Great speech! However, I should also note Jonathan Chait's comments:
Few people follow the arcana of Congressional debate. They attribute all political outcomes to the president, and thus when the outcome is unsatisfactory, the reason must be a failure of presidential willpower. I wrote about this phenomenon, with relation to the BP spill, in a recent TRB column.
Rachel Maddow offered a perfect example of the phenomenon the other night. She delivered her fantasy version of the speech President Obama should have given. It was filled with unequivocal liberal rhetoric. I was struck by this portion, explaining how she would pass an energy bill:
The United States Senate will pass an energy bill. This year. The Senate version of the bill will not expand offshore drilling. The earlier targets in that bill for energy efficiency and for renewable energy-sources will be doubled or tripled.In reality, you can't pass any of the climate bill by reconciliation. Democrats didn't write reconciliation instructions permitting them to do so, and very little of its could be passed through reconciliation, which only allows budgetary decisions. Maddow's response is to pass the rest by executive order. But you can't change those laws through executive order, either. That's not how our system of government works, nor is it how our system should work.
If Senators use the filibuster to stop the bill, we will pass it by reconciliation, which still ensures a majority vote. If there are elements of the bill that cannot procedurally be passed by reconciliation, if those elements can be instituted by executive order, I will institute them by executive order.
If Maddow's speech had to hew to the reality of Senate rules and the Constitution, she'd be left where Obama is: ineffectually pleading to get whatever she can get out of a Senate that has nowhere near enough votes to pass even a stripped-down cap and trade bill. It may be nice to imagine that all political difficulties could be swept away by a president who just spoke with enough force and determination. It's a recurrent liberal fantasy —Michael Moore imagined such a speech a few months ago, Michael Douglas delivers such a speech in "The American President." I would love to eliminate the filibuster and create more accountable parties. But even if that happens, there will be a legislative branch that has a strong say in what passes or doesn't pass. And that's good! We wouldn't want to live in a world where a president can remake vast swaths of policy merely be decreeing it.
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3 comments:
It seems to me that people's criticism of Obama is that he talks in these generalities and platitudes.
Maddow's speech was full of action. This morning I did this and this year we will pass that.
I think that people do have unreal expectations of what Obama should be doing, but the fact is he's nowhere near as "progressive" as he allowed himself to be portrayed during his election. Yes, the liberals sort of created a persona of "Obama the progressive" when his politics have always been in reality more middle of the road, but Obama is guilty of going along for the ride and never saying "hey, I think you guys are getting the wrong idea about my politics"
I think it is just an excuse to say that presidents of the past didn't do this or didn't do that as one of the columns you linked to said. Yes the New Deal had starts and stops and history sort of forgets that. You never remember how longs things took in the past or how much work it was to accomplish things, but all this talk about presidents didn't do this or you can't get this through reconciliation is maddening to me. When Bush was in office his administration found any number of ways to do things. They just did things whether they had the legal rights to or not. They created new powers for the president left and right. Yet all I hear in the media now is what can't be done and what votes the Democrats can't get.
I hesitate to say it's a GOP vs. Democrat thing, but it just seems like every day the Dems are asleep at the wheel. While the GOP can get done whatever they want except that it's always change I don't want.
Your last line really hits home with me, John. During the Bush years, the GOP got everything they wanted. Since the Democrats saw that it was popular (thanks to constant cheerleading by Fox "News" and other media outlets), they went along with it. Unfortunately for us, everything the GOP wanted was completely the wrong thing to do.
Now, I don't blame Obama for most of this. He can't close Guantanamo Bay because of rampant cowardice in his own party (and, of course, total opposition - no matter what he proposes - from the GOP). He did get health insurance reform, albeit very conservative reform, and we're getting pretty good financial reform and, I believe, the end of "don't ask, don't tell." That's progress.
But Obama doesn't show the fiery kind of leadership we saw on the campaign trail. He doesn't use the presidential bully pulpit to press for specific reforms. Instead, he leaves it up to Congress. But Congress, by the nature of the beast, CAN'T lead. That's the President's job.
That's why I loved Rachel Maddow's fake speech, despite the errors of fact. No, the President can't do all that stuff (and I really don't want him to imitate Bush by inventing new powers for himself), but he needs to LEAD. He needs to clearly explain EXACTLY what he wants, and what he expects from Congress, and then PUSH those policies - hard!
Sure, compromise will probably be necessary to get anything through Congress, but that will happen anyway. Right now, Obama seems to compromise unilaterally - and then the right-wing doesn't move an inch, anyway. This administration is still a million times better than the previous, but Obama is rapidly running out of time to get anything worthwhile accomplished.
What Bush and Cheney were good at was politics. They would bully polititians into voting the way they wanted threatning them with who knows what.
The President has vast amounts of political power.
If a Democrat is faltering you have a representative go to his office and tell him that unless he votes the way he is supposed to the president in not going to endorse him during the next election and in fact he is going to fly Airforce One over to his hometown and endorse another Democrat in the primary. The West Wing had a scene where one of the Presidents guys said exactly that.
You don't have to go to that extreme but there is tons of political leverage to be asserted. But in order for threats like that to work you have to believe the President means business. All the Democrats seem to have no fear of going against what Obama wants if it serves their purposes.
The perfect example is Joe Lieberman, he should have been run out of the town on a rail. Stripped of all powers, etc. But they took the wishy washy root and are still acting like he's a friend of the Democrats.
People feared Bush and Cheney and like what they were doing or not (I don't), they were able to get things none because of it.
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