The Sorkin Fallacy
Since I was accused by a couple people in the last presidential power thread of creating a strawman, I should note that David Sirota and especially Drew Westen have provided the latest very real examples of people asserting that FDR imposed an uncompromising liberal agenda on Congress. (Westen, needless to say, mentions the “I welcome their hatred” speech while failing to mention that it didn’t stop Congress from stopping much of his post-1936 agenda and compelling grossly immoral compromises on most of what remained.) The fallacy, as Chait aptly puts it, that “the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric” is unusually persistent despite the fact that outside of overpraised TV shows it’s utter nonsense. In the actually existing world of American politics, 1)the president is subordinate to Congress on domestic (although certainly not foreign) policy, and 2)the “bully pulpit” does not give the president any significant ability to get legislation enacted or shape public opinion.
In fact, what was most impressive about FDR (and in many ways most different from Obama) is that FDR really was a pragmatist. He was not particularly wedded to any ideology and was willing to try just about anything and see if it worked. If you look at the whole sweep of the New Deal, it’s actually hard to classify philosophically.
Compared to Roosevelt, Obama is much more wedded to the middle-of-the-road conventional wisdom of the day. He is, in this sense, more like Hoover than Roosevelt.
Actually a lot of truth in that, I think.
I don’t think “ideology” is what you’re talking about.
If you go back to their records before they became president, Obama was much more of a liberal ideologue than Roosevelt.
I don’t think it’s ideology that explain the differences in how they governed, but style and circumstances.
I never really saw that in Obama’s record, to be honest. I still don’t.
Record as distinguished from rhetoric, maybe.
He voted for same-sex marriage…in 1996.
He sponsored a bill – eventually passed – requiring the police to videotape interrogations and confessions in homicide cases.
I know he supported SSM in a questionnaire. But, when did he have a chance in ’96 to vote on it?
I’m not sure how much we disagree here, Joe.
My contentions were:
1) The most important difference between FDR and Obama as individuals concerns temperament (which I think is what you mean by “style”).
2) Obama is more fundamentally ideological than FDR was (though I think you and I probably disagree on how to describe Obama’s ideology).
(Of coures circumstances are important…and very different in all kinds of ways. And I’ve always been one to see the Obama administration as very symptomatic of larger problems with the Democratic Party these days–which is one of the main differences in circumstance. The Democratic Party of Roosevelt’s day included a much stronger and more politically articulate labor movement. It also included a powerful white supremacist element that morphed into a constituency of the other party today. Both these facts contributed to what FDR was and wasn’t able to accomplish as President.)
We disagree on whether Obama’s term in office has been more centrist than FDR’s because of Obama’s ideology (your theory, that he is less liberal than FDR) or despite his ideology (my theory, that he has a liberal ideology that he curbs for reasons of style and realism).
Compared to Roosevelt, Obama is much more wedded to the middle-of-the-road conventional wisdom of the day.
What I’ve found myself pondering lately is exactly what kind of “moderate” “centrist” Obama is, because it seems to me that those labels can mean two different things.
(1) he’s wedded to a series of beliefs and prescriptions about policy that just happen to be considered “moderate” or “centrist” in the current political climate (but could be considered “left” or “right” in other contexts), and these beliefs would guide his actions regardless of the political context of the moment; or
(2) he’s wedded to “centrism” as an end in itself — i.e., the notion that the answer always lies somewhere in between left and right, however “left” and “right” happen to be defined at any given time?
I’ve gone back and forth on this but I’m increasingly convinced that the answer is much closer to (2) — i.e., triangulation not as one more strategy in the toolbox to get what you want, but an end in itself.
I take IB’s “middle-of-the-road conventional wisdom” to be one more way of saying (2) as well.
You raise a really interesting question, UK. I don’t think that those of us who don’t know Obama personally are in any real position to answer it (and I’m also not sure what the cash value of the difference between theory 1 and theory 2 is when it comes to political outcomes).
