Axrendale (21 posts) Wed Nov-17-10 04:49 AM
Response to Reply #6
13. Just a "bill signer"?
Edited on Wed Nov-17-10 05:48 AM by Axrendale
With all due respect, I think that you are failing to give Obama credit for the role that he did play in the legislative accomplishments to his name thus far. Sure, it was by no means a perfect performance, but to declare unequivocally that "any" Democrat elected in his place could have produced an equal or better record, is, I would say, more than a little bit unfair.
Let's first take a look at some of the historical precedents that you hold up as being superior Presidential Legislators to our current POTUS. I find it interesting that you use Harry S. Truman as an example. "Give 'em Hell Harry" certainly did know how to roar from the Bully Pulpit with the best of them, and any liberal Democrat worth his/her salt can only experience a distinct feeling of pride that our party was once led by a such a man. The trouble with holding him up as a parable of how a President should get a legislative agenda passed through Congress when their party holds the majority however, is that Truman was, quite frankly, terrible at doing this. His approach to dealing with Congress had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, and the (rather predictable) result was that in almost eight years of promoting his Fair Deal legislation, HST managed to get Congress to pass one - that's right, count 'em, one - of his initiatives in a form that he was prepared to sign - a housing bill that had been so watered down by the time it landed on his desk that it seems patently ludicrous to hold it up as any sort of example of "getting more and giving up less".
John F. Kennedy had something of a better time working with the Democrats in his two (or rather one and a half) Congresses, but not so much so that the last truly great President (every President since has been either of flawed greatness or a relative nonentity) can be trumpeted as having had enjoyed anything even close to the same level of success as that enjoyed by truly successful PLs. By 1963 the New Frontier initiatives that had managed to be signed into law were uniformly of a fairly minor note - and this was quite deliberate. JFK was more than canny a politician enough to understand that any political capital he sought to expend fighting to break the thoroughly conservative Congress of the time to his will would only be wasted - he would have to work with, not against, the legislators of his day. He did so in a manner highly reminiscent of that employed by Obama, incidently - and the result was that although Kennedy did not managed to achieve any overly flashy results in the short-term, he was able to get a good number of watered down measures enacted, and build up the foundations for much greater action in the future. Some might find this a little disappointing, but others would argue that it was better than the failure to get anything done at all. JFK always defined himself as a "pragmatic idealist" - he understood what he wanted and why, but he also understood the limitations of the political resources at his disposal, and sought to work within those boundaries.
The fact is that in the entire course of American political history, there have only ever been five Presidents who have succeeded in forming a contextually historic progressive legislative agenda and been able to compel/coerce Congress into enacting at least part of it into law - one Republican and four Democrats. They are: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and... Barack Obama (John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon might have made the list, but were respectively assassinated and disgraced before they could do so). Of these five, it is fairly safe to say that three of them can be singled out as possessing legislative accomplishments that stand out in scope above those of the other two: and those are Roosevelt, Johnson, and Obama, in that order (Obama's present legislative accomplishments probably hover in relative terms somewhere between those of Johnson and Wilson). The inclusion of our current President in that list for the results of his first two years (if some people think it unfair to rate Obama solely on the outcome of half his first term, it should be remembered that it is usual for Presidents to cram the bulk of their achievements into short periods of time. Most of Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal was enacted from 1905 - 1906, Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom was largely confined to the period from 1913 - 1914, FDR's New Deal was at its height from 1933 - 1936, and LBJ's Great Society was brought about in bulk during the years prior to 1966) is all the more remarkable, one might note, as all of the four (with the exception of Wilson, in terms of numbers at least) 20th Century ones had at the time of their greatest legislative accomplishments significantly more in the way of political resources to draw upon than Obama ever dreamed of. Don't believe me? Let's take a look at the numbers:
- From 1905 5o 1906, when Theodore Roosevelt sought to ram as much of his Square Deal legislation through Congress as possible he was able to do so more than anything else by virtue of commanding a twenty-eight seat majority in the Senate (59 Republicans to just 31 Democrats) and a one hundred and sixteen seat majority in the House (251 Republicans to 135 Democrats), over both of which he was widely thought to hold even greater influence than Kaisar Wilhelm held over the Reichstag.
- From 1913 to 1914, Woodrow Wilson's Democratic coalition that he used to pass the New Freedom held an overwhelming majority in the House of one hundred and forty-seven seats (291 Democrats, 9 Progressives, and an Independent to 134 Republicans). Their majority in the Senate seemed less convincing on paper (51 Democrats and 1 Progressive to 44 Republicans), but this belied the reality that the entire progressive wing of the Republican party remained furious at the rejection of Theodore Roosevelt by the Party powerbrokers in 1912, and in revenge for this were more than willing to join with the Democrats in a coalition to enact that legislation they had been agitating for for years.
