Surprise: Legislator-In-Chief Obama is Not So Good at Legislating

Democratic Party leadership had the choice in the 2008 primary to support the inexperienced Barack Obama for its presidential nominee or Hillary Clinton with her years of proven leadership skills, knowledge, and experience. There were even on-the-air debates as to which was more valuable, Obama’s high likeability factor (that’s what gave George W. Bush the edge in 2004) or Clinton’s more substantive qualifications.

We all know what happened. The DNC went to extraordinary and even unethical lengths to nominate Barack Obama, the haloed motivational speaker, over the wonky down-to-earth Hillary Clinton.

So it should surprise no one today to read Michael Barone’s post at RCP titled Obama Has Aura But Doesn’t Know How to Legislate. What is surprising is that Barone very clearly describes Obama’s lack of legislative experience and pinpoints the problems our president’s thin resume means for a country facing major domestic and foreign relations problems. (Tina Brown was on to something like this in her recent post advising Obama to enlist the aid of Bill Clinton.)

Barone writes (emphases mine):

Aura dazzles, but argument gets things done. Consider the debate on the Democrats' health care bill and the increasingly negative response to Barack Obama's performance. Democrats have the numbers to pass a health care bill -- 256 votes in the House, 38 more than the 218 majority; 60 votes in the Senate, enough to defeat a filibuster. But they haven't come up with the arguments, at least yet, to put those numbers on the board. It's something not many predicted that bright January inauguration morning. We knew that day that Obama was good at aura, at generating enthusiasm for the prospect of hope and change. His inspiring speeches -- the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines, the race speech in Philadelphia, the countless rallies in primary and caucus and target states -- helped him capture the Democratic nomination and then win the presidency by the biggest percentage margin in 20 years.

But it turns out that Obama is not so good at argument. Inspiration is one thing, persuasion another. He created the impression on the campaign trail that he was familiar with major issues and readily ticked off his positions on them. But he has not proved so good at legislating.

And the reason Obama is not so good at legislating:

One reason perhaps is that he has had little practice. He served as a legislator for a dozen years before becoming president, but was only rarely an active one. He spent one of his eight years as an Illinois state senator running unsuccessfully for Congress and two of them running successfully for U.S. senator. He spent two of his years in the U.S. Senate running for president. During all of his seven non-campaign years as a legislator, he was in the minority party.

In other words, he's never done much work putting legislation together -- especially legislation that channels vast flows of money and affects the workings of parts of the economy that deeply affect people's lives. This lack of experience is starting to show. On the major legislation considered this year -- the stimulus, cap-and-trade, health care -- the Obama White House has done little or nothing to set down markers, to provide guidance, to establish boundaries and no-go areas.

Barone concludes:

Obama's July 22 press conference was intended to rally support for the Democrats' health care bills. It didn't. The president eschewed serious arguments and rattled off campaign-type talking points. Those used to be enough to elicit cheers from enthusiastic audiences in Iowa and Virginia.

But aura can only take you so far, particularly when you diminish it by disrespecting the Cambridge police department. Being president means being more than commenter-in-chief. You need to know how to legislate. You need not just aura but argument.

Yikes! As the renowned David Brooks once mentioned, George W. Bush never learned the difference between campaigning and governing - yet one more similarity between Dubya and Obama.

Here’s my favorite reader’s comment following Barone’s post:

Posted by S. Valenti

We needn't look any further than the trajectory of our Massachusetts Governor, Deval Patrick for a blueprint of how Obama's presidency is unfolding. Like Obama, Patrick came out of nowhere and was swept into office with the same rhetoric of 'hope and change' and with the help of their shared svengali, Axelrod. Many had high hopes for Patrick. He's been unable though to work with the overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature to accomplish any meaningful legislation and his handling of the economy is not reassuring. His poll numbers tanked within his first year and it appears that he'll be a one term Governor.