My guess–and it’s only a guess–is that, in a way, both 1 and 2 are true. Obama is temperamentally drawn to positions that represent the consensus of serious policy elites. But that, from a subjective point of view, he adopts these positions because he honestly believes that they represent the truth (and, happily, serious, powerful people share this belief with him). This guess is based on knowing well many other people whose minds work like this.
But of course, I don’t know President Obama. So while I’m in a pretty good position to judge his actions, I’m much less able to draw solid conclusions about his motivations.
This is where I think you have to go back to his days in the Illinois Senate, and the people who knew him during and before then.
What about 2a – he’s governed as a centrist not because he thinks the prescriptions are the best, but the best available?
That falls apart at the places they clearly weren’t, like the debt ceiling.
FDR was very constrained by Congress in the area of foreign policy. Cash-and-Carry, Bases for Destroyers and Lend-Lease all had to be passed through Congress, meaning that Roosevelt had to be persuasive to the legislative branch as much in foreign affairs as in domestic affairs. Presidents only asserted a free hand in foreign policy, and got away with it, after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
Furthermore, Obama makes speeches all the time. When was the last time one of them got him any closer to his stated goals?
The 2008 campaign?
As it turns out, influencing public opinion is very good at getting results that depend on the public, and no so good at getting results that depend on, say, winning over votes #59 and 60 in the Senate.
I mean, are Ben Nelson and Scott Brown going to be swept up in Barack Obama’s awesome narrative?
People who devote their political understanding to consuming and responding to public political messaging – bloggers, op-ed columnists, people who crank out Daily Kos diaries on a daily basis – overestimate the significance of public political messaging.
Exactly my point. Going all the way back to the trip to Denmark (wasn’t it?) for the Chicago Olympic bid, speechifying has proved to be pretty ineffectual with the insiders.
This Sirota thing is just a mess. It makes it sound like Obama muscled the senate into accepting a watered-down bill. Seems to me the bill that passed wouldn’t have done so without the “Cornhusker kickback” that finally won Nelson’s vote. Certainly people have made arguments that there were alternative paths to passing a stronger bill – and I’m sure they’ll do it here again – but senate rule-making intrigue doesn’t involve the “bully pulpit.”
What it comes down to is that The Bully Pulpit makes people feel awesome, and the Cornhusker Kickback makes people feel like crap.
It’s very pretty to believe that effectiveness and the ability to inspire lie along the same axis.
It only can do this, or help to do this, where the ground is fully prepared by hundreds of thousands and indeed millions of people doing the ordinary work of politics, organizing people and moving hearts and minds so that they are ready to be moved by what the President has to say – and it has to be enough people, especially voting people in roughly the center, to put the fear of god in people who are going to have to win elections from them.
It can be done. In fact it’s done all the time. But it’s *bloody hard work* and rather than fight to win, Obama’s people have been content to sit on their hands these last three years, bitching at the manager for starting the wrong lineup.
I think that people on the American left honestly thought their work was done in November 2008. I really do. It’s sad, really.
Let’s be fair; we all, presumably, have jobs and lives and suchly. We are expected to do those jobs competently and well without constant supervision. The job of politicians is to 1) govern, and 2) play professional politics.
It is not unreasonable for people to expect that once they provided their half of the transaction (votes, time, energy, door knocking, envelope stuffing, what have you) that THEIR job was done for four years. If more work is required, that’s what we have professional pols for, to do the heavy lifting BETWEEN elections. The rest of us have our own lives, its why we elect people to govern for us.
Admittedly, it doesn’t quite work that way. But I don’t think its out of line for people to expect that it SHOULD, and I have a deal of sympathy for people who, upon being told ‘not only do you have to work your own job, see to the needs of your family, and somehow have a life in-between, you have to constantly be engaged in political war in order for those you elected to realize the smallest of gains’ to go ‘fuck that, I don’t have the time or energy.’
The loonie-toons who are currently eating the left’s lunch money don’t think their work is done when the votes are counted, and it’s never been seen that way before, not really. Maybe we are selling the wrong narratives?
I mean we all know, somehow, that the left in the 1960s – to take one example – didn’t elect JFK and then sit back say “OK guys, job done!” But somehow we’ve come to this, everyone expecting a President with (D) after his name to just deliver health care and ponies because we really, really deserve it.
