It’s always interesting to watch how a narrative begins in the media, cable and talk shows — how it takes on a life of its own, sparking a big pile on, where a phrase becomes repeated over and over, and a concept that one person expressed becomes locked in as the conventional wisdom. And so we get the current belief that Obama has a “juice” problem, or just hasn’t read enough about LBJ — and if he could only schmooze a little more here, and twist an arm a little more there, he’d get a lot of his agenda through. Hey, what’s wrong with him?
Former White House press corps member Paul Brandus disagress. He argues — correctly — that Obama’s problem is not a “juice” problem but a Republican problem. Here’s some of what he writes in The Week:
The big question in Washington this week comes from ABC’s Jonathan Karl, who asked President Obama at a press conference: “Do you still have the juice?”
Juice, in this context, means the energy and wherewithal to have your way, to get the job done. (Karl’s “still have” presumes Obama had the juice to begin with, which is increasingly debatable.)
Karl also asked about the president’s failure to end the sequester or get a gun bill through the Senate (it would have died in the House anyway), and implied that these episodes showed how powerless and ineffective Obama is just 100 days into his new term.
He notes that Obama knew the NRA was hugely powerful but he went ahead on gun control (now called “gun safety” just as liberals now call themselves “progressives,” and used cars are marketed as “pre-owned” cars but let’s use the real phrase and not retreat from it) anyway.
That he lost the gun-control fight says not so much about his power (or lack thereof) as it does about ongoing, implacable Republican resistance to his wishes. Karl didn’t ask about that. His question implied that Obama’s weakness was solely to blame for these legislative failures. That’s simply not the case.
He further notes that a key sticking points is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has nothing to lose and everything to gain by check-mating Obama now, and if the GOP retakes the Senate and keeps the House (which some pundits including Brandus think could indeed) Obama will need a cast designed for a webbed foot.
Towards the he writes:
he problem is not that Obama lacks “juice.” What he lacks, here in his fifth year in office, is an understanding that he’s never going to get anywhere with Republicans. At a California fundraiser last month, he said he’s going to keep trying — even though he acknowledged that it’s irritating his base — because the country needs it. He thinks that eventually, Republicans will do, as he puts it, “the right thing.” Who is he to say what’s right? Obama got 51 percent of the vote in November — not exactly a mandate. Republicans, as they see it, are doing the right thing. And unlike Obama, they’re not irritating their base. They’re playing to it.
The president still thinks he can change Washington. He can’t. This isn’t a failure. The forces against him — deeply entrenched, heavily financed, well-organized — were here long before he came to town all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. They’ll still be around when he leaves 45 months from now.
What can Obama do? He suggests Obama call it as it is about his opponents who they are and what they are trying to do.
Go to the link and read it from beginning to end.
Some thoughts:
1. Mitch McConnell may not have achieved making Obama a one-term President, but unless there is some shift he will have achieved stopping Obama from doing the things the bulk of Americans (twice) elected him to do.
2. As Brandus points out, Obama is not just a guy who sits around and reads books and looks at position papers all day. He does socialize, and drink. So once again this is our stereotyping journalism at work — where a statement is made about someone that is “high concept” (easy to quickly grasp) and used over and over. And over.
3. Quotes from GOPers and polls now confirm that there are many Republicans who will a)oppose something even if they agree with it because Obama wants it and they don’t want to give him a victory, b)will go along with their party even if they passionately disagree with it because it’s their party. Policy matters less now than getting to that savory moment when you give members of your sports team a high five when you defeat the other side, do a victory lap, and rub the other side’s faces in their loss.
4. We’re in a new era where partisans will refuse to compromise one iota and the only goal is to check mate the opposition or destroy it. This portends badly for America since we could be heading into revolving terms of gridlock as each party attempts to shove through its agenda without accommodating the other side and building any kind of national consensus.
The bottom line? To say the current situation is due to Obama lacking leadership, or “juice” or know how is not accurate. He could be faulted on some of his legislative skills, but the bigger part of the context is the GOP’s successful effort to hold the line, squelch his agenda, and deny him a legacy. And I’ve always said: if you listen to Rush Limbaugh you know how the party will eventually respond — which does not bode well for substantive immigration reform.
And there’s another view as well: The Daily Beast’s John Favreau also disagrees that Obama has been, in effect, politically negligent and says his supporters need to do more:
The more exciting story to tell is how Lyndon Johnson charmed and strong-armed his way to massive legislative victories. Much less interesting is the fact that most of those victories occurred while his party held record majorities in Congress. By the end of his second term, following the loss of 47 House seats and three Senate seats, one aide joked that Johnson couldn’t even get a Mother’s Day resolution passed.
