Washington
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.
On election night of 1992, the Senate Republican leader, Bob Dole, declared belligerently on television that Mr. Clinton would need 60 votes for anything important he wanted to pass. This may have sounded to the president-elect like an empty threat: with 57 senators on the Democratic side of the aisle, he must have felt he could charm or cajole just three Republicans into voting with him.
But the Senate had significantly changed even since Jimmy Carter’s time. Moderate Republicans, who once made up nearly half of their party’s Senate membership, had seen their ranks dwindle to at most 10 or 12. Meanwhile, nearly a dozen conservative Southern Democrats had been replaced by even more conservative Republicans. The reality was that while President Clinton could find 50 Senate votes for many of the things he wanted, getting to 60 was far more difficult than he had imagined. The only realistic way to do it was to bring in at least a few of the moderate Republicans as full legislative partners, even at the risk of alienating left-of-center Democrats.
Given the level of Republican Party discipline under Mr. Dole, it’s not clear that this would have worked. In any case, President Clinton didn’t really try. The ambitious health care program introduced in his first year failed for many reasons, but in the end, there never was any plausible way to get to 60 votes, not with a program that was viewed as an exclusively Democratic project and a president who was rapidly losing credibility among the electorate at large. Had there been 60 or 61 Democratic senators that year rather than 57, it would have made little difference. Mr. Clinton was just not strong enough in the country to achieve supermajorities in Congress. The one major success of his first year — passage of a fiscally responsible budget — became law only because, by a quirk of Congressional rules, it couldn’t be filibustered.
Now, 16 years later, another Democrat gets his chance. In many ways, the political environment has turned upside down. The Democratic Party in Congress is no longer the fragile and ideologically disparate group it was in 1977 or even 1993; it is now a remarkably cohesive left-of-center majority, with the presence of several dozen fiscally conservative “blue dog” Democrats in the House only a minor obstacle to its unity. Now the question is not whether the next Congress will be willing to support President Obama’s vision, but whether this majority will want to move further in a liberal direction than the country wishes to move.
Barack Obama is a man of compelling gifts, but in the end he was elected primarily because the Republicans had made a hash of things, not because of his charm or elegance. If he shows any early signs of being the ideological left-wing president John McCain warned of, he will be stepping into his own kind of political trap, different from the ones that ensnared Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, but potentially just as debilitating.
Nor is he free of the filibuster problem. He almost certainly won’t have 60 Democratic senators to work with, but that was always an overrated issue. A president who commands the allegiance of most Americans can usually find a way to reach 60 votes in the Senate, as George W. Bush did in his first term on tax cuts and education reform. But a president who does not have that allegiance can’t get there no matter how many Democrats are sitting in the chamber. The route to breaking filibusters runs through the court of public opinion more than it does the Senate chamber. And, despite the Democrats’ remarkable gains over the last two national elections, the party remains to the left of the electorate.
All of this suggests that, to escape the fate of Messrs. Carter and Clinton, Barack Obama needs to preserve the centrist image he cultivated during the campaign; to reinforce the personal good will that both parties genuinely seemed to feel for him on election night; to avoid letting impatient Democratic majorities tempt him into pushing initiatives that the electorate won’t support; and still somehow emerge with a record of accomplishment that bears some resemblance to the promises he made all over the country this fall.
One might argue that doing all this doesn’t just call for statesmanship, eloquence or legislative skill: it calls for a magician. On the other hand, Barack Obama has already done something that seemed impossible. Maybe he is one.
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