US Elections

A populist State of the Union

By Luke Freedman in Sydney, Australia

12 February 2013

Tuesday's State of the Union address is President Obama's first major opportunity of his second term to offer a comprehensive defence of his legislative goals. The President's mission this speech — as well as in the years ahead — should be to offer a populist message that allows Democrats to leverage public support for a progressive political agenda.

The 2012 elections were a fairly decisive rejection of the Republican Party platform. President Obama coasted to a second term and Democrats won the popular vote in both the House and Senate elections. However, Republicans maintained control of the House due to gerrymandering and structural advantages and the filibuster still provides the GOP with de facto veto power in the Senate.  As such, the legislative gridlock that's paralysed Washington over the last two years is likely to continue into Obama's second term.

Democrats' best response is to avoid what John Judis dubs an "insider strategy" and "instead transfer the fight for their agenda ... to the electorate where they hold the advantage." This means no more vague statements about priorities and then leaving Congress alone to work out all of the legislative details as Obama did with healthcare reform. Instead, the President needs to take a more active role in shaping bills and applying pressure to the legislature. Obama did this well during his proposal on immigration reform late last month. "If Congress is unable to move forward in a timely fashion, I will send up a bill based on my proposal and insist that they vote on it right away," he explained in his speech in Las Vegas.

The President needs to reiterate this message in his State of the Union address. And he also should make a point of reaching out directly to citizens and other grassroots organisations-explaining that he needs their help in getting Congress to take action. 

It's true that political science research shows that the power of the bully pulpit is greatly overstated. The president doesn't have the capacity to bend the public or members of Congress to his will with rhetoric alone. But Obama's objective isn't to change minds; it's to marshal existing public support  for many of his policy proposals. 

Ninety-two per cent of Americans want universal background checks on all gun sales, a figure that  includes 85 per cent of NRA households. Fifty-five per cent support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants — a number that's almost certain to grow in coming years as the Hispanic percentage of the population increases. And 68 per cent favour Obama's fiscal cliff proposal to allow the federal government to negotiate prescription prices for Medicare recipients with drug companies.

Democrats faces two conflicting realities. The public is largely receptive to many of their policies and favourable demographic trends mean this isn't likely to change at any point in the near future. At the same time, the American political system — and its entrenched interest groups — make it very easy for a determined opposition to stymie the majority and block change. The challenge for Democrats is to find ways of effectively utilising their advantage in numbers in order to bring about legislative change. I don't have all the answers of how this can be done. But it should start with President Obama's speech tomorrow.

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The mighty, weak presidency

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

2 November 2012

Another observation from Chait's Obama endorsement:

The Republican strategy is perfectly clear and not even very well hidden. Yet many of us don’t accept it as a reality because it does not feel true. We instinctively hold the president, not Congress, responsible, another finding political scientists have measured. The hunger to attribute all outcomes to the president is so deep that the political elite take it on faith. Bob Woodward, who is justly famed as a reporter but whose opinions are interesting only as a barometer of Washington establishmentarianism, blamed Obama because Republicans turned down an extraordinarily favorable budget deal. “Presidents work their will — or should work their will,” Woodward declared, “on the important matters of national business.”

How can a president “work his will” in such a way as to force autonomous members of the opposite party controlling a co-equal branch of government to sacrifice their own calculated self-interest? It is a form of magical thinking, but a pervasive one. Which is exactly why the Republican strategy — making Obama’s promise to transcend partisanship fail by withholding cooperation — has worked.

I agree with this, yet disagree with the conclusion to which it would seem to logically lead: that the presidency is unimportant. Here's how I reconcile a view of Washington in which the president is both vitally important and substantially powerless. (I'm referring here to domestic politics; in foreign policy, the president has a great deal of power, particularly consindering the office's usurpation/Congress's neglection of the Congressional power to declare war and the refusal of every president since Nixon to recognise the constitutionality to recognise the War Powers Act.)