It’s strange. Maybe it’s a shift to a buy-it-now-on-credit culture? I don’t know. People don’t make much anymore, maybe it’s the same with politics.
In the Bush years we saw that the bully pulpit in combination with the equivalent of state media give powerful agenda-setting powers to the president. Of course this is not symmetrical with the two parties.
No, we didn’t. Not the bully pulpit, we didn’t.
On the eve of the Iraq War, after a year of concentrated public messaging by the President, only a minority of the public wanted to invade Iraq. He got what he wanted anyway, because public opinion wasn’t the key factor.
When the Bush Tax Cuts passed, only a minority of the public supported them. A larger % supported the Democratic alternative. He got what he wanted anyway, because public opinion wasn’t the key factor.
Social Security reform crashed and burned with the public.
When did Bush actually gain the approval of the public and use the public wind at his back to advance his agenda? After 9/11, and that sure wasn’t the power of his words that put the public behind him.
This is exactly correct. A majority of Senate Democrats voted for war with Iraq.
Bush got most of his agenda passed because he could usually count on the support of 25-50% of the “opposition” party in Congress.
And why did those Democrats who voted for the AUMF do so?
Hillary Clinton summed it up best in her quote about being at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue: because she thought it was important for the President to have wide powers in order to be effective at pursuing foreign policy.
John Kerry gave a typically long-winded speech about not voting for war, but voting to give the President latitude to conduct foreign policy. He explicitly told Bush “Do not rush to war,” before casting that vote.
These are not caves to public opinion on the issue at hand; these are acts of preference for certain institutional power arrangements. They were the ultimate inside baseball, like what Chait was talking about.
I totally agree with this.
That is a really excellent analysis.
Now, here’s the relevant question for this piece:
Did Social Security reform crash and burn because someone used the Bully Pulpit against it and rallied public opinion? Or was it because of
1) actual economic conditions (people on Social Security or expecting to be feeling threatened),
2) the institutional power of the AARP lobby,
3) pre-existing political beliefs about Social Security?
George W. Bush used the honeymoon of his re-election to try to “move the Overton Window” on Social Security privatization among the public with an extensive, nation-wide campaign of public messaging.
Right. One thing you have to admire about first-term Bush is that he knew “mandate” is a Latin term for “bulllshit,” or more specifically you have mandate to do anything you can get the votes for in Congress no matter the electoral margin. While his second term underlies that without the votes a stronger “mandate” is worth jack shit.
Well, yes, it does confer some agenda-setting powers. Actually converting that agenda into law, not so much.
Wait… what?
This is just categorically untrue, Scott. OF COURSE the bully pulpit has significant ability to shape public opinion. That’s how public opinion gets shaped; by years and years of politicans getting up there and pushing and selling themselves and their positions. There are other ways public opinion is shaped but this is a big one.
Maybe you meant to say that the bully pulpit has significant ability to shape policy (true, in the short term) or to shape public opinion in the short term (less true, but it wouldn’t be as blatantly wrong.)
Every time I drive by the monument in town to all the servicemen and women killed in Reagan’s invasion of Nicaragua, I remember just how powerful the bully pulpit, in the hands of a great communicator, can be.
The bully pulpit must be wedded to other power sources to be fully effective which is why powering down OFA after the election was a huge mistake.
Good point, Murc.
What we should be talking about is what the bully pulpit can be effective at doing, and when.
Public opinion vs. elite opinion.
Long-term vs. short term.
Within the prevailing boundaries vs. beyond them.
Battle lines drawn vs. fluid.
Yes, “shaping public opinion” was the wrong way of putting it — “moving public opinion in the short or medium term,” yes.
Not a one of you ever argued this before Obama became President. None of you pretended that the office of the Presidency was ‘powerless’. None of you argued that the bully pulpit didn’t exist. None of you argued that narratives and frames were unimportant.
You’re all doing so now because your little prince needs defending, and there is no rational way to defend him. So you claim up is down, that black is white, that things we’ve known to be true our entire lives are a pack of lies, and that a pack of lies is merely contrarian wisdom.