I supported Patrick back in 2006 but quickly learned that rhetoric is no substitute for a substantive record of accomplishment. I didn't see any reason to buy into Obama's rhetoric last year or make the same mistake twice.

Larry King’s Interview with the Smart, Savvy, Dignified Former President Bill Clinton

The transcript of Larry King’s interview with Bill Clinton posted at CNN is in sharp contrast to the media’s disgraceful treatment of him during the Democratic primary and general election. Week after week, the punditry presented the most egregious caricatures of Clinton their limited abilities could produce. Of course, they had to do their level best to support the DNC in its attempts to destroy both Hillary and Bill – for example, resorting to outright lies in their efforts to smear them as racists - in order to assure that Obama, the least qualified candidate, would be swept into the presidency.

King’s interview presents the former president as he is: the smart, dignified international leader whose global initiative continues to confront the world’s most pressing problems.

The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity:

Larry King: The stimulus bill passed today [Tuesday]. The president signed it in Denver. Is it going to work?

Bill Clinton: I think it will do what it's designed to do. And I think it's important that the American people understand what it's designed to do.

It's supposed to do three things.

Number one, put money in people's pockets who are in trouble now -- extended unemployment benefits, the modest tax cuts, increase in food stamps. That will help grocery stores and other businesses and keep Americans who are good, honest, hardworking people afloat. Watch Larry King's interview with Bill Clinton »

The second thing it's supposed to do is give a chunk of money to state and local governments, primarily for education and health. That is designed to make sure that they don't have to either have big tax increases or lay a million people off. Either one, in this economy, would be bad.

The third thing it will do is to create jobs through existing road and bridge contracts, through rail improvements, through modernization and especially through clean energy and energy efficiency.

So I think that given how fast it had to be done and the compromises that had to be made, it's quite a good bill. And I think it will do what it's designed to do.

King: John McCain and others on the other side of the ledger are saying that he didn't come forward enough to the Republicans, he didn't make them part of this Easter basket.

Clinton: Well, I disagree with that. I think the only way he could have gotten a lot of them to vote for him would be to accept their economic theory. Their economic theory is why we're in this mess in the first place.

King: Do you resent it when the Bush people say that this problem started with you, it started in your administration?

Clinton: Well, they don't have much evidence for that. I always answer, does anyone seriously believe if the team I had in place had been in place for the last eight years that this would have happened? And the answer to that is no. We had a much more vigorous regulatory environment with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We were watching these derivatives. I do think we should have done more on derivatives.

King: Before we move on to other things, should taxpayers be bailing out the automakers?

Clinton: We don't owe it to them. We should only do it if it's in our interests. I believe it's in our interests ...

King: We keep hearing about Obama's BlackBerry -- he's got a special BlackBerry now that doesn't have to be recorded into the White House. Do you have the number?

Clinton: No. No.

King: Would you like the number?

Clinton: I know that in the world that exists today, if you're hyper-busy, you need them. Hillary lives on hers.

King: Do you have one?

Clinton: I don't. I like being able to concentrate on what I'm doing one thing at a time, you know. And I think if I had one, I'm so hyper and always trying to do three things at once, I'd be worse than he is or worse than she is. So I don't have one.

King: What's Chelsea going to be? Is she interested in government?

Clinton: Yes, she's interested in government. She cares about public health. She thinks that America has still got a ways to go to develop an affordable, high quality health care system. And I think she wants to be a part of it.

King: Sarah Palin, net plus, net gain?

Clinton: I think she was a net plus before the failure of Lehman Brothers and the collapse of the stock market, because she gave (McCain) credibility on the Republican right. Through no fault of her own, she became a negative on September 15th, because nobody on their team had any economic experience, and the burden against the Republicans was overwhelming.