American government is set up so that Congress, the presidency, and the courts are co-equal branches that share power between them. The Constitution is designed so that Congress is more powerful than the president, and although the commander in chief is more powerful than the founders had hoped he would be, he or she is still very much at the mercy of the legislative branch.

Nonetheless, Congress is made up of 100 senators and 435 representatives, and finds it very difficult to work in accord. The president is the single most powerful political figure in Washington, even though he is constantly stymied by Congress, the courts, and his own bureaucracy. It is a mistake to think that governmental failure or success should be attributed entirely, or often even mostly, at the feet of the president. But no one else in Washington has as much power as he does. It matters enormously who the president is, even if his ability to get things done is limited at best.

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The Libya intervention

By Luke Freedman in Sydney, Australia

15 October 2012

One of Team Romney's campaign talking points is the Obama administration's supposed disdain for bipartisanship and cooperation with Congress. One can quibble with the president's skills as a negotiator. And there are specific instances, such as the debt ceiling deal, where I wish Obama had more foresight in trying to head off such a crisis earlier in the year. But it's patently absurd to claim that the Democratic Party is primarily responsible for the hyper partisanship of the last couple of years.

And further, it's misleading to focus on the intricacies of Obama's negotiating tactics as opposed to looking at the actual bills he put forward. A stimulus plan laden with tax cuts to entice Republicans. A health care plan created by the Heritage foundation and modeled after Romney's plan in Massachusetts. And immigration reform and a cap-and-trade bill that until recently had received broad bipartisan support.

But one instance where the Republican criticism rings true is in the Obama administration's handling of the Libya intervention. The War Powers Resolution, passed in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, requires "The President to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action and forbids armed forces from remaining for more than 60 days, with a further 30 day withdrawal period, without an authorization of the use of military force or a declaration of war."

Rather then obtain congressional approval for the engagement, the administration claimed that because there were no actual hostilities taking place the War Powers Resolution did not apply. It's a pretty implausible argument and one that the President's Office of Legal Council rightly rejected. The US Navy was lobbing cruise missiles into the country and drones were carrying out attacks within its borders. To claim these actions don't constitute "hostilities" is to render the term essentially meaningless.

Of course,  Obama isn't exactly unique in his desire to act unilaterally. Every president has claimed the War Powers Act to be unconstitutional. And other administrations have sent troops abroad in fairly similar circumstances. But with the extralegal actions of the Bush administration still looming large, it's troubling to see the president exploiting such loopholes. A precedent for the next president to use in justifying their own extensive war-making powers.

Regardless of the intervention's merits the legislative branch had good reason to be frustrated with the flimsy legal analysis used to exclude them from the decision making process. And in a saner universe, Republicans would focus on this incident when highlighting the adminstration's unwillingness to work with them. But, the problem is, they're very much in favour of granting the president these type of powers. And thus had no interest in dissecting the constitutionality of his actions. It's become a recurring theme for the GOP; pass over the substantive critiques of the president while trying to blow other non-issues out of proportion.

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The power of the presidency and Obama on gay rights

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

17 May 2012

Andrew Sullivan summarises the gains Barack Obama has made for gay rights:

His first step was getting rid of the HIV travel ban, already signed by Bush, but not yet implemented. Again, the process dragged on for months—but the White House insisted it was better to have everything in perfect legal order so the change could not be challenged. It came through.

Then he endured a hazing by gay activists and writers (including me) on his slow pace on gays in the military. But we were wrong. He made the brilliant calculation that he would not push it right away, as Clinton did, and he would not be the front person to advocate the change. Adm. Michael Mullen would do it, backed by Republican Defense Secretary Bob Gates. By bringing the military top brass and Gates slowly on board, he outmaneuvered the Republicans. Even then, he almost ran out of time, but clinched it after the 2010 midterms. He worked our last gay nerves. But when an openly gay solider asked a question at a Republican debate, a photo of a lesbian couple kissing during a Navy homecoming was reprinted around the country, and a Navy veteran asked his Marine boyfriend to marry him in what was the first proposal involving two gay men on a U.S. military base, the sheer scope of the cultural change was astonishing.