You’ll fool the people you’re trying to fool, the people who want to be fooled, but nobody else.
Utter bullshit, of course, but then I wouldn’t want to argue the proposition that the president dominates domestic policy on the merits either.
I miss the comments from the old blog. I recall that post, though long before I myself began throwing my hat into the ring, as being particularly interesting.
Well, look at the source. But there is one little grain of corn to pick out of the dung:
The bully pulpit is, of course, quite important during election campaigns.
It is proper to use quotes only when quoting someone or something, and it is considered general best practice that when that thing isn’t readily apparent to also provide a cite of some sort.
The word ‘powerless’ in conjunction with people claiming that the Presidency is such occurs nowhere in either the OP or in any of the comments upthread, nor in any of the linked articles. I would reccomend amending your post to conform to proper style.
It is proper to use quotes only when quoting someone or something
I am unaware of this internet tradition.
Me, too, me too…
[...] More: The Sorkin Fallacy : Lawyers, Guns & Money Share and [...]
Would a number of prime time addresses to the country during February and March of 2009 explaining Keynesian economics to a skeptical country have helped? Maybe, but doubtful. As with so much else, what probably would have helped on the stimulus was Obama staking out an opening bid that was further to the left (i.e. larger and less focused on tax cuts), in order to potentially move the gravity of negotiations back toward the liberal side of the ledger. Instead, he claimed the center from the very beginning, which is probably where his instincts lie in any event. For better or worse, a byproduct of having so many Congress hands on a presidential staff is that they seem laser-focused from the very beginning only on what can pass, not what can also move the debate. But moving large bills through Congress is exceedingly difficult, so I tend to give Obama and his people the benefit of the doubt on that score. Up to a point.
Frankly, I don’t know if tossing out $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion for starters would have preemptively and permanently scared off Nelson, Snow, Collins, and Specter. I do know, however, that it was not tried–and that’s a much bigger rub than complaints over not using the “bully pulpit”.
Or he could have passed a 2nd huge stimulus through reconciliation with only 50 votes, but he had already pivoted to happy talk. One person who sure believes in the bully pulpit is Obama, he keeps believing that if we talk as if the economy is fine people will believe it.
I’m not sure if a second major stimulus would have garnered 50 votes, given the political inclinations of Senate Democrats by early 2010. After the bruising ACA fight the likes of Bayh, Lieberman, Nelson, Landrieu, et al might have strangled a second major stimulus in the crib. But you’re right that it certainly would have been worth a shot.
If they could have voted against they would have been happy since their entire purpose was to “show independence.” Its why Obama lost the stimulus battle, his opponents entire position was 0.75*(What Obama asks for).
Not his opponents’. His opponents’ position was Nothing. Not a single one of his opponents voted for it.
0.75*Obama was the position of the “independent” swing voters who had to make a show of pushing back before they could vote for it.
Because nothing is easier than passing a “huge stimulus” than a rule that can only be used for deficit-reducing measures.
Surely, the contortions necessary to get a favorable ruling on that wouldn’t have lost any votes.
It just has to be deficit neutral over 10 years. Something rather easy to do. But causing decades of harm to the nation is a much easier path to tread so its OK!
…with “a huge second stimulus.”
Easy-peasy!
Doesn’t have anything to do with your point, or mine, and is in fact a pointless cheap shot. So OK!
See, the “easy” part is selling 50 Senators on tax hikes – above and beyond the expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts – to cover, in years 5-10, half the cost of a “huge second stimulus.”
The “peasy” part is selling them on the spending cuts – again, cuts above and beyond the ending of the stimulus programs themselves – sufficient to cover the other half.
The size of the initial stimulus proposal — and the lack of a followup stimulus that could get through the Senate — were bad, but the key thing in my mind that is absolutely an unmitigated and unforced error of the Obama Administration’s first term was the failure to appoint Fed officials when there were 60 Dem votes in Congress. I mean, Clare McCaskill is stupid and Ben Nelson is stupid and an asshole, but neither of them would actually have voted against Peter Diamond or any other similarly-qualified non-inflation-hawk. (Two seats are still vacant.)