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Stimulus Package Takes Care of the Affluent

You only need to read the screaming banner headlines on the front page of the Huffington Post to get the picture of what happened with the stimulus bill today:

PELOSI: WE HAVE AN AGREEMENT

White House Has Yet To Speak... $789 Billion Bill Preserves Obama's Signature Tax Cut... House Vote Possible Thursday... Senate Will Follow...Payback: Dems Strip Business Tax Cuts... Big Winners: The Upper-Middle Class

Got that? The big winners are the upper middle class.

Thomas Edsall writes:

When President Obama outlined on January 8 the rationale for the economic stimulus bill, "The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act," he clearly identified the men and women most in trouble:

Nearly two million jobs have now been lost, and on Friday we are likely to learn that we lost more jobs last year than at any time since World War II. Just in the past year, another 2.8 million Americans who want and need full-time work have had to settle for part-time jobs.

The House-Senate compromise, however, cuts funds for extended health care coverage for the unemployed; cuts $30 billion in aid to state governments to prevent reductions in social services to the poor and out-of-work; and also cuts a special "Making Work Pay" tax holiday from $500 to $400 for an individual, and from $1,000 to $800 for a couple, for low-to-middle-income workers still hanging on to their jobs.

Amid all the cutting, however, one group emerged unscathed: the upper-middle class, the not-quite-super-rich, but certainly not on the ropes. Most of these folks, in terms of income and employment, are what could be called the un-needy, a group clearly distinct from those Obama identified as the core target of the legislation. The "compromise" legislation includes $70 billion, or just under 10 percent of the whole package, to be used expressly to take care of these affluent people.

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Sober Obama Fields Tough Questions (watch video)

Mr. Obama showed a stern demeanor this evening in the first formal press conference of his still new administration as he fielded several questions about the stimulus bill, safe havens for terrorists between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and a timetable for American forces in Afghanistan.

He chided Republican critics of the stimulus bill by reminding them more than once that their failed policies helped create the financial meltdown, and Americans voted for change in November.

The streaming video has concluded. Sorry.

For Jeff Zeleny's live blogging at the Caucus (NY Times) of Obama's news conference go here.

Maureen Dowd: Prince Charming Obama Losing his Luster

Photo courtesy of LATimes

Good heavens! I’m getting worried about myself. This post will be the second time in the past several days that I’ve linked to Maureen Dowd in appreciation of her caustic style of truth telling. She’s been diverted from trashing the Clintons by the huge whoosh from the sudden deflation of Obama euphoria - like E. J. Dionne, a chronic Obamaphile, signed off his column recently by warning that no president has ever been seen walking on water !!!

Here’s Modo on the Potomac’s Postpartisan Depression:

Once upon a time, America thought Prince Charming would glide in and kiss her, reviving her from a coma induced by a poison apple of greed, deceit, carelessness, recklessness and overreaching.

But then the prince got distracted, seeing Lincoln in the mirror, and instead gave the kiss of life to a bunch of flat-lining Republican tax-cut fetishists.

Somehow the most well-known person on the planet lost control of the economic message to someone named Eric Cantor.

(And Larry Summers ended up making Henry Paulson seem riveting.)

In his first weeks padding around a White House that still has nails on the walls waiting for new pictures, and phone and e-mail kinks, Barack Obama could not locate the bully pulpit and ended up being bullied.

Republicans, pulled out of their existential lethargy and re-energized by the president’s charm offensive, immediately mounted an offensive against him. Just as Michael Bloomberg learned the perils of cuddling a groundhog when it bit him, Mr. Obama learned the perils of coddling conservatives.

Pete Sessions, a conservative from Waco, Tex., and the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, warned that they could become an insurgency, having learned more about insurgencies “because of the Taliban.” (Yes, that’s the same Taliban that was allowed to regenerate by bumbling Republican leaders.)

Obama advisers are right to crow that the president’s civility to Republicans will be popular with the public. But the carrot-stick ratio was way out of whack. Mr. Obama should have written up a kosher (as in pork-free) bill that Americans could trust — and Republicans couldn’t as easily mock — and jammed it through.