On marriage too, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder had already made the critical decision that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional on its face, that discrimination against homosexuals warranted heightened legal scrutiny, and that therefore the administration would no longer defend DOMA in court, as it had in its first two years. In other words, by February 2011, Obama and Holder put the significant weight of the Justice Department behind the constitutional logic of marriage equality. Immediately, the lawyers in the Proposition 8 case in California claimed this as a “material” or legally significant development. It was. And, of course, if discriminating against gays in marriage violates the equal-protection clause, as the Justice Department claims, then DOMA is doomed. And in making that decision, Obama did far more to advance marriage equality substantively than he did in his recent interview. To add icing to the cake, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech for the first time asserting that, for the United States, gay rights were integral to human rights across the globe, and the U.S. would conduct diplomacy accordingly.

This, by any measure, is an astonishing pace of change in one presidential term.

Whether you think Obama's done too much or not enough on this issue, I can't see how these don't count as real and substantive gains. Which is why I don't understand when people claim that Obama hasn't achieved anything in his term or that — in grim echoes of the end of the Clinton years — that it doesn't matter which party is in the White House. This is just one issue, but it's an example of the way elections have a real impact on a nation. I'm the first to tell you the power of the presidency is often overstated, and that even seasoned oberservers too often overlook the significance of Congress and the states, but let there be no mistake about it: the president is the most powerful single political actor in the United States, and who that person is matters.

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The unpowerful Presidency

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

21 March 2012

President Harry S. Truman once griped that people expect far more of the president that he is capable of delivering:

[The President] has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues … The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ’em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

It seems the president may not even be particularly good at PR. Ezra Klein has a rather persuasive article in the New Yorker that's worth your time. His argument is that presidential speeches aren't very effective at moving public opinion. In fact, if anything, they harden opponents' opinions against whichever issue a president is pushing:

The experience helped to crystallize something that Lee had been thinking about. “Most of the work on the relationship between the President and Congress was about the President as the agenda setter,” she says. “I was coming at it from the perspective of the increase in partisanship, and so I looked at Presidents not as legislative leaders but as party leaders.” That changes things dramatically. As Lee writes in her book “Beyond Ideology” (2009), there are “inherent zero-sum conflicts between the two parties’ political interests as they seek to win elections.” Put more simply, the President’s party can’t win unless the other party loses. And both parties know it. This, Lee decided, is the true nature of our political system.

To test her theory, she created a database of eighty-six hundred Senate votes between 1981 and 2004. She found that a President’s powers of persuasion were strong, but only within his own party. Nearly four thousand of the votes were of the mission-to-Mars variety—they should have found support among both Democrats and Republicans. Absent a President’s involvement, these votes fell along party lines just a third of the time, but when a President took a stand that number rose to more than half. The same thing happened with votes on more partisan issues, such as bills that raised taxes; they typically split along party lines, but when a President intervened the divide was even sharper.

This is an uncomfortable truth for those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about American politics. It's tempting to see the president as a powerful figure, capable of shifting public opinion through the mere force of his words. (I've written previously about the fondness pundits have of urging the President to give a "paradigm-shifting speech.") Hearing that the president's influence is often less than nothing is an unpleasant reality check. It's satisfying to argue that, for instance, the president should talk more about jobs and expect that will translate into real legislative outcomes. But if the facts don't support that argument, it's be dishonest to keep making it.

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Seven mistakes Aussies make when talking about US politics

By Erin Riley in Sydney, Australia

4 January 2012

As we turn to the Iowa caucuses, there are a few mistakes that it’s easy for Australians to make — and frequently do — when discussing US elections. So here’s my list of seven mistakes Aussies often make when they talk about American politics.

