaching security legislation after Sept. 11, 2001, only to find his domestic agenda frozen when the Iraq war went south. Mr. Obama signed plenty of legislation when Democrats ran Congress, capping last year with a bipartisan tax deal, a repeal of restrictions on gays and lesbians in the military and the ratification of an arms control treaty with Russia. The fallow period since then was broken mainly when he and Republicans reached a spending agreement to avoid a government shutdown.