Overreach

Leadership in the Obama Presidency

George C. Edwards, III

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780691163314, 9780691153681
• eBook ISBN: 9781400841967
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How Obama overestimated the power of rhetoric and persuasion during his presidency

When Barack Obama became president, many Americans embraced him as a transformational leader who would fundamentally change the politics and policy of the country. Yet, two years into his administration, the public resisted his calls for support and Congress was deadlocked over many of his major policy proposals. How could this capable new president have difficulty attaining his goals? Did he lack tactical skills?

In Overreach, respected presidential scholar George Edwards argues that the problem was strategic, not tactical. He finds that in President Obama's first two years in office, Obama governed on the premise that he could create opportunities for change by persuading the public and some congressional Republicans to support his major initiatives. As a result, he proposed a large, expensive, and polarizing agenda in the middle of a severe economic crisis. The president's proposals alienated many Americans and led to a severe electoral defeat for the Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections, undermining his ability to govern in the remainder of his term.

Edwards shows that the president's frustrations were predictable and the inevitable result of misunderstanding the nature of presidential power. The author demonstrates that the essence of successful presidential leadership is recognizing and exploiting existing opportunities, not in creating them through persuasion. When Obama succeeded in passing important policies, it was by mobilizing Democrats who were already predisposed to back him. Thus, to avoid overreaching, presidents should be alert to the limitations of their power to persuade and rigorously assess the possibilities for obtaining public and congressional support in their environments.

CHAPTER 1

Assessing Opportunities

PUBLIC SUPPORT

PUBLIC SUPPORT IS A KEY POLITICAL RESOURCE, and modern presidents have typically sought public support for themselves and their policies that they could leverage to obtain backing for their proposals in Congress. It is natural for a new president, basking in the glow of an electoral victory, to focus on creating, rather than exploiting, opportunities for change. After all, if he convinced voters and party leaders to support his candidacy—and just won the biggest prize in American politics by doing so—why should he not be able to convince the public or members of Congress to support his policies? Thus, presidents may not focus on evaluating existing possibilities when they think they can create their own.

Yet it is a mistake for presidents to assume they can lead the public. There is nothing in the historical record to support such a belief. In earlier work, I focused on the opinion leadership of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan on a wide range of policies and efforts to defend themselves against scandal. I found that public opinion rarely moved in the president’s direction. On most of Clinton’s and Reagan’s policy initiatives, pluralities, and often majorities, of the public opposed the president. Moreover, movement in public opinion was typically against the president.¹ An analysis of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to lead the public also found that the president typically experienced frustration and failure.² Like Barack Obama, George W. Bush sought far-reaching changes in public policy across a broad range of issues. To achieve his goals, he went public as much as any of his predecessors, but from tax cuts and immigration to Social Security and the war in Iraq, he was not able to move the public in his direction.³

The success of a strategy for governing depends on the opportunities for it to succeed. Relying on going public to pressure Congress when the public is unlikely to be responsive to the president’s appeals is a recipe for failure, so it is critically important for presidents to assess accurately the potential for obtaining public support. Moreover, adopting strategies for governing that are prone to failure wastes rather than creates opportunities.⁴

There are two fundamental components of the opportunity for obtaining public support. First is the nature of public opinion at the time a president takes office. Does it support the direction in which the president would like to move? Is there a mandate from the voters in support of specific policies? Is there a broad public predisposition for government activism? Are opposition party identifiers open to supporting the president’s initiatives? A second facet of the potential for public leadership focuses on the long run. What are the challenges to leading the public that every president faces?

After outlining the White House’s view of the opportunities for change in its environment, I explore both facets of public opinion in this chapter. We will see that by analyzing the opportunity for obtaining public support for Obama’s initiatives, it is possible to understand and predict the challenges President Obama faced in going public and the relative utility of this strategy for governing.

The View from the White House

Barack Obama is all about change. Calling for change was at the center of his campaign strategy, and he spoke tirelessly of fundamental reforms in health care, energy, the environment, and other policy areas. Once in office, the president and his aides embraced the view that the environment offered a rare opportunity for the changes they espoused. They reasoned that the crisis atmosphere would galvanize the country, perhaps even generating bipartisan support for the president’s initiatives. Thus, they viewed the economic crisis as an opportunity, a catalyst for action, rather than as a constraint. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel articulated this strategy most succinctly when he declared that one should “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”⁵ In other words, the new administration concluded that the economic crisis had heightened the desire for change that voters expressed in November, creating a once-in-a-generation opportunity for bold policy shifts.⁶

On the surface, it seemed reasonable to conclude that in a time of severe economic crisis that touched many aspects of everyday life such as housing, banking, and consumer credit, Americans were seeking reassurance from the White House and the president would have both the public’s ear and its good wishes. More importantly, Obama’s team felt the recession had left public opinion malleable and highly responsive to bold leadership. Thus, even during the transition, the president-elect launched a full-scale marketing blitz to pass his massive stimulus package, including delivering a major speech at George Mason University.

