Don't write off the Republicans
Obama may be making two mistakes from over-confidence: not trying to reach out to Republicans in Congress, and leaving the crafting of major legislation to the Democratic barons. Look for a modest revival of the GOP in the next election.
If you take seriously the talking heads on the cable-news networks, you might believe that, less than four months into the Obama Presidency, the Obama agenda is rolling toward enactment and the Republican Party is in danger of dissolution. History would argue otherwise.
President Obama is enjoying public approval at about the level that previous Presidents have enjoyed at this early stage. Democrats have solid Senate and House majorities (with their Senate majority growing as Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter has changed parties and Al Franken is on the verge of certification as a Minnesota Senator). So soon after last fall's election, there is no single Republican leader who can serve as that party's rallying point. But it is far too soon to declare Obama and his program winners by technical knockout.
First, the matter of political mandate: Obama's victory in the 2008 Democratic nominating race was razor thin. His general-election victory over Sen. John McCain was solid but not as large as expected. The financial/economic crisis — hard economic times always favor Democrats — buried a McCain campaign that was still competitive at the time the recession struck. (A comparable foreign policy/national security crisis might well have elected McCain). Democrats had a huge financial advantage over Republicans and, down the stretch, were outspending Republicans 3 and 4-to-1 in major electoral states. The outgoing Bush administration was hugely unpopular. Yet Obama won the popular vote by only a bit more than 6 percentage points.
Obama's 2008 victory was nowhere near as large as those of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 or Lyndon Johnson in 1964, those to which it is most often compared. Democrats' Congressional majorities, likewise, are nowhere near as one-sided as those coming out of the 1932 and 1964 elections. In baseball terms, Obama's victory was 6-4 over the Republicans whereas the FDR and LBJ victories could be characterized as 10-1.
Why does this matter? Presidents with huge popular and strong Congressional majorities can operate with freer hands than those who must pay greater attention to minority opinion in the Congress and country. (Yet, in 1965, Johnson took extraordinary steps to generate Republican and business support for his Great Society programs). Obama's nominating and general-election campaigns stressed bipartisan cooperation and his desire to end polarizing gridlock in the capital, but as President Obama has talked bipartisanship but has governed in a one-party manner.
Obama's initial, defining action was the passage of a nearly $800 billion economic stimulus package which was mainly drafted by House Democrats after a process in which Congressional Republicans were frozen out. The package passed on a party-line vote. Since then, party lines in the Congress have hardened as subsequent proposals have been developed without Republican input.
Does Obama have enough public popularity and Congressional votes to jam them through on a one-party basis? Thus far the Obama White House seems to believe that he does. This likely is a miscalculation.
Party lines are hard to maintain: Specter, immediately after defecting the GOP, angered his new Democratic Senate colleagues by voting with Republicans on several issues. As a result, they stripped him of the seniority he had believed he would maintain after his party switch. His is no sure vote on any issue, especially on those where 60 votes are necessary to cut off debate and force a floor vote. There are at least a half-dozen, sometimes more, Democratic Senators who will regularly break ranks with their colleagues, depending on the issue.
Regional and ideological differences among Democratic Senators and House Members make it extremely difficult to maintain solidarity on any given matter. That will become quite clear, shortly, when energy and health-care legislation comes to Congressional consideration. One-party-drafted proposals, if they do not include input from the opposition party and independents, are extremely difficult to enact.
The White House must also learn to control its own proposals: Obama, new to the job, left the drafting of his stimulus package in large part to Congressional Democrats. He is doing the same, now, with development of his health-care and energy proposals. Historically, most major policy proposals — especially those involving big changes — have been developed within the White House, in cooperation with Congressional leaders (most often of both parties).
By contrast, Clinton's 1994 health-care reform proposal went too far in the direction of White House control. Hillary Clinton, who led the effort, excluded not only Republican but key Democratic Congressional leaders from the exercise, with disastrous result. Perhaps that is why the present Obama administration, populated in large part by Clinton alumni, has tilted so strongly in the opposite direction, letting the Hill develop the proposals while the President does the cheerleading for them. Almost certainly, though, this will lead to later trouble. Having let Congressional Democrats take the lead, the President will be placed in a position of either rubber-stamping or renouncing what they have done. A President needs unmistakeably to be in charge of his own agenda.
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Comments:
Posted Fri, May 8, 7:30 a.m. inappropriate
write off the pooplikans? what need is there for them with a president who's owned by goldmann sachs and whose war policies are just like bush/ cheney's? fiddlesticks.
Posted Fri, May 8, 7:37 a.m. inappropriate
Your historical comparisons are from an era when both parties were "big tent" organizations. The new Republican Party, however, has remade itself into a much smaller force, controlled by those who adhere to hard-right, hard-edged Club For Growth politics. At 21 percent support among the population nationwide, if Republican challengers next year are primarily right-wing ideologues, then there will be no Republican recovery, large or small.
Posted Fri, May 8, 9:06 a.m. inappropriate
Bipartisanship requires both the majority party's genuine offer of collaboration and the good-faith acceptance by the minority. Sometimes it seems the out-of-power party is more interested in putting together talking points and recorded votes for the next election than in coming to the table and getting their fingerprints on bills.