But the public isn’t the problem here. The two major parties are.
The public, still, prioritizes jobs over budget balancing. And would, by all accounts of those who study polls, be very amenable to the message: “the best way to balance the budget is to create jobs.”
The public doesn’t need to be convinced of Keynesianism (the public isn’t in any theoretical sense Keynesian, but it’s not anti-Keynesian either).
The leaders of our two major political parties and our punditocracy are the ones who need the convincing. One party is ruled by an almost nihilistic supply-side orthodoxy, the other by an old-fashioned, but equally mindless, form of fiscal conservatism.
There seems to be a push by reasonable liberals such as those here, to insist that Obama really couldn’t have accomplished anymore than he did no matter what, because the presidency is so limited.
If that is the case then who cares if Bachmann is elected in 2012, she really won’t be able to do all that much either.
Now that’s how you build a strawman.
Yeah, I’m impressed. It’s that ‘no matter what’ clause he buried in there that really brings it all together. I’m bookmarking this post as an example of how to do it.
Then just what are you saying? Roosevelt was inefective after 1937, because what? 1932 to 1937 never happened?
What I see is excuses that Obama could not have done more than he did even if he wanted to, because of the limits of the office and congresses unwillingness to move. This is based on your reading of history and the fact that this is just the way it is as far as I can see.
Make fun of me and tell me what I’m missing.
I won’t make fun of you, but here is what you are missing:
If Bachmann wins, it can be safely presumed that the Democrats won’t retake the House, and may well lose the Senate. So you have some reasonable chance that all branches of government will be united under a discipled, batshit-insane party that is perfectly willing to watch the world burn, as long as they can cut taxes.
Now, for this to be comparable to Obama, he would need the Senate to be rigidly controlled by Majority Leader Sanders, while Speaker Grayson lived in fear of his soullite-party base, and did anything to appease them.
Oh, and Obama really would need to be a secrit socialist.
See the difference now?
If you scroll up to the original post you will find several segments of the text highlighted in blue. These are called “hyperlinks” and they’re basically high-tech footnotes; clicking on one will bring you to another text. If you click on the one that says “Drew Westen” you will be delivered to Jon Chait’s response to Westen’s NYT op-ed, in which Chait demolishes the idea that FDR passed a bunch of perfect progressive legislation through the magic of rhetorical fortitude.
Well, I can’t speak for others, but I was responding to your actual comment.
And that’s either a strawman, or a misreading of arguments so egregious it would almost have to be willful. I don’t believe anyone in this discussion is arguing Obama couldn’t have accomplished more than he did no matter what. I can think of tons of hypothetical situations in which he could have done more.
You say ‘excuses’ like its self-evidently true that we know our own arguments are wrong and are trying to cover for them. I would submit that this isn’t true.
You know what, lets deal in specifics. Walk me through how Obama, say, gets a clean debt ceiling vote by using the tools he has at his disposal. I’m legitimately curious.
Walk me through how Obama, say, gets a clean debt ceiling vote by using the tools he has at his disposal.
“I have instructed Secretary Geithner, using the authority he has under [name of law I can't easily find], to deposit 2 $1T coins in our account at the Federal Reserve. I understand that some people question this action, but I will not allow the economy of this nation, and that of the world, to be held hostage by a small branch of extremists who control one branch of Congress. If enough people believe I acted incorrectly, I will be happy to justify my actions before a Court of Impeachment, and before the world.”
That’s not a debt ceiling increase is it? Just an increase of the money supply.
And means we have $2T more cash on hand to spend. It means you don’t need a debt ceiling increase.
See here for inflation implications.
I agree with Mal on this, and sadly, this is about the only alternative the Fed has left to them: monetize a portion of the debt and take chances on inflation.
That’s ‘how Obama gets around congress.’ It’s not ‘how he makes congress do as he wishes,’ which is what we’re talking about.
Sidebar: how would this work, exactly? If we have two trillion dollars worth of platinum, couldn’t we just sell that and use the money for whatever?
No, you stamp a coin and give it the nominal value of $2T. Then you declare that you have $2T more than you had yesterday.