The new president quite sensibly concluded that he had to promote economic recovery as his first order of business. Moreover, his proposal for recovery called for massive subsidies to keep the banking and automobile industries afloat and a staggeringly expensive program to stimulate the economy. These expenditures and tax cuts produced by far the largest deficits in American history. In addition, passing them required the president to spend his political capital in the early days of his presidency, in difficult legislative battles in which he could not attract bipartisan support. A politically costly battle over his budget followed directly, with similar legislative results.

An alternative analysis of the policy environment might have viewed the economic crisis as a constraint. Obama could have justifiably argued that he would have to scale back his agenda, that the economy was in such a fragile state that he should focus all his attention on nursing it back to health as soon as possible. He also could have explained that, given the amount of money the government would be pouring into the economy, at the moment the country could not afford a costly overhaul of health care or an ambitious initiative to combat global warming that included a controversial cap-and-trade system and energy taxes. Instead, he would work to overhaul the financial services industry, whose excesses triggered the crisis.

Obama realized that dealing with a severe recession was not at the core of his campaign for the presidency. He later recalled, “The last thing I would have liked to do as an incoming President is figure out how to save GM and Chrysler from bankruptcy. That wasn’t on my list of to-dos when I was running for office.”⁷ Moreover, the White House was aware of the challenge it faced in dealing with the economy. According to senior advisor David Axelrod, “We came to office and immediately walked into a fiscal crisis, a financial crisis, and an economic crisis. It required some very difficult decisions, and it required everyone to spend some political capital.”⁸ The president knew it was “political suicide” to ask for freeing up the second portion of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, and later reflected that he knew his “political capital would go down pretty rapidly.”⁹

Nevertheless, the administration moved aggressively to propose the most ambitious domestic agenda since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Obama decided that he would convey the idea that the nation’s problems, from the retreating economy to falling student test scores, were intertwined as he pressed for action on a host of fronts simultaneously.¹⁰ The president often argued, for example, that the country had to address the cost and availability of health care and lessen its dependence on foreign oil before there could be a real economic recovery. From a policy analytic standpoint, the White House had a good case. Politics rarely defers to analysis, however.¹¹

Even after the frustrations of his first year in office, Obama declared in his State of the Union message in January 2010:

From the day I took office, I’ve been told that addressing our larger challenges is too ambitious; such an effort would be too contentious. I’ve been told that our political system is too gridlocked, and that we should just put things on hold for a while.

For those who make these claims, I have one simple question: How long should we wait? How long should America put its future on hold?¹²

After the Republican success in the 1994 elections, Bill Clinton felt that he needed to get ahead of the political passions of the moment and turned toward the center of the political spectrum with his triangulation strategy. Barack Obama had a different response to the setbacks of his first year. He kept to his agenda, only altering its timing.¹³

The President’s Mandate

New presidents traditionally claim a mandate from the people, because the most effective means of setting the terms of debate and overcoming opposition is the perception of an electoral mandate, an impression that the voters want to see the winner’s programs implemented. Indeed, major changes in policy, as in 1933, 1965, and 1981, rarely occur in the absence of such perceptions.

Mandates can be powerful symbols in American politics. They accord added legitimacy and credibility to the newly elected president’s proposals. Concerns for representation and political survival encourage members of Congress to support the president if they feel the people have spoken.¹⁴ As a result, mandates change the premises of decision. Perceptions of a mandate in 1980, for example, placed a stigma on big government and exalted the unregulated marketplace and large defense budgets, providing Ronald Reagan a favorable strategic position for dealing with Congress.

Barack Obama won the presidency with nearly 53 percent of the popular vote, the first time a Northern Democrat had won a majority of the popular vote for president since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s victory in 1944—and only the third time any Democrat had won a majority of the vote in those sixty-four years. Democrats won additional seats in both houses of Congress, and the historic nature of the election of the first black president generated an enormous amount of favorable press coverage. Furthermore, the new president had emphasized change, not continuity, in his campaign and promised bold new initiatives.¹⁵ Thus, it was easy for Democrats to overinterpret the new president’s mandate for change.

Obama seemed to have a realistic interpretation of the nature of his victory, however, as we can see from his response to a question about his mandate in a press conference on November 25, 2008.

Q: Thank you, Mr. President-elect. Given the election results, what sort of mandate do you have from the voters, do you believe? And does the large Democratic majority in Congress present an opportunity to pass your agenda, or is there a danger, in this environment, of overreach?

PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA: Well, first of all, we had, I think, a decisive win because of the extraordinary desire for change on the par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Assessing Opportunities: Public Support
• Chapter 2 Creating Opportunities? Going Public
• Chapter 3 Evaluating Strategic Choices: Leading the Public
• Chapter 4 Assessing Opportunities: Congressional Support
• Chapter 5 Creating Opportunities? Leading Congress
• Chapter 6 Evaluating Strategic Choices: Passing Legislation
• Chapter 7 Persuasion and Opportunity in Presidential Leadership
• Notes
• Index