Posted Fri, May 8, 10:05 a.m. inappropriate
Ammons is quite right about partisan tactics by a minority party. As we get closer to 2010 elections, it is highly likely that Congressional Republicans will employ such tactics---casting votes and making statements for the record. However, when 2009 dawned, Congressional Republicans were quite prepared to cooperate with a popular new Democratic President on a whole host of issues. The tactic chosen by the Obama White House--that is, devising Democrats-only proposals and, then, deploring Republicans for not buying into them---has only hardened GOP opposition prematurely.
There are some difficult issues lying ahead (in a difficult financial/economic environment) and I think it unlikely Democrats will be able to address them successfully without at least some GOP collaboration at the front end. We shall just have to see.
Posted Fri, May 8, 11:08 a.m. inappropriate
"In other (not so new) news, Dick Cheney knew about torture all along and is proud of it: In an interview with a radio host, he said Obama and Democrats were ending interrogation policies "to appeal to the far-left in their party." He went on to offer some advice that, for comedy's sake, we hope the GOP follows: "I think it would be a mistake for us to moderate. This is about fundamental beliefs and values and ideas. … You know, when you add all those things up the idea that we ought to moderate basically means we ought to fundamentally change our philosophy. I for one am not prepared to do that, and I think most us aren't."
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/05/intelligence-re.html
Read it at ABC News
Posted Fri, May 8, 4:31 p.m. inappropriate
"When 2009 dawned, Congressional Republicans were quite prepared to cooperate with a popular new Democratic President on a whole host of issues."
Apparently memory plays tricks. What they were prepared to do was accept President Obama's unconditional surrender. I imagine they will continue to do so, crying like Monty Python's Black Knight "None shall pass!" I imagine that will work out about as well as it did for the Black Knight.
It would be foolish to count the Republicans out in the long term, but as long as the Club for Growth and Rush Limbaugh are running the show, they will be righlty seen as obstructionists who are more interested in ideological purity than the success of the nation. It's hard to see how they recover from that.
Posted Fri, May 8, 7:05 p.m. inappropriate
Redactor, your argument might be compelling if you had facts to support it. Sadly, you don't.
Fact - the Democrats in Congress did not allow any Republicans to participate in the drafting of the early bills (stimulus, etc.).
Fact - the Democrats did not allow any Republican amendments to those bills.
Fact - faced with this, the Republicans offered alternative bills that were defeated. The "just say no" claim is simply wrong.
How do these facts support any argument that the President even attempted to keep his campaign pledge to be bipartisan?
Posted Sun, May 10, 12:17 p.m. inappropriate
First, Van Dyk is right in many respects. . . Plenty of history to point out the out-of-power party's increased numbers in off year elections; secondly, Obama's margin was hardly a mandate - something extremely difficult to pull off in these fractured times.
However, Redactor does have a point regarding the Rs - they made a lot of sweet talk about working with the new President (presumably during the honeymoon period) but, at the end of the day, that party has become a marginal fringe group in the public's mind. The first term Presidency of GW Bush being determined by the Supreme Court and, arguably, a handful of counties in Ohio, unfortunately opened the door to 8 years of divisiveness that was sealed with the illegal invasion of that pesky dictatorship - Iraq.
The Rs further stepped up to make tax cut after tax cut, not ask us to pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars associated with the war and drove us to the largest deficit in U.S. History. And let us not forget what the distinguished occupant of the oval office said last fall, "That economy thing caught me by surprise. . ."
Now, I am not a particularly vindictive person and I know that there's plenty of blame to go around for the collapse of the banking system and more; however, I'm going to be exceptionally skeptical about ANY Republican proposals for the country's future at this point.
I an not an Obama acolyte, but the mess that has landed on his doorstep will take the best minds, fiscal discipline and TIME to work us out of this precarious situation. People on the right make plenty of snarky remarks about Queen Pelosi and Obama's naivete and 'liberal' agenda with trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, but these conservative clowns let Bush run them over in Congress and, in fact, generated and pushed bills that went WELL beyond the post-911 stimulus.
So as many of us now tell friends and colleagues who supported Bush and then began to have questions about him but still found Obama's media-hyped Messiah persona 'scary', we say, "Now you know what we felt like for the past 8 years."
Posted Sun, May 10, 8:48 p.m. inappropriate
As just a normal citizen who doesn't get in to the details Van Dyke needs to know that most of us see Obama as reaching across the isle to the republicans only to be mostly rebuffed. I see it as the republicans not participating and the mistake is in my mind that is how the normal citizen will see it. 100% no votes is not participating any way you cut it. I truly support Obama and I know that he accomplishes nothing with out congress passing it. The bully pulpit can only do so much.
Posted Mon, May 11, 6:54 a.m. inappropriate
To davidrsmith: Yes, many like you "who don't get into the details" may have such an impression. That is why I write so that you may know more of the details. We agree that Obama can go only so far with the bully pulpit. The Congress must pass his proposals. That is why I suggest he must include Republican Congressional leaders in developing his major proposals---especially those which involve big changes, such as the health-care and energy plans now pending. The historic record shows that
bipartisan involvement is necessary for ultimate success. Thus far Obama has talked about it but, in practice, has pursued a Democrats-only strategy.