Norman Ornstein: What Obama Can Learn From Truman
[U]nlike Truman, Obama has constantly sought common ground with Congress. While that strategy averted a descent into national default, it has not been met with an olive branch on the other side. Obama’s embrace of the “Gang of Six” debt reduction proposal in the Senate, a call for substantial changes in core entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, along with major tax reform and more revenues, was not greeted with applause by most Republicans. Instead, it only reinforced Republicans’ ideological partisanship. Speaker of the House John Boehner rejected any attempt at a “Grand Bargain”, because his caucus would not countenance a deal that included any revenues at all. The message was clear: anything that Obama is for, Republicans will be instantly against. It’s a playbook from which the GOP is unlikely to diverge anytime soon.
There’s an argument to be made that the president’s passive-aggressive approach to policy-making actually paid big benefits in terms of policy successes in his first two years. There is no way the House and Senate both would have passed health reform bills, for example, if the president had intervened aggressively and demanded things like a public option that would never have survived a filibuster in the Senate.
But however much Obama deserves to be commended for his instinctual pragmatism and his commitment to finding common ground with his political adversaries, that doesn’t mean it amounts to a wise electoral strategy in the year ahead. Obama must reckon with the fact that the 112th Congress will be an implacable political foil. If he does so, he’ll be able to profit from the Republicans’ ideological overreach. But a continued willingness to compromise without pushback will only encourage Republicans in Congress to increase their demands and push for more confrontation. The resulting turmoil will soon irredeemably sour independents against the entire government, including the president.
The alternative is not for the president to abandon negotiation or make his own set of non-negotiable demands, but to channel his inner Harry Truman. That means first redefining the terms of debate, framing a narrative across the country by both decrying the bickering and describing the consequences for voters everywhere if the Republican Congress has its way—what the budget cuts in the House budget would mean for medical research, how people with serious disabilities would be forced onto the streets, Medicaid patients unable to get organ transplants, and so on. The president’s domestic policy achievements from his first two years were not received enthusiastically by voters, and the record this year is dismal, but he can take a chapter from Truman’s playbook by describing in detail the many pressing issues facing the country, which the 112th House, and the Republican minority in the Senate, have refused to address.