It’s a huge, scary moment, with trillions of dollars and millions of jobs flying out the window. Vice President Joseph Biden, in another Cassandra moment, told House Democrats that even if the White House does everything right, “there’s still a 30 percent chance we’ll get it wrong.”

The president and his aides seemed a bit snow-blinded by the White House, overwhelmed and slow to understand that they were losing the high ground and the whip hand. They couldn’t even get their pick for commerce secretary, the Republican Senator Judd Gregg, to vote for their stimulus bill; he said he would abstain.

Those in the president’s circle were too caught up in more narrow concerns, like how their relationships with the president and the capital were shaking out; whether they could breathe on this new planet with the rarefied air of cool planes and helicopters; and whether W.’s mind-boggling mountain of garbage would trash Democratic candidates in 2010 and doom Mr. Obama to one term.

“I would rather do the right thing and have one term than be mediocre and have two,” Mr. Obama told House Democrats at their Williamsburg retreat Thursday night. The lawmakers had been feeling disillusioned that they were carrying Mr. Obama’s water on the bill, while Obama aides triangulated and promised that the bill would “improve” in the Senate.

But here’s the kicker – Instead of her usual all out assault on any woman daring to set foot on the national stage, Modo actually gets in a dig at Obama for throwing Nancy Pelosi under the bus:

Nancy Pelosi told her leadership team that she had told the president, “I don’t mind you driving the bus over me, but I don’t appreciate your backing it up and running over me again and again.”

Will wonders never cease?

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Obama’s Cocktails and Cookies Outreach to Republicans Hasn’t Worked

The Senate reached a deal last night on the stimulus bill; apparently three Republicans, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins signed on – not exactly a bipartisan effort. Charles M. Blow’s op-ed in this morning’s NY Times offers a blow by blow account of how Obama’s “cocktails and cookies outreach” hasn’t worked:

It took just two weeks for Washington’s Kumbaya experiment in bipartisan civility to explode in turgid rants, finger-pointing and re-entrenchment.

Tuesday night, Obama did a speed-dating circuit with television anchors at the White House, and repeatedly dismissed Republican objections to the stimulus bill as trifling. He told Anderson Cooper on CNN that if you add up all the programs that have been criticized, the total “amounts to less than one percent of the total package.” (That’s still quite a bit of money to those of us who don’t have the power to print it.) He also wrote an editorial in which he scolded “misguided criticisms.”

This must have been the glove slap to the face for Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

The next day, Graham went ballistic on the Senate floor. “This bill stinks. The process that’s led to this bill stinks.” He continued: “If this is the new way of doing business, if this is the change we all can believe in, America’s best days are behind her.” Later on Fox News, Graham said Obama has been AWOL on this bill, and then he went even further: “The president has not led. He has tried to campaign. The campaign is over. We have got to govern.” Ouch.

(I guess Obama’s cocktails and cookies legislative outreach programs didn’t work.)

Obama shot back at a Virginia meeting of House Democrats — the very lawmakers who had saddled the package with party favors and shipped it off to the hostile Senate. He accused the Republicans of having “false theories of the past” and “phony arguments,” of playing “petty politics” and “gamesmanship” and just plain “nit-picking.” He seemed hostile and snarky. It wasn’t a good look for a man who promised to change the tone in Washington.

The public has noticed the tonal shift, or lack thereof. In a Gallup poll released Wednesday, a slightly larger percentage of Americans said that since Obama was elected, the level of civility between Democrats and Republicans in Washington had gotten worse, not better. And, as one would expect, nearly twice as many Republicans as Democrats thought that the tone had gotten worse. (Half all of respondents said that it had stayed the same.)

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Agreement Reached on Stimulus Bill; Final Vote Possible This Weekend

Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine.


Over the years, I’ve watched centrist Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine again and again provide the calm and rational voices needed to move stalled legislation. The two women played significant roles in negotiations that helped the senate reach an agreement this evening on a stripped down stimulus bill of about $780 billion.

