Alan Ehrenhalt: Will Obama’s Congress Be Too Friendly?
[Alan Ehrenhalt is the editor of Governing magazine.]
BARACK OBAMA will be the third Democratic president in the last 40 years. The first two, wildly different as human beings, had one important thing in common: They both got off to a dreadful start.
Jimmy Carter failed to win passage of any signature program in his first year, never really recovered, and couldn’t win re-election. Bill Clinton made himself so unpopular that his party was swept out of power in Congress in 1994. Ultimately, he bounced back, won a second term, and had a reasonably successful presidency. But there’s no question that his disastrous first two years limited what he could ultimately achieve.
Any new president would be foolish not to look back at those experiences and try to figure out what went wrong, and how it might be avoided. And there are plenty of lessons to look at: Mr. Carter’s seeming arrogance and lack of familiarity with Washington; Mr. Clinton’s politically clumsy health care plan and lack of personal or managerial discipline.
But there’s something else that President-elect Obama ought to think carefully about: numbers. Simple, beguiling, ultimately misleading numbers.
It would be hard to overstate what a different universe Capitol Hill was three decades ago. Jimmy Carter came in with huge Democratic majorities — there was a filibuster-proof 61-seat majority in the Senate, while in the House, more than two-thirds of the members were Democrats. Perhaps he can be forgiven for thinking that he had enough legislative support for the ambitious program he wanted to enact: welfare reform, national health care, a comprehensive energy package and a great deal else.
But President Carter failed to grasp — or refused to confront — the mathematical reality that every reporter in the press gallery instinctively understood. That Democratic majority was almost totally illusory. Of the 292 House Democrats sworn in that January, about 70 were conservative Southerners with little personal loyalty to the president and none at all to a mainstream Democratic agenda. Perhaps 30 more were big-city machine Democrats, the last of a dying breed, with little interest in public policy at all other than offering an occasional vote to labor and asking politely for instructions from the party back home. To get anywhere, Mr. Carter needed help from what was then still a sizeable contingent of moderate Republicans. Yet, falsely confident in his majority, he made little effort to reach out.
Bill Clinton, taking office 16 years later, made a different mistake. He took the rules of the Senate too literally. They provide that bills are declared passed when they receive a majority. But by 1993, this had ceased to be true. The right to filibuster, used extremely sparingly for almost two centuries of American political life, was now considered an acceptable tool for the minority in fighting against anything it wanted to fight. It didn’t take 50 votes to pass a bill; it took 60, the number required to end a filibuster and force a vote....
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BARACK OBAMA will be the third Democratic president in the last 40 years. The first two, wildly different as human beings, had one important thing in common: They both got off to a dreadful start.
Jimmy Carter failed to win passage of any signature program in his first year, never really recovered, and couldn’t win re-election. Bill Clinton made himself so unpopular that his party was swept out of power in Congress in 1994. Ultimately, he bounced back, won a second term, and had a reasonably successful presidency. But there’s no question that his disastrous first two years limited what he could ultimately achieve.
Any new president would be foolish not to look back at those experiences and try to figure out what went wrong, and how it might be avoided. And there are plenty of lessons to look at: Mr. Carter’s seeming arrogance and lack of familiarity with Washington; Mr. Clinton’s politically clumsy health care plan and lack of personal or managerial discipline.
But there’s something else that President-elect Obama ought to think carefully about: numbers. Simple, beguiling, ultimately misleading numbers.
It would be hard to overstate what a different universe Capitol Hill was three decades ago. Jimmy Carter came in with huge Democratic majorities — there was a filibuster-proof 61-seat majority in the Senate, while in the House, more than two-thirds of the members were Democrats. Perhaps he can be forgiven for thinking that he had enough legislative support for the ambitious program he wanted to enact: welfare reform, national health care, a comprehensive energy package and a great deal else.
But President Carter failed to grasp — or refused to confront — the mathematical reality that every reporter in the press gallery instinctively understood. That Democratic majority was almost totally illusory. Of the 292 House Democrats sworn in that January, about 70 were conservative Southerners with little personal loyalty to the president and none at all to a mainstream Democratic agenda. Perhaps 30 more were big-city machine Democrats, the last of a dying breed, with little interest in public policy at all other than offering an occasional vote to labor and asking politely for instructions from the party back home. To get anywhere, Mr. Carter needed help from what was then still a sizeable contingent of moderate Republicans. Yet, falsely confident in his majority, he made little effort to reach out.
Bill Clinton, taking office 16 years later, made a different mistake. He took the rules of the Senate too literally. They provide that bills are declared passed when they receive a majority. But by 1993, this had ceased to be true. The right to filibuster, used extremely sparingly for almost two centuries of American political life, was now considered an acceptable tool for the minority in fighting against anything it wanted to fight. It didn’t take 50 votes to pass a bill; it took 60, the number required to end a filibuster and force a vote....