Sense and Nonsense

Opportunity

Jack Balkin has a really fine post about what he calls "the presidential politics of emergency."  He compares the way that Bush framed the terrorism threat to expand his power with the way Obama is framing the economic threat to expand his power.  Balkin's understanding of presidential power comports with my own: to be able to lead boldly, a president needs both skill and luck.  The latter comes largely in the form of opportunity, especially a crisis, which allows the president to gather focus and power unto himself:

The more severe the crisis, the greater the need for bold, decisive action, and the greater the need for the country to rally around its leader, to whom the public looks to resolve the crisis. To do this, the leader needs the support of all to surmount the very serious problems that the country faces. This not a time for selfishness, narrowmindedness, or obstruction. Everyone must work together. The President, in turn, must set the agenda. He must lead. He must present a plan; Congress must work out the details and ratify it without delay or obstruction.
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Both Bush and Obama have made use of the President's power to define emergency and crisis in ways that shape others imaginations, and in ways that legitimate the steps they assert must be taken. Bush insisted that he needed vast powers to detain, interrogate and make war; he pointed to Iraq and insisted that it was a continuation of the war against Al Qaeda. Obama insists that he must have an enormous stimulus to jump start the economy, he must take control of major banking institutions to stave off financial meltdown, and he must propose a remarkably ambitious new budget with new programs for infrastructure development, health care, education, energy conservation and environmental protection to sustain economic capacity and global competitiveness in the future. Given the crisis we face, the only way forward, Obama is saying, is to reject Reaganism and embark on a Second New Deal focused on guarantees of health care for all Americans, financial regulation and/or government control of financial institutions, environmental protection, energy independence, and infrastructure investment. That is to say, just as Bush identified his crisis to justify the policies he pursued, so Obama has defined his crisis to justify his proposed solutions.

Balkin is not saying there is no difference between Bush and Obama.  And he points out that "your view about the legitimacy of a particular use of the Presidential politics of emergency depends on which of the two men you support and your view about whether they have accurately described the nature and the scope of the situation before the country."  Quite right.   He adds:  "If there really is an emergency along the lines described by the President, then of course, it is very different than if there is no emergency, or it is not as severe as the President says it is, or if the nature of the problem is different than the President describes, for then the solutions are the wrong solutions, and will lead the country in the wrong direction."

But trying to sort out the correctness of the assessments made by Bush and Obama is not Balkin's focus in this piece.

Instead, I want to focus on what the two men share-- the similar way in which the modern President-- whether Bush or Obama-- uses the formulation and articulation of crisis and emergency in order to take control of the political agenda, shape the nation's political imagination, and make resistance seem, at least in the short run, parochial, narrow minded and even futile.

This essay is worth reading. It's far more interesting and educational than anything I saw in the morning's newspapers.

The Expectations Gap

Few things plague a new president like that gap between what we come to expect of a new president and what he is able to deliver.  The aura and anticipation surrounding a president-to-be typically diminish quickly once the glow of the inauguration itself dissipates.  Barack Obama faces particularly stiff winds, which are likely to disperse that glimmer even faster than usual.

In this piece from tomorrow's New York TImes Magazine, Matt Bai provides us with a fine anemometer to register the force of the prevailing winds.  Here's a taste of the great writing in this article:

[T]he transition is also very much about this process of forestalling reality, perpetuating the notion of the outsider who has arrived with pick and chisel to breach the ancient crypt of Washington and release its musty air. It is an interregnum of suspended hopefulness, the period after the outsider has asserted his dominance over the system but before he has had the opportunity to become identified with it. His power lies in being perceived, for as long as possible, as a transitional figure, a reformer among insiders; once the transition ends, so, fairly or not, does his lack of accountability for chaotic situations and intractable bureaucracy.

It's well worth reading in it's entirety.

A Look Ahead

There's a brief but important article by Matt Bai in today's New York Times Magazine about the difficult realities facing the next president.  Bai's focus isn't the economic situation or foreign policy.  Rather, he's looking at the political realities the new president will face on Capitol Hill.

On the one hand, if McCain wins on Tuesday, he is likely to face huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.  Bai writes:

McCain would almost certainly become the first president in 20 years to enter office with a Congress dominated by a hostile opposition, and the scorn he has earned from formerly sympathetic Democrats during what has been, at times, a small and cynical campaign would make the few miles between the Capitol and the White House feel like the distance separating, say, Juneau, Alaska, and Moscow. Narrowly elected amid the inevitable allegations of fraud and divisiveness, McCain in his first year would stand little chance of passing a proclamation honoring Betsy Ross, much less any meaningful legislation on health care, energy or taxes.

That's for sure.  But it's not as if a big Democratic victory on Tuesday would make life easy for Barack Obama.  Bai says:

If recent history is any guide, however, Obama would need more than raw numbers in his favor. Congressional majorities are, in fact, a lot like corporate profits; they exist on paper, but that doesn’t mean they’re actually there when you need them. Carter, a reformer who won in an equally anti-Republican year, inherited a 23-seat majority in the Senate and a 149-seat advantage in the House — and accomplished little. Working with a narrower majority, Clinton barely passed a budget and then failed to win approval for his health care plan before losing Congress altogether.

It's a good, brief article. (Don't you love that sentence highlighted in red?)