Could Obama Be Pulled Leftward as President?
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in Barack, Congress, Democrats, LiberalismDick Morris has an interesting column pointing out that Barack Obama’s center-ward drift could mean very little once he has to work with a liberal Democratic Congress. Morris reminds us that the two most liberal (and ineffective) years of the Bill Clinton presidency were his first two when a Democratic-controlled Congress forced him to pursue a liberal agenda instead of the centrist one on which he ran for president.
Morris makes a good point and he could end up being right, but it’s important to remember that the Democratic Congress of 1993 and the one we’ll have in 2009 are two very different entities. First of all, the 1993 Democrats were on their last gasps of power and full of so much corruption and indolence that the current lackluster Dems look like virtuous go-getters in comparison.
Secondly, as Democrats have learned to pick up “red†seats, their coalition has begun to include more-and-more representatives and senators who are by no means “liberal.†Congress may end up being solidly Democratic but that doesn’t mean it will be solidly liberal. Obama, if he chooses to be a centrist leader, could cobble together the votes necessary to push through his agenda rather than being forced into a liberal one.
Of course, this assumes Obama is a centrist, which is far from proven. That’s why one-party governance is always risky. The lure of the ideological fringes is often too great for the party in power to resist.
Divided government, although often fraught with gridlock, usually produces more tempered and pragmatic results. I’m not sure John McCain wants to run on “a vote for me is a vote for divided government†but since we can assume Congress will be Democratic we can also assume that a McCain administration will, if anything, be unable to pursue a rightwing agenda with as much ease as Obama could pursue a leftwing one.
If the goal is to keep the government as close to the center as possible, a McCain presidency combined with a Democratic Congress could be our best option. Of course, that assumes McCain would be willing to compromise rather than try to seize as much executive power as possible. But that’s a post for another day.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 and is filed under Barack, Congress, Democrats, Liberalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 9th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Dick Morris ‘nuf said
July 9th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Aw, Rob beat me to it. Morris is so full of BS these days it’s just amazing anyone is paying attention to him anymore. I expect his latest book to sell well to Republicans who are still rabid Clinton haters just whetting their knives to treat Obama the same way they treated the Clintons and to quickly hit the remainder stores after those dead-enders have their copies.
July 9th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Yup. Pretty simple really. Easy to understand. Easy to implement. Just vote divided. You got a real knack Alan, what it takes me an essay to say you can distill into a few sentences.
I think we can now officially declare that Donklephant is ground zero in the Divided Government rEVOLution. When you think about it, the Blog name and tagline are just friggin’ perfect. Justin – You don’t have a problem with that do you?
July 10th, 2008 at 9:47 am
I think a lot of this is going to depend on the perception of who owes who. If Congress thinks Obama owes them for his victory, they will want their pound of flesh. If Obama thinks they owe him, he will expect them to do his bidding for awhile.
I think the latter scenario is going to be true if he wins. He’s doing this mostly on his own.
July 10th, 2008 at 10:18 am
mw — yeah, I totally ripped off your thesis didn’t I?
re: Dick Morris — I almost began the post by saying, “since Dick Morris wrote it, we can begin by assume there’s giant gaps in logic.” If you read the piece, he actually claime in there that Clinton nearly lost the 1996 election because he drifted so far left in his first two years. I’m sure it would be news to Dole that he nearly won that year. Apparently, when you’re Dick Morris, you can change the meanings of words.
July 10th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Alan,
Its not my thesis. Smarter guys than me thought of this. I am just a voice crying in the wilderness trying to promote the work of guys like Niskanen, Slivinski, Ornstein, Mayhew, and Levinson.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
mw — those guys are chumps. We all know you’re the puppetmaster behind this opperation.
September 23rd, 2008 at 10:25 am
I dunno about pulled, Alan. That makes it sound involuntary. Certainly Obama is more likely to find congressional support among his own party, which will be the majority.
In thinking about the question,I notice how it highlights how unsure we are about where he’s going to choose to stand. There is an easy route he can take by rubber-stamping what a democratic majority proposes. And then there’s a harder but IMO more fullfilling route (for the country) that he can take by trying to get moderate Republicans on board and disappointing the most liberal of democratic partisans.
Obama has been spending a lot of time talking about how he can get people with strongly variant views into a room, and then work something out. If he is elected and gets this room filled, is he really going to do more than tell the GOP that they’re SOL? Only time will tell.
Notice as well that if we get to that point, the GOP has to decide how they want to respond. Will they be interested in bipartisan efforts that will still lean towards the president and the congressional majority? Or will they embrace a dissident role that ultimately results in the passage of more liberal reforms that they can demonize?
My money, sadly, is on the latter. The President is only one person, and is often stuck playing the role of cat-herder.