The last couple weeks have served as a brilliant, if butt-ugly, reminder that governance should be judged not on the back and forth of day-to-day events, but on outcomes. When the history of President Obama’s first month in office is written, it will state that he moved swiftly and boldly (and perhaps “wisely”) to combat a calamitous economic crisis, pushing through stimulus legislation that emerged from Congress in pretty much the form and amount he requested, and in impressively short order. The sturm und drang over line items that came and went, honeymoons that supposedly ended early, and Bipartisanship: Impossible will be rendered mere footnotes to the end result.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the minutiae of this past month should be disregarded completely. Indeed, they offer an assortment of clues to the manner in which Obama’s administration will play out over the long term. As long as he continues to get what he wants, Obama will use both carrots and sticks to engage the Republicans and maintain the bipartisan high ground; the minority party, meanwhile, will likely play nice and talk up what a great guy Obama is, while offering little to no actual support for his agenda.
Note, however, that last phrase: “his agenda.” As I noted, historians will regard this stimulus as distinctly Obama’s package – and once the bill reaches his desk for signature he will take full ownership of it. But since the day after Inauguration, this legislation has hardly felt like it belonged to Obama. He made a big show of acceding to various GOP tax-cut proposals during the weeks before he took the oath, but once in the White House he left the bill almost entirely in Congressional leaders’ hands to shape, reshape and fight over. He seemed determined not to get his own hands dirty, not to demand specific items in specific amounts nor to reject specific Republican proposals out of hand.
He allowed the House to steer the bill too far to the left, then the Senate to over-correct to the right, before yesterday’s frenetic negotiations concluded with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Ben Nelson, Arlen Spector and the Ladies from Maine all smiling. (Here’s another clue to the next two years: As long as those six people are smiling, Obama’s agenda will sail through the legislative branch.) The president’s own arm’s-length embrace of this process wound up costing him only a few billion in education funding here, a few billion in aid to the states there…
…And about 25 percentage points of popular support for the legislation. That’s the extent of the disconnect between Obama’s approval rating and that of the stimulus package itself. Obama’s decision to allow Pelosi and Reid to shape and guide the bill not only made opposition less painful for the Republicans – it cost Obama considerable buy-in from a public that clearly wants him to seize his mandate and succeed with it, but is far less attached to the fortunes of the Democratic Congress. (more…)
One of the hoariest clichés out there is the notion that politicians “campaign in poetry, but govern in prose.” Both Obama and John McCain campaigned last fall with uplifting calls for bipartisanship – McCain because he needed to overcome the Republican brand, Obama because he wanted to run up the score and break through the “50-percent-plus-one” nightmare of the Bush years. But even now that Obama has achieved that breakthrough, he’s still governing (at least for the moment) in poetry, and Monday’s visit to the Hill was nothing if not poetic.