Hulse and Herszenhorn at the NY Times report:

Democrats succeeded, after a long day of private negotiations and intense public debate, in winning the support of enough Republicans to move the package toward a final Senate vote, where Democrats are confident of passage, given the support announced by several Republicans. Exact outlines of the accord, which is somewhat smaller than the amount originally sought by President Obama, were not immediately available, but the senators agreed to cut some spending and strip out some business tax cuts to gain enough Republican support.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, hailed the agreement. “This is a very critical juncture for our great country,” he said on the Senate floor.

The timing of the Senate vote was not clear, but Mr. Reid signaled that action could take place over the weekend. Once it the package is approved, differences between the Senate legislation and a considerably different version passed recently by the House will have to be reconciled. President Obama has said he hopes all that can be accomplished in time for him to sign the measure within 10 days.

Three centrist Republicans, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine, were among the senators wooed by Democrats, whose efforts were bolstered by Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, who is a former Congressman from Illinois.

Senator Reid and Mr. Emanuel reportedly met with Ms. Collins and Mr. Specter Friday evening to smooth out any remaining wrinkles. Soon afterward, Mr. Reid conferred with his fellow Democrats to gain their approval.

Gaining enough Republican support was essential, since 60 votes are generally required under Senate rules to move a bill forward. “Is it perfect?” Senator Collins asked rhetorically on the Senate floor. “No.” But what was put together is a worthy compromise, she said.

Mr. Reid singled out two negotiators, Ms. Collins and Senator Ben Nelson, a conservative Democrat from Nebraska, as “two people who got us where we are, with great work by others.”

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Obama Team Designates Pelosi to Take the Fall for Stimulus Bill

It’s hard to tell what’s happening with the stimulus bill – re-spun as the economic recovery act - this Friday afternoon, but we’re assuming it’s still possible the senate will call for a vote before midnight.

Given the recent photos of Pelosi and Obama showing her obvious infatuation with President Cool as emphasized in yesterday’s gushing assurance, “We’ve got his back,” Jane Hamsher’s declaration at Huffpo this morning is a little startling.

Hamsher writes:

The story of the morning seems to be that the Obama team is unhappy with Nancy Pelosi and the House committee chairs for delivering up such a liberal, pork-laden bill that they themselves really had nothing to do with.

"Anonymous staffers" are fanning out to fuel the fiction that "during the transition Summers, his deputy Jason Furman, and the White House's top Congressional liason, Phil Schiliro, laid out the broad principles they wanted the bill to adhere to, but when it came to actual content, they deferred to the chairmen."

Hamsher goes on to say:

Except that it's not true. The Obama transition team has been working on the substance of the bill from day one. Their first step was to go to the Association of Mayors, the National Governors' Associations and other non-congressional groups and say "give us all your shovel-ready projects." That and other provisions written by the Obama team became the spine of the bill. It went through only three committee markups, and moved through the House at lightening speed in a way that made many House chairs unhappy, with the notable exception of Dave Obey (now also under attack) who helped push it through quickly.

The House bill is notable not only for its size but also because it had no earmarks, which are the lifeblood of House members, the way they show their constituents what they're doing for them. As one person knowledgable about the writing of the bill says, "if you're in the House why would you write a bill without earmarks unless you didn't write the bill?"

Hamsher gets to the really mean part here:

But with public opinion quickly turning against the bill, and the House Republicans claiming the moral high ground as they held formation to oppose him, how could Obama be distanced from responsibility for elements of the bill under GOP attack and remain above the fray? That seemed to be the locus of White House concern, and according to those familiar with what happened, the "polarizing" Nancy Pelosi was designated to take the fall.

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Oops! Nascent Obama Administration Not Fully Prepared For Task At Hand

President Obama fails to measure up to Ronald Reagan as the nation's second Great Communicator.

