It’s practically a truism that the only way for a president without big majorities in Congress to get anything big passed is to anger his own party’s base. And history suggests that the short-term partisan pain usually produces more lasting political gain.
At least that’s what the Obama White House is hoping will be the result of its messy compromise with House Republicans on a year-end omnibus spending bill that left the president’s liberal supporters seething. For anyone who lived through Bill Clinton’s strategic compromises with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, the complaints from the left had a familiar ring.
In June 1995, when Clinton countered GOP demands for fiscal probity by offering his own plan to balance the federal budget (over 10 years instead of seven), House Democrats cried foul. “I think most of us learned some time ago that if you don’t like the president’s position on a particular issue, you simply need to wait a few weeks,” declared Rep. Dave Obey, a liberal stalwart from Wisconsin. “If you can follow this White House on the budget, you are a whole lot smarter than I am.”
But Clinton’s aides explained that he had come to the conclusion that the American people would not see him as leading if he simply said “no” to the Republicans, and that he was determined to be seen as being on the “solution side” of problems, from the budget deficit to welfare.
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In the six years of his presidency, Obama hasn’t had to do much of that kind of compromising, nor has he been willing to. But in the wake of the GOP’s midterm rout, the president and his aides have now apparently come to the conclusion that that’s what the American public wants — and even expects.
The stakes facing the two presidents are not really comparable. Clinton — in the midst of his first term — was trying to reorient his party by upending three decades of Democratic orthodoxies concerning the social compact, while Obama — nearing the end of his second — was simply trying to avoid the threat of another round of brinkmanship over a government shutdown by passing what — in a less rancorous era — would have been a routine spending bill.
This president bent on Democratic priorities — allowing the weakening of a key provision of the financial reform bill he himself fought so hard to pass, and a big increase in individual contribution limits to political parties and their congressional campaign committees — to stave off even more unpalatable elements: cuts to Obamacare, or retribution for his recent executive actions on immigration. From the administration’s perspective, accepting this bill — warts and all — was better than risking an immediate shutdown or a 90-day continuing budget resolution that would have to be relitigated in the far more unstable circumstances of a larger House GOP majority and a Republican Senate.
Obama’s presumed intention is to live to fight another day. And if he has any hope of avoiding complete marginalization in his last two years in office, that’s just what he’ll have to do — if only by using his veto pen — in the new year.
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It’s worth remembering that President George W. Bush passed his Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008 with crucial Democratic support, over the vociferous objection of conservative Republicans — and even then only after the House initially rejected the bill and sent the stock market plunging in shock. In negotiations over the bill, then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson knelt down in supplication to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for her support.
So it’s probably not the worst thing for Obama, politically speaking, that Pelosi has declared herself “enormously disappointed” with the White House’s support for the spending bill, which passed with just 57 Democratic “yes” votes and 139 “nos.” Indeed, the public tends to like presidents who stand up to their own parties, and couldn’t care less about the internal rivalries and disagreements within the House Democratic caucus.
Early in Clinton’s tenure, House Speaker Tom Foley and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, both Democrats, urged him to abandon any push for the kind of campaign finance overhaul that Ross Perot’s outside-the-box campaign had put on the national agenda. Clinton acceded and later counted the decision as one of his biggest mistakes, in terms of setting the tone for his new administration.
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Perhaps no other single act of Obama’s presidency has received sharper criticism from both parties than his early acceptance of his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s advice to let Pelosi take the lead in drafting the economic stimulus bill that was roundly denounced by liberals as too small and by conservatives as too laden with pet Democratic pork barrel projects.
“He was far too deferential to the congressional wing of his party, and it cost him,” one senior Republican House aide said Friday. “It cost them more, but it cost him.” And, the aide continued, in contrast to Clinton — who made a determined strategic decision that the only way to win reelection in the aftermath of the GOP’s 1994 takeover of Congress was to seek artful compromise, “this president is not really driving events anymore.”
In fact, Republicans said, the White House weighed in with its last-minute lobbying push only after the basic terms of the deal had been hammered out by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), and his colleagues Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), thus giving Pelosi a good 24 hours to solidify liberal opposition.
From the White House perspective, internal Democratic divisions on Capitol Hill were just as pronounced — and perhaps more significant — as Pelosi’s irritation with Obama.
The paradox is that despite the liberals’ discontent, the White House’s all-out campaign for the compromise bill involved the kind of personalized outreach — from the president’s top aides to senior Cabinet officers — that congressional Democrats have been craving in vain for six years. It’s tempting to ponder what sort of results Obama might have achieved if he had employed such basic care-and-feeding techniques earlier, in less drastic circumstances.
Were he inclined to be a careful student of Clinton’s successes — which the record suggests he is not, particularly — Obama might take comfort from the reality that 20 years ago, Clinton was widely mocked by many in his own party (and among the opposition) as weak and waffling (or at least cynical) for his compromises with the Republicans. By the end of his tenure, no less a critic than Gingrich adjudged him “the best tactical politician, certainly of my lifetime,” and today he is remembered, for better and worse, as the kind of president who could close the deal.