1) They assume American political parties are homogenous

American Political parties truly are big tent — in each party, there are a wide spectrum of beliefs and voting patterns in Congress. Using a conservative-progressive scale, which is oversimplified but has its uses, the most progressive Republicans are more so than the most conservative Democrats. Within parties, there are groups that hold different things to be valuable. Assuming “Republicans are X” or “Democrats are Y” really underestimates the huge amount of variety in US politics.

And this variety is important because most legislation is bipartisan. Caucuses arranged around issues are incredibly useful. They allow Congresspeople who represent districts with similar issues to join together. Representative Sam Farr, for whom I interned in 2010, is the co-chair of the House Ocean Caucus, a bipartisan committee primarily made up of representatives from coastal districts for whom Ocean management issues are important.

Related: Assuming American political parties have party discipline.

2) They don’t realise political philosophy is actually pretty important

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How to talk like a President

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

5 August 2011

Justin Elliott wonders whether Texas Governor Rick Perry's Lone State twang might remind voters too much of President George W. Bush. He goes on to discuss accents with Allan Metcalf, an expert on Presidential speaking styles. Metcalf:

In my book I say that there are two ways of sounding presidential. One way is to be distinguished and elevated, starting with the example set by George Washington and his immediate successors, who were highly educated and very well spoken. That tradition also goes up to the present with someone like Barack Obama, who has a rather well-spoken, high-end style. But then also, going way back to Andrew Jackson, is the notion that the president should sound like a man of the people. George W. Bush particularly made a point of sounding down-to-earth rather than elevated. I was impressed in the CBN excerpt [above] by the way Perry on the one hand sounded down-to-earth — he used "snitch" and "kinda"—- but on the other he was talking about "laboratories for innovation" and clearly in command of dignified language as well.

I'd say, from my non-expert point of view, that President Bill Clinton had that same talent of fitting dignified language into down-to-earth speech patterns. To be honest, though, the down-to-earth speaking style is what most readily comes to my mind for all Presidents, which has more to do with political cynicism than the cultural background of those who seek the position. Few people drop their gs with such a determined consistency as do those who aspire to elected office.

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Deconstructing birtherism

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

2 March 2011

I imagine the first time I heard about the provision of the United States Constitution requiring the president to be a natural born citizen was in the context of a Seinfeld joke. In a 1996 episode of the show, Frank Costanza, the father of Jerry's neurotic sidekick George, explains that he has no interest in politics because, as an immigrant from Italy, he cannot hold the top job. "I refuse to vote," he shouts, absurdly. "If they don't want me, I don't want them!"

This is one of the absurdities of the belief that Barack Obama was not born on the United States. Before this conspiracy came along, who thought about the natural birth requirement outside of the context of a wacky sitcom gag? The requirement is unusual itself; in principle, United States law treats all its citizens the same, regardless of how they came to be a citizen. Yet when it comes to holding the top job, the country suddenly creates two classes of citizen: natural born and naturalised. It's such a blatant transgression against the dictum that all men are created equal that I recall in earlier times there was even talk that Republicans might amend the natural-born requirement out of the constitution to facilitate an Arnold Schwarzenegger run.

Birtherism is in the news again because Republican presidential possible Mike Huckabee affirmed Obama's qualification for the presidency in a way that some folks see as being far too friendly to the 41 per cent of Republicans who have doubts about the president's place of birth. (Huckabee claims he believes Obama was born in Hawaii because Bill and Hillary Clinton are too dastardly and effective to not have dug out the truth if it were otherwise.) I agree, however with Jonathan Bernstein and Adam Serwer that for Birthers this is not literally about where Obama was born.