That’s ‘how Obama gets around congress.’ It’s not ‘how he makes congress do as he wishes,’ which is what we’re talking about.
I’ll settle.
Sidebar: how would this work, exactly? If we have two trillion dollars worth of platinum, couldn’t we just sell that and use the money for whatever?
You don’t need $2T in platinum to mint a platinum coin, just like you don’t need $1 worth of silver to mint a dollar. The only reason you need any platinum is that, for reasons unknown, coins from other metals are regulated by a different law.
This is creating money by fiat.
Fair enough, I guess. (I was out of town during the rise and fall of the whole trillion-dollar coin idea; it literally seemd to spring up and then die over the course of like five days. so I missed the entire debate.)
1)the president is subordinate to Congress on domestic (although certainly not foreign) policy, and 2)the “bully pulpit” does not give the president any significant ability to get legislation enacted or shape public opinion.
This sure isn’t how things felt during the Bush years. And yes, I know “felt” is the operative word in that sentence.
But the Iraq war, weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds – it seems like when the president wants to sell something, the bully pulpit is in fact a great place from which to bully from.
Even the things that failed felt like they had this great momentum to them. Privatizing SS seemed inevitable when Bush brought it up out of the blue after the 2004 campaign. Granted, it was inevitable – but my point is that even a tremendously unpopular idea seemd viable when the President put his weight behind it.
So the question is, how many liberal ideas would be viable if the President actually got behind them? Obviously the U.S. wouldn’t be a Marxist utopia where unions are giving service workers vacation and pay raises beyond the inflation rate and what not, but the bully pulpit probably would’ve given us a much better financial reform bill. We’d most likely have a robust labor board and consumer protection board. If only.
Maybe EFCA or Cap and Trade would be Obama’s SS privatization disaster, where the business community unites and says no more, but the liberal movement would at least have something to show for those failures. People would still be talking about EFCA, or cap and trade. They’d be a real policy positions, with real (if minimal) weight behind them instead of just a boogey-policy on Fox News. Politicians would try out new talking points now and then. Their merits would stay in the public consciousness. The Bully Pulpit, over time, might just convince a lot of people that yes, liberal positions have merit and should be implemented.
I mean, Bush lost that privatization debate. But what odds would you give that SS remains unprivatized over the next ten years? Do you have full faith that that idea – as tremendously unpopular as it proved, is dead?
That’s the power of the bully pulpit.
Please to be showing evidence that Bush made either the Iraq War or privatizing Social Security popular.
I never said either policy was popular. You mentioned the bully pulpit in two arenas – policy and public relations. Well, public relations be damned, Bush got his way. Even on SS privitizing, it feels like that moment in The Social Network where Mark Zuckerburg was having lunch with Shawn Fanning and said, “but you lost the lawsuit to the music industry.” And Shawn Fanning says: “Oh yeah? Care to buy a tower’s records?” Kinda feels like we’re at that point with SS privatization. Liberals won the lawsuit, but dramatic changes to entitlements are coming.
I said the bully pulpit made both cases feel inevitable, and sure as hell got congress to enact legislation regarding Iraq (which you’ve made a clear exception for), and even in the case of SS privatization, well, a little bullying of Village opinion from the pulpit sure would be nice from Obama.
It’s got nothing to do with the “bully pulpit.” On foreign policy, the president does have enormous discretion, a point not in dispute. On Social Security, Bush’s plan is a complete failure, and privatization is not on the table. If these are your examples I don’t see where the disagreement is.
As I first stated, the operative word in my “argument” (to use the term loosely) is “feel.” I think we’re in disagreement on the effects of rhetoric, but I’m not really arguing with you. Words inspire. That’s not to downplay the importance of coalition-building in any way. Only to say: words do matter. If public support matters, (and maybe you’re not saying this) why denigrate the role of the bully pulpit?
Polling shows the public is already on the liberal side of plenty of domestic policies. Can that support be galvanized? If so, why are liberal policy positions so often radioactive while dumbass conservative claptrap isn’t? Don’t you find that maddening? Don’t you want a liberal politician to stand up in front of the country and exclaim: “I am a liberal, and by God, I support the public option over the individual mandate!”