- The 74th United States Congress, which met from 1935 to 1936 and which was compelled by Franklin D. Roosevelt to pass a series of historic economic and social statutes that formed the keystone of the New Deal, did so partially thanks to FDR's matchless politicking, but partially also by virtue of being dominated by the most powerful legislative coalition ever to be assembled in American history. FDR enjoyed the loyalty of 69 Democrats, 1 Farmer-Laborer, and 1 Progressive against just 25 Republicans in the Senate, and 322 Democrats, 3 Farmer-Laborers, and 7 Progressives against just 103 Republicans in the House.
- When Lyndon B. Johnson rammed measure after legislative measure that collectively made up the bulk of the Great Society through the 89th US Congress from 1965 to 1966, he was in command of a legislative coalition that was almost as impressive as that presided over by FDR. 68 Democrats in the Senate (to 32 Republicans) and 295 Democrats in the House (against 140 Republicans) swore fealty to LBJ at the height of his power.
It is worth noting that despite holding these seemingly invincible majorities in both houses of Congress, TR, Wilson, FDR, and LBJ all had to wheel, deal, compromise, and negotiate like mad to get anything from the Legislative branch. Those who felt (and continue to feel) that the results each of these men achieved were somehow "half-measures" that could have been far better than they were (a famous story tells how Eugene Debbs, the leader of the American Socialist Party, was in the aftermath of the Social Security Act of 1935's enactment asked whether FDR had not carried out the Socialist agenda. "He certainly has carried it out", Debbs replied. "He has carried it out on a sretcher!") fail to appreciate just how much effort it really took to achieve even these "limited" results.
- We know come to Barack Obama and the 111th Congress. Over the past (almost) two years, Obama in seeking to enact his own legislative agenda (dubbed the "New Foundation") has been confronted with the realities of managing a legislative coalition that at its absolute height consisted of 58 Democrats and 2 Independents opposed by 40 Republicans, while in the House the Democratic coalition never achieved a greater strength than 258 Democrats to 177 Republicans - the smallest effective majorities on this list.
When one then factors in the die-hard opposition that the Democrats have faced from the Republicans, a phenomenon that almost resembles the fervor with which Southern politicians opposed Civil Rights legislation, applied universally to the agenda of the President, as well as the difficulty involved in simply maintaining cohesion within the ranks of his own party (a problem that has not been so pronounced in the House, but which has proved lethal to numerous pieces of legislation in the Senate), and a case can actually made that Obama was lucky to get as much out of the past eighteen months as he has.
Certainly one can argue (probably rightly) that he could have improved considerably on certain areas of his performance. But that is to neglect that there is much to the legislative record of the 111th Congress that is genuinely historic, and to dismiss the President as merely a bit-player in the process, crippled by a "lack of experience and expertise", is forgive me, to betray having paid little attention to exactly what role he did play. It was Obama's iniatives that resulted in a great part of the legislation that he has managed to sign into law, and a number of items that failed to be enacted. His initiatives and his negotiations, his attempts to fulfill on his promises, and his input into the contents of the legislation that will be his legacy, formed an influence on the legislative process since the beginning of his presidency, that for better or worse must be reckoned with as having been highly influential on the "contents of the sausages", so to speak. Like it or loathe it, the legislation that has become law, from the ARRA through to the Healthcare Bill, through to the Financial Regulation package, and beyond, bears Obama's signature in more ways than one. If Hillary Clinton or John Edwards had been the Democratic nominee in 2008, or if Bill Clinton had managed to evade the 22nd Ammendment and return for a third term, then their final tally of legislative accomplishments by this point would certainly have been very different from Obama's - but I for one am not at all sure that the differences would have been for the better. Those who complain of the Healthcare Bill's flaws have a number of very important points to make, but it is important to remember that we could just as easily have had no bill at all. The Financial Regulatory package could have been a lot stronger... but it could also potentially have been signiciantly weaker.
As a final note on the Stimulus bill, I agree with those who contend that it was/is not nearly large enough, but also tend to sympathize with those who contend that it was just about as a big as was reasonable to hope for from a strictly political standpoint. Perhaps it could have been made bigger, but not by enough to make a reasonable difference.
A note on the tax cuts however - it is certainly true that the ARRA contained within it one of the largest tax cutting programs in history. That does not however make them in any way, shape, or form in any way similar to Reaganomics, nor do they at all resemble the supply-side tax cuts that have done such harm over the past decade. The tax cuts that Obama pushed for were demand-side Keynesian tax cuts of the same kind as those which were pursued by John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. Certainly from an economic perspective government spending is far more effective at stimulating the economy than tax cuts (although these are very capable of providing some stimulus if they are properly aimed at the middle class), but the entire rationale behind "Reactionary Keynesianiam" has always been that it is more politically acceptable, even if it is less economically efficient, than Progressive Keynesianism (one thinks of FDR using military spending as a substitute for deficit spending in order to banish the last vestiges of the Great Depression).
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=433x524622#524742Well said and, I think, applicable in this discussion. I think it clearly demonstrates how the country has benefited from having the Dem at the helm.
Julie
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