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Wacky Presidents Day link of the day

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

22 February 2011

Presidents Day has been and gone in Australia, but in America it's still Monday, and hence still the holiday. In my mind, the best way to celebrate what was once known as Washington's Birthday is to salute the imaginativeness of the Internet as applied to the occupants of the Oval Office and their character traits. Last year I linked to a list of the sexiest presidents. For 2011, how about this draft guide to the talents of the 43 illuminaries in the world of professional football? Some of my favourites:

1. William Howard Taft, Nose Tackle. A big man with good hands. Thicker than a copper bathtub through the ass, an important asset when talking about nose tackles. Nimble enough to construct Anti-Trust legislation and then properly evaluate it as a jurist. Endurance (one term) is an issue.

5. Bill Clinton, Running Back. An amazingly elusive open field runner with penchant for fumbling the ball with the game on the line. Character issues are a genuine concern, as he once texted inappropriate images to a female trainer. Gets great penetration. Often found out of position; puts ball where it shouldn't go. Conditioning is suspect.

42. Barack Obama, Wide Receiver. Too little football experience to properly evaluate here; already holds Heisman Trophy for some reason, though.

(H/t to Colin Seiler for that one.)

Speaking of presidents and football, and since I've just finished re-reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, here's Hunter S. Thompson biographer Willam McKeen recounting the single interview Thompson got with his bete noire, Richard Nixon:

Hunter was one of those reporters following Nixon around in the early days of the [1968] primary. And after an event one night in New Hampshire he was getting juiced at the bar with some of his other reporters when one of the Nixon aides came in and said, "Listen, the old man has a 75-minute drive to the airport to catch his private Lear jet. He wants to talk football. None of us know football. Thompson, you know football. Will you sit with the President and talk to him?" And the minute you bring up any other subject but football, we're dumping you out the car by the side of the road in the frozen tundra of New Hampshire. So he said, okay.

Given his love for the sport, I have no doubt Nixon would be disappointed at his number 27 rating in the draft pick list above.

Finally, I'm grateful to the Associated Press for clearing up something I have to check on every year. According to its Twitter feed: "It's Presidents Day." No apostrophe; "Presidents" is an adjective in this case.

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Dude in Chief

By Jonathan Bradley in Seattle, WA

6 November 2010

The Wall Street Journal is a bit upset that Daily Show host Jon Stewart called the President "dude" when he appeared on the Comedy Central program last week:

Obama said that administration official Larry Summers did a “heckuva job” on financial reform–and the President suggested his words were deliberately chosen to echo the language George W. Bush used to praise FEMA official Michael Brown during Hurricane Katrina. Stewart jokingly told the president, “You don’t want to use that phrase, dude.” Was it disrespectful for Stewart to address the president using a term that’s more commonly exchanged between two college guys sharing a bong?

I'm going to say no. Sure, "dude" isn't the standard term of address for the American head of state. But keep in mind a few things: The proper title, Mr. President, was chosen by George Washington so as to diminish the deference afforded the country's leader. California and its surfers didn't exist back then, so we can't be sure what Washington would have thought of "dude" specifically, but we do know he didn't want Americans to treat their leader with too much King-like esteem.

It's true that America is a more formal country than, say, those of us in Australia are used to. I recall a USSC-hosted event that included former opposition leader Kim Beazley answering questions from members of the public. As the Centre's CEO Geoff Garrett aptly commented on the night, you would not find Americans calling a leading politician by their first name, as the Australian audience members did unself-consciously as they approached the microphone that night. Egalitarianism is all very well, but America is a country that treats earned positions as being worthy of some level of demonstrated respect.

But, 'dude'? Probably a poor term of address if meeting the President in an official capacity. But let's not forget that this cuts both ways. As Stewart famously told CNN, the show that once lead into his features puppets making prank phone calls. The Daily Show is hardly the most Presidential forum in the world. In fact, Obama was appearing there specifically to remind the show's viewers of the connection they had with him. And politicians — not just Obama — are always pulling silly stunts to convince us that they're just like us: try bowlin', beer-drinkin', and g-droppin' for a start. Dude, who can blame Stewart for treating a politician as if he actually was just like the rest of us?

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