This move is so predictable to anyone who has watched presidential behavior in the last 30 years--in fact, not to toot my horn, but it is something I told reporters last January when asked if Obama would be a different president than President Bush (one was to Pacifica Radio and the other was to Congressional Quarterly). Then I stated that once the dust had settled and the glimmer of the Obama victory faded, his public approval numbers would begin to fall. Further he would find frustration in trying to advance important policy through the Congress--promises he had made on the campaign trail--and with an impending re-election campaign coming--would need to act quickly--thus would turn to the unilateral powers that are now deeply entrenched in the Oval Office.
So here we are, just a little over a year after Obama was sworn into office, and the administration is announcing that it gave Congress its chance to come on board, and Congress failed to act:
Mr. Obama has not given up hope of progress on Capitol Hill, aides said, and has scheduled a session with Republican leaders on health care later this month. But in the aftermath of a special election in Massachusetts that cost Democrats unilateral control of the Senate, the White House is getting ready to act on its own in the face of partisan gridlock heading into the midterm campaign.
"Look, we gave it a shot and Congress just wouldn't give us everything we wanted, so we all need to move on" seems to be the message here. The interesting thing about this is how quick the administration is to move to unilateralism and how flimsy of an excuse it has given--how many presidents in the past would have loved having control of both houses of Congress, including 59 Senators?
With each president since Reagan--bar one--the president moved toward unilateralism for good reason--they were dealing with an opposition that not only controlled one or both houses of Congress but were bitterly partisan. For instance Clinton didn't lurch toward unilateralism until 1995--after the Republicans took the Congress. And the one president who went unilateral right away when given a Congress controlled by fellow partisans? George W. Bush. George W. Bush had unified party control of government and a public approval rating that was sky high, yet behaved as if he was surrounded with a hostile public and Congress.
The problem to me seems to be that Obama hasn't figured out leadership yet. For instance, last year he made the ill-fated decision to allow the Congress to construct two major and controversial policies--health care reform and cap and trade--without the involvement of the White House. And when Congress failed, he now thinks that he can get by without them.
Congress is like that wild horse you often see featured in Disney movies that needs to be broken. The only way you break it is to get on its back and show it who is boss. You don't break a wild horse by putting it in a pen and allowing it to tame itself. Had the Obama administration told Congress from the outset what it wanted--and worked diligently at each step--chances are good that the President would not be in the pickle he currently is.
If he is looking for a history lesson, he should look to Reagan's first term. He gave Congress just a couple of major policies to focus on and he used a carrot/stick approach to getting what he wanted. He did the little things like posing with Members or inviting leaders on the yacht Sequoia for one on one time, and for those who were recalcitrant, he called their major donors or he singled them out for personal attacks--all of which worked. Had Obama taken a similar approach, you might not have 60 or 70 nominees bottled up by one senator--instead, he should have made Senator Shelby of Alabama a day-after-day symbol of Republican obstructionism and not waited until now to do so.
So from a research perspective, I am pleased to see that unilateralism is alive and well.
Yes We Can!