Today, a minority of senators can kill bipartisan legislation that is supported by a majority of their colleagues. And they frequently do. In the House, the speaker alone can kill bipartisan legislation that is supported by a majority of his colleagues. And he frequently does. Following some of this country’s worst mass shootings, a Republican senator and a Democratic senator with A ratings from the National Rifle Association authored a gun safety bill requiring criminal background checks that was supported by 90 percent of the American people. If I were a reporter, I’d be more interested in what was wrong with the Congress that refused to pass that bill than the man at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue who relentlessly campaigned for it at more than a dozen events around the country.
The problem here is that reporters on deadlines trying to generate daily copy find it easier to stick with the quicker “high concept” story that has an immediate news peg that has “legs.” It would take much more digging, interviewing and research to detail what’s going on with Congress, how the Republican stance is far different from what Ronald Reagan faced with Democrats or Richard Nixon faced with Democrats or any other President in recent memory faced with an opposition party. This is a new degree of hyper-partisanship. MORE:
This president has played plenty of hardball and softball with members of Congress. I was there when he cut deals and cajoled his way to a health-care victory that 100 years’ worth of Democratic and Republican presidents had sought and failed to achieve. I saw him do the same with the recovery act, and student-loan reform, and Wall Street reform, and “don’t ask, don’t tell”—a legislative legacy that, whether you agree with it or not, already stands tall against any other president’s in recent memory.
I’ve also seen what happens to Republicans who dare to even contemplate cooperation with the White House. When Congressman Scott Rigell of Virginia accepted the president’s invitation to join him at an event highlighting the shipyard jobs that sequestration would destroy in his district, the two men had a warm and constructive conversation aboard Air Force One. The president talked about his willingness to pursue entitlement reform. Rigell said he was open to closing tax loopholes for the wealthy. In return, he was threatened with a primary challenge by his local Tea Party, attacked by Grover Norquist as a “cheap date,” and flooded with nasty calls and emails from conservative activists.
If you’re a Republican in Congress, what’s more likely to sway your vote—a trip on Air Force One and a personal plea from Barack Obama, or the threat of a Tea Party challenge that’s taken down so many of your colleagues in recent elections?
AND:
The president and the Congress are responsible for the decisions that this country makes or doesn’t make. But as citizens, so are we. We can complain about what’s happening in Washington for the next year, or the next four years, or the next 10 years, or we can do something about it. We can make sure that young woman’s voice isn’t lost in a cacophony of ads and lobbying and primary challenges. Whether or not we support this president’s agenda, we can rise to the challenge he laid out on the night of his reelection.
Go to the link and read it in full.
UPDATE: The Daily Beast’s John Avlon (who is now the site’s Political Director) weighs in about the GOP’s “block and blame” game. Here are some key quotes but this MUST be read in full:
There’s chutzpah, and then there’s rank hypocrisy.
The RNC released a slick but cynical Web ad this week commemorating the first 100 days of President Obama’s second term. Politics ain’t beanbag, and no one expected their assessment would be sunshine and light. But there’s a particularly low place for folks who block and then blame—in this case, intimating with mock sadness that the president is legislatively impotent for failing to pass universal background checks in the wake of the Sandy Hook slaughter.
Reality check: 41 Republican senators (and five Democrats) voted against the bipartisan compromise bill crafted by Republican Pat Toomey and Democrat Joe Manchin. And among Republicans controlling the House, the modest background check bill—supported by 90 percent of Americans—was considered DOA.
This affront to common sense and common decency is difficult to defend. And so the RNC response is to blame the president for a failure to lead, despite that his bipartisan outreach was rejected by most Republicans.
Don’t take my word for it—listen to Pat Toomey: “In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized,” Toomey told the Times Herald editorial board. “There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it.”
This is ugly stuff, deeply self-defeating to the cause of self-government. It is also the new normal….
AND:
There are plenty of credible criticisms of President Obama, specifically arguments that he didn’t have enough executive experience or Washington experience to lead effectively before entering the Oval Office. But the hyperpartisan impulse to oppose policies that Republicans have supported in the past simply because President Obama supports them has been the story of this administration in too many of its dealings with Congress. From the adoption of the Heritage Foundation–proposed and Romney-implemented individual mandate for health-care reform to the president’s proposal of entitlement reform that has so far been unable to provoke an equal Republican response to achieve a grand bargain, the outreach is too often one-sided and unreciprocated.
For conservatives to block bipartisan bills as a matter of strategy and then blame the president for the failure to achieve progress is the height of hypocrisy. The subsequent media rush to debate whether the president is a lame duck is itself a lazy taking of the bait, reflecting that desire to fast-forward to the 2016 campaign rather than stay focused on the matter at hand: covering governing, with accountability intact.
May I say:”Ditto”?
There is a LOT more so go to the to the link and read it in full.
Avlon’s two most recent books are MUST reading for news, journalism, writing and political junkies:
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.