Despite the endlessly fawning praise by the media whose skills happen to be in grinding out news reports and not in public speaking, Obama isn’t the world’s greatest orator. How hard could it be to imitate the cadences of 1960s civil rights leaders and evangelical preachers to convert a political rally into a frenzied revival meeting?

Plus, the supposed great orator now occupying the White House reads from a teleprompter the inspiring words of Jon Favreau, known worldwide for a Facebook photo of his drunken groping of a cardboard cutout of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In impromptu speaking, the new president begins by commanding us to “Listen” and proceeds to “and, uh” his way to completing each supposedly well-formed sentence. By the way, why do my friends consider it an occasion for celebration that our president can speak in complete sentences? The anomaly of George W. Bush aside, shouldn’t we take for granted that our national leaders will have mastered at least eighth grade communication skills?

In light of the above, it’s not surprising the headline for Jeanne Cummings’ post at Politico this morning reads: Obama Losing the Stimulus Message War. Cummings writes:

At this crucial juncture in the push to pass an economic recovery package, President Obama finds himself in the most unlikely of places: He is losing the message war.

Despite Obama’s sky high personal approval ratings, polls show support has declined for his stimulus bill since Republicans and their conservative talk-radio allies began railing against what they labeled as pork barrel spending within it.

The sheer size of it – hovering at about $900 billion — has prompted more protests that are now causing some moderate and conservative Democrats to flinch and, worse, hesitate.

The anxiety over lost momentum seemed almost palpable this week as the president in television interviews voiced frustration with his White House’s progress and the way his recovery program was being demonized as a Democratic spending frenzy.

In Obama’s own words in an NBC interview, it’s his job to “get this thing back on track.”

Already, he’s trying – rolling out Michelle Obama to talk stimulus Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday (at a train station, no less) and sitting down with key senators one-on-one.

But this is unfamiliar turf for a team that achieved near epic status for its communication skills during the presidential campaign. They’ve rarely ever had to play catch-up.

With the president’s gifted oratory and a technologically savvy team, the Obama camp was able to seize control of the national conversation as early as April and never fully relinquish it right through his Inaugural Address two weeks ago.

To be sure, some of Obama’s headaches stem from the normal dysfunction that occurs when a White House is in transition. Phones don’t work, chains of command are fuzzy, and there are formalities that need tending to.

But the Obama team also made its own mistakes. The president’s troubled cabinet nominees added to the cacophony that at times drowned out the White House economic messages in the past two weeks.

And it seems more apparent each day that the nascent Obama Administration isn’t fully prepared for the task at hand.

The president’s decision to push through a massive stimulus bill, while perhaps unavoidable, is forcing the much-vaunted Chicago crowd to adapt at lightning speed to its more skillful adversaries on Capitol Hill, while at the same time taking a crash course on harnessing the full power of bully pulpit. If he doesn’t figure it out soon, Obama is likely to find out that his stimulus package looks very different than he had in mind indeed.

The Jetsons versus the Flinstones

Obama’s campaign was lauded for its visionary use of modern tools for old-fashioned politics. Through the Internet, it recruited supporters, collected dollars, rallied supporters and organized get-out-the vote operations.

But when these modern heroes arrived at the White House, it was like the lights all went out.
Their contact with their millions-fold supporters was cut off, literally, as e-mail systems broke down and ‘The List’ of political supporters was blocked at the iron gate.

To meet government ethics rules, the campaign operation and its grassroots army were forced to de-camp to the Democratic National Committee, robbing the president of one of his most potent political weapons just as the stimulus bill was under consideration in the House.

But while the White House team struggled to adapt, it was business as usual on Capitol Hill for Republicans.

They could practically sleep-walk through their attack plan once House Democrats began to fill in Obama’s broad outlines for a stimulus with a few pet projects of their own.

It required two simple steps: Scream pork, call Rush Limbaugh.

They even could have even used a rotary phone.

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