NPR spun it as a great success in the lede, and continued in that tone for several paragraphs:
CQ: Obama's Winning Streak On Hill Unprecedented
by Don Gonyea
In his first year in office, President Obama did better even than legendary arm-twister Lyndon Johnson in winning congressional votes on issues where he took a position, a Congressional Quarterly study finds.
The new CQ study gives Obama a higher mark than any other president since it began scoring presidential success rates in Congress more than five decades ago. And that was in a year where Obama tackled how to deal with Afghanistan, Iraq, an expanding terrorist threat, the economic crisis and battles over health care.
Unprecedented Success Rate
Obama has been no different from his predecessors in that he's always ready to send a firm message to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue as he "urges members of Congress" to come together and act. All presidents demand specific action by Congress - or at least they ask for it. But when you look at the votes of 2009 in which Obama made his preference clear, his success rate was unprecedented, according to John Cranford of Congressional Quarterly.
"His success was 96.7 percent on all the votes where we said he had a clear position in both the House and the Senate. That's an extraordinary number," Cranford says.
The previous high scores were held by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, with 93 percent, and Dwight Eisenhower, who scored 89 percent in 1953. Cranford notes that George W. Bush's score hit the high 80s in 2001, the year of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. But Obama surpassed them all, Cranford says.
But then a tad more realism slipped in, without, apparently, any consciousness of the tension between the two accounts (emphasis added):
He Picked His Battles
A major reason for Obama's record high score this year: Democrats took away a significant number of seats from Republicans in the 2006 and 2008 elections, resulting in big majorities in the House and Senate for the president's party.
But Sarah Binder, a congressional analyst at the Brookings Institution, says there's another key reason he scored so well. She says he only took an official position on issues that were really important to him - those that he knew he had a very good chance of winning. He picked his battles carefully.
"He can do that because he's been in the Senate, his staff has been in the House and he understands the process here. They are consummate congressional insiders in understanding how this works," Binder says.
Binder says the intense partisanship in Congress these days, a condition underlined in a separate CQ vote study, meant that Democrats were more likely to rally around the president each and every time he asked them to - if only to deny the Republicans a victory.
It's certainly true that Obama's staff seems entirely tuned to the internal political reality of Versailles Congress. And totally oblivious to reality or public opinion. "Health care reform" alone is enough to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt.
Matt Yglesias pointed out the obvious in response to this story:
In part we're seeing that an administration staffed, from the White House on down, with veterans of the Hill has a very good sense of what can pass congress and what you need to do to get congress to pass it.
That said, I continue to think that this approach may prove counterproductive in the midterms. The kind of activists who you need to give money, volunteer, and urge their friends to vote like to see the President they worked to elect out there fighting against the bad guys. Watching him sound out where the pivotal member stands, and then leaning on everyone to his left to get in line is demoralizing.
But NPR's next paragraph after that unintentionally revealing quote is a giant step back towards stupidland, since that "rally around the president" effect has been so notably lacking on health care, the one issue that's dominated attention for months on end. The effect is so clearly limited to relatively minor matters that it's downright embarrassing to see anyone try to pretend otherwise.
Just after that, though, the story takes its most dramatic turn of all toward honest reporting:
The Downside Of Compromise
But another contributing factor here may prove more controversial for the president and his party. That's his willingness to negotiate and to compromise. For example, as much as the president said he wanted a public option as part of a health care bill, the final legislation won't have one. But that's not counted as a loss for the president under the scoring of this survey.
It sure would be nice if all the alters involved in writing that story could get together and talk.
Things were even worse when Rachel Maddow decided to take the tack of dealing with this story under the banner of "Conventional Wisdom Fail" (see, Obama is too a raging success!) And it went from bad to worse when she brough on Michael Beschloss, in full-on lamitude mode:
MADDOW: Empirically, whether or not you like Obama's policies, but from a pure quantitative perspective in terms of what this president has done-how does President Obama's first year stack up against previous presidencies?
BESCHLOSS: Well, he is the equal of Franklin Roosevelt in his first year, LBJ in 1965 or Ronald Reagan in 1981. You know, Obama last year, or two years ago during the campaign, kept on saying, "I want to be a transforming president," like Roosevelt, like Johnson, like Reagan. And the breadth of the kind of things he has done-you're absolutely right to talk about them-I think suggests that that's what he's going to be.
MADDOW: In terms of the challenges that he faced, the president talked about, has he been-almost joked about the fact that nobody could have ever guessed that Iraq would almost be considered a backburner issue for this presidency.
BESCHLOSS: Absolutely.
MADDOW: That he'd be dealing with the economy. Can you give us some historical context for what challenges he was handed?
BESCHLOSS: It's almost unique in the last century. When FDR came in in 1933, we were in a terrible Great Depression, but in terms of foreign policy, the world was fairly quiet. And Roosevelt could spend his first term basically concentrating on the economy.
If you look at a case, for instance, like LBJ coming in in 1963, had to deal with the death of John Kennedy. But, again, the world was relatively quiet. He was able to concentrate on his domestic program.
In contrast, look at Obama coming in just a year ago. We were teetering--as you said--on the brink of another Great Depression. We had two wars, a struggle with terrorism. This is someone who had to deal with things on all sorts of fronts and engage with every single one of them.
News flash: Al Qaeda is NOT the Soviet Union or Red China. The military threats in LBJ's world dwarfed those in Obama's no matter how much Bush/Cheney koolaid the denizens of Versailles may drink. What's more, the mere fact that you face a major crisis such as the financial meltdown doesn't really count for much if your response is basically to turn your back on it.
Comparing Obama to FDR is nothing short of laughable. Heck, even on foreign policy, FDR's Good Neighbor Policy was more profound than anything Obama has done. But even the comparison to LBJ is patently absurd as well. Here's a list of Johnson's major accomplishments in his Great Society agenda that were passed in 1965, his first year after winning election on his own:
Civil rights
* Voting Rights Act of 1965
* Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965
War on Poverty
* Upward Bound
* Head Start
Education
* Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965
* Higher Education Act of 1965
Health
* Medicare
* Medicaid
Arts and Culture
* National Endowment for the Arts
* National Endowment for the Humanities
Consumer protection
* Cigarette Labeling Act of 1965
Environment
* Land and Water Conservation Act of 1965
* Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965
* Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act of 1965
The Civil Rights or health care accomplishments alone dwarf everything that Obama has accomplished this year. But one doesn't even have to look at such mega-epochal pieces of legislation. Consider how profoundly America has been changed by the Cigarette Labeling Act, or the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act. (Conventional wisdom has it that Nixon was the great turning-point environmentalist President. Conventional wisdom is wrong again.) The comparison between Obama and LBJ is not even close to being close.
LBJ was an effective President. Obama is an efficient one. The difference is night and day. The only real valid comparison between the two men is that Obama is doubling down on LBJ's tragic mistake in Vietnam with his own embrace of the neo-cons brain-dead "long war" ideology. |