Wouldn’t the bully pulpit change what’s acceptable discourse, if not now, then over time at least?
This country needs more full-throated liberals. Maybe liberal policy won’t spring forth from their tongues, but it can’t hurt.
I guess some people “feel” differently than others. I don’t know where you get the idea that privatizing Social Security seemd inevitable when it couldn’t get any support among Senate Republicans. PR, narrative, and loosely-defind feelings have their role, I suppose, but they are at best tertiary ones compared to moving bills through committee and counting and whipping votes.
Also, among voters who self-identify, Democrats outnumber Republicans by a noticeable if no longer substantial margin, and have for many, many decades. But conservatives outnumber liberals by something like two or three to one. Liberals are a small minority, even if the public agrees with a number of their positions, particularly on economic issues. If you want to know why there aren’t more full-throated liberals in the Democratic Party, start there.
No, privatization is not on the table, but the most liberalist president in 40+ years, who has done the best possible job possible, was begging John Boehner to let him slash Social Security.
Now, maybe you want to argue that supposedly liberal Democrats want to dismantle the centerpiece of liberal government policy despite Bush’s use of the bully pulpit to promote that idea (and it was certainly part of a larger effort), but it seems like a weird claim.
I’m a day late and a dollar short, but I would like to note that a couple days ago Scott (I think) was trumpeting Obama’s progressive achievements (ACA, DADT). Today he’s absolving Obama’s failures. Listen, the “the President doesn’t have that much power” argument cuts both ways. If Obama doesn’t have much power to influence Congress, then, okay, the failures are not his; neither are the achievements–they belong to Congress. The flipside is: if Obama owns the wins, then he owns the losses too.
It’s just like the Reaganites. They want Reagan to get credit for the ’80s economy (via the tax cuts), and the Democratic Congress to get the blame for the ballooning deficits. No. They can’t have it both ways; neither can Obama.
Congress deserves as much or more credit than Obama (just one reason I think “Obamacare” is a stupid term) for the ACA. DADT is a military matter, which like foreign policy, presidents have more ability to influence.
Yes, Obama owns wins and losses; I am not sure Scott disagrees. And, DADT as with his refusal to defend DOMA (Sec 3), is an example of an area where the President does have some real power to influence over above Congress.
I respectfully disagree. The idea that the President of the United States does not have a significant ability to get legislation enacted or shape public opinion lacks any foundation, and Scott does not bother to supply it. The examples of presidents who used the bully pulpit to push ground-breaking legislation are legion, with FDR, LBJ and even Truman enacting important parts of the social safety net through heavy reliance on that tool. Nixon and Reagan didn’t use the bully pulpit to accomplish their objectives? W didn’t either? The fact that so many of you rally around an almost self-refuting and unsupported hypothesis of The Powerless Bystander President betrays another agenda, which appears to be support for the feckless incumbent. Bad theories usually are based on insufficiently examined motives or imperatives, and this sisn’t amy different.
That’s really more the way we remember things. When FDR got up and gave the “I invite their hatred!” speech that everyone loves Congress shot his whole agenda all to shit. That doesn’t make a good story though.
Scott actually addressed the idea that “FDR imposed an uncompromising liberal agenda on Congress” and “his most powerful weapon is rhetoric” … not sure of the “legion” of cases where this is disproved.
LBJ was a skillful legislative leader; his “rhetoric” alone didn’t drive his success. As noted, FDR couldn’t rely on rhetoric alone, but required other things (including letting the South have their racist policies) to get some of his policy proposals passed.
Nor, is the strawman “The Powerless Bystander President” at issue here. Scott specifically noted that particularly in the area of foreign policy, that isn’t the case. The President retains power, obviously, just not as much as some want to believe.
The #2 comment on the bully pulpit is somewhat over done though as some note above.
I think Scott is wrong in at least one sense. The president is the single most powerful actor on average, even for domestic legislation. That doesn’t mean he has the majority of the power, though. He is just one among a number of players who share influence. And sometimes a Speaker might hold more power on a particular issue when the political dynamics and the congressional votes work out just right. Swing congressional voters also hold a lot of power at the margin, but this should not be confused with the type of broader agenda setting power that the president and majority leaders hold.
