Last Friday’s press conference by Barack Obama marked the end of an era. It was March 1st, the day that the sequester was set to kick in, and the President had just come from a meeting with congressional leaders in the Oval Office. On the eve of previous fiscal deadlines, the White House and Congress often found a way to reach a deal, even if it was only a patchwork solution or a temporary fix. Not this time.
A deal on the sequester was never really possible. Back in January, in return for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling for a few months, conservative House Republicans demanded that their leaders, John Boehner and Eric Cantor, allow the trillion dollars of cuts in the sequester to take effect. The White House, which wanted additional revenue as part of the replacement for the sequester, saw the G.O.P.’s all-cuts approach as a nonstarter, which means that sequestration is likely here to stay. (I wrote about the House G.O.P.’s road to the sequester in an article about Cantor last week.) When one considers that the alternative scenario was for House Republicans to precipitate a government default and a potential global financial crisis, the sequester cuts and the estimated three-quarters of a million jobs that they will cost this year are not so bad.
At Obama’s press conference, after he explained the negative effects of sequestration, he cast blame on the Republicans, and a reporter challenged his analysis. “It sounds like you’re saying that this is a Republican problem and not one that you bear any responsibility for,” she said to the President.
Obama seemed taken aback. “Well, Julie, give me an example of what I might do.”
Obama’s slightly testy response is worth considering. I don’t remember a President ever publicly expressing a similar sentiment. All Presidents come to appreciate the limits of the power of their office, and there are reams of quotes from Presidents privately expressing disdain for Congress’s unwillingness to bend to their will. But rarely do they ventilate such thoughts in public.
A little later, Obama, using a reference from “Star Wars” (with some “Star Trek” mixed in), went even further, giving a short lesson on the separation of powers:
The tendency of many Washington pundits, especially those who cover the White House, is to invest the Presidency with far more power that the Constitution gives it. The idea that the Presidency and Congress are co-equal branches of government is the most basic fact of our system, and yet it is often absent from political coverage of standoffs between the two branches. If only Obama would lead, this fiscal mess would be solved! If only he would socialize more with legislators the way L.B.J. did, his agenda would pass!
The pundits are not alone in assuming that the President is all-powerful. Indeed, the fact that Barack Obama now so appreciates the limits of his office and his lack of Jedi powers is rich with irony. As I’ve written about before, the premise of Obamaism— from his famous convention speech in 2004, through his primary challenge to Hillary Clinton, in 2008, right up until the later half of his first term—was that Obama was a politician uniquely suited to transform American politics by breaking through the polarization in Washington and bringing the two parties together.
Obama’s theme of post-partisanship and unity as a substitute for political ideology has always had its critics. Sean Wilentz, writing in The New Republic, in 2011, noted that Obama
Needless to say, that didn’t happen. In reviewing the history of the politics of post-partisanship, Wilentz argues that Presidents who have used post-partisanship as merely a rhetorical device have been more successful than those who truly believed in the idea.
That Obama, who started his Presidency as a true believer, has now given up on the idea that he has any special powers to change the minds of his fiercest critics is probably a good thing. His devotion to post-partisan governance has long fed two mistaken ideas: that the differences between the parties are minor, and that divided government is inherently good for the country.
A fundamental fact of modern political life is that the only way to advance a coherent agenda in Washington is through partisan dominance. When Obama had large Democratic majorities in Congress during his first two years in office, he led one of the most successful legislative periods in modern history. After he lost the House, his agenda froze and the current status quo of serial fiscal crises began. Like it or not, for many years, Washington has been most productive when one party controlled both Congress and the White House.
The boring fact of our system is that congressional math is the best predictor of a President’s success. This idea is not nearly as sexy as the notion that great Presidents are great because they twist arms in backrooms and inspire the American people to rise up and force Congress to bend to their will. But even the Presidents who are remembered for their relentless congressional lobbying and socializing were more often than not successful for more mundane reasons—like arithmetic.
Lyndon Johnson’s celebrated legislative achievements were in reality only a function of the congressional election results—not his powers of persuasion. In 1965 and 1966, after the enormous Democratic gains of the 1964 election, Johnson was a towering figure who passed sweeping legislation. In 1967 and 1968, after he lost forty-eight Democrats in the House, he was a midget.
Each President is conflicted about how much to advertise the limits of his power. On one hand, pretending the office is more powerful than it is can have some benefits; in politics, perception is often reality. But, as Obama seems to have learned, reminding the public of the limits of the office can also help keep expectations more realistic.
Given all this, it’s depressing but not entirely surprising that there are already stories about the White House looking beyond the current Congress, and focussing on winning back the House in 2014, so that Obama’s last two years in office can be spent working with a Democratic majority. At his press conference on Friday, Obama hinted as much. He told reporters that while he can’t “force Congress to do the right thing,” perhaps “the American people may have the capacity to do that.”
Photograph by Charles Dharapak/AP.