This is just WRONG, dude. It is. Although to be fair, Scott phrased himself poorly, which is something I myself pointed out. But I would submit it is you, not he, who is claiming ideas that lack any foundation.
First of all, nobody is saying that the President of the United States lacks significant ability to shift public opinion. Shifting public opinion is an important job of the President. What IS being claimed is 1) Presidents lack signficant ability to change public opinion in the short term, and that Presidents lack signficant ability to move legislation through a Congress that is either disinterestd or hostile.
You claim that FDR, LBJ, and Truman passed groundbreaking social legislation through that tool. Can you back that up? Because it seems to me that those people passed groundbreaking social legislation by having congressional majorities who agreed with their legislative goals and by working the chambers politically behind the scenes. Their speechifying had little to do with those legislative goals. It had SOMETHING to do with them, of that there is no doubt. You can move the needle a little. But it wasn’t going to win them any votes that didn’t exist in either chamber.
What their use of the bully pulpit DID have to do with was winning election and building the movement. FDR didn’t give the ‘I welcome their hatred’ speech because he thought it would make conservative members of Congress piss their pants and then vote for his legislation. He did it to send a signal to the electorate of EXACTLY what his priorities were and what he was going to try to do. That helped the Democratic Party win elections (the economy cratering on the republicans watch didn’t hurt either) and more democratic legislators meant more things could get passed.
In the same vein, Nixon, Reagan, and W used the bully pulpit to build on, expand, and entrench the conservative movement and conservative framing, with an eye towards winning elections and future dominance. Reagan’s use of it didn’t much help him (what DID help him were huge electoral victories and a number of Democrats who agreed with his legislative goals) but it helped out Newt ten years later a whole lot, and Newt’s bomb-throwing didn’t get much done legislatively, but laid the groundwork for Republican victories in 2000 and 2004.
As far as Obama goes, he absolutely should be engaging in some good old-fashioned raillery against the Republicans, and he should have started doing so. But not because it would have gotten us a jobs bill, a second stimulus, and a clean debt vote. Because it would help the party win in 2012, setting up the possibility of getting that stuff passed then, and part of his responsibility as leader of the Democratic Party isn’t the legislative fight right in front of him, but ensuring the health of the movement long, LONG after he leaves office.
FDR in October of ’36 was actually more like “I welcome their hatred, but I more or less buy their take on macroeconomic situation” — and nine months later you have a second recession.
Anybody whipsawed by a second job loss in ’37, or any business for which it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, probably didn’t need the speech that much.
If Al Gore is seated in January 2001, with the exact same Congress that Bush had, does a massive tax cut happen? If not, why not? And are tax cuts domestic policy?
Gore probably would have had some compromise to bid the tax cuts down, correctly pointing out that tax cuts do not generate jobs or tax revenue, and why blow a surplus out of the water.
He likely would have spent endless hours lecturing us with Power Point presentations to reinforce this.
Yes, it does. It’s different from Bush’s, though.
Al Gore campaigned on a massive tax cut package, remember. It was designed to be weighted much more heavily towards the middle and lower classes.
What likely happens is that, with a Republican Congress that is in a tax-cuttin’ mood, and a Democratic President who is receptive to that and who campaigned on his own tax cut package, is that a deal somewhat more to the right than what Gore wants (bit which is still signficantly to the left of where Bush ended up) is hammered out between Tom Daschle and his Republican counterparts, which he then signs.
I’m not sure I udnerstand the purpose of your question, but I hope that answers it.
Well, our host just told us that the President is nothing but a rubber stamp (“subordinate”) for Congress when it comes to domestic issues, which suggests that we get the Bush tax cuts with or without Bush. But I don’t think this is actually the case, and neither do you, so I wonder what our host has to say about it.
I might add that the price tag on the cuts would have been vastly lower, given Gore’s (in)famous “lockbox”. It wouldn’t have been only the distribution, but also the size. Also, almost surely no 2003 cut.