Imagine How Much Barack Obama Could Have Gotten Done If He Were Bill Clinton

In an article last week about Syrian refugees coming to the United States, Heather Wilhelm wrote about President Obama’s response to the concerns and objections of various governors/Republicans:

“For his part, Obama opened his heart, attempted to understand where his opponents were coming from and turned on some good old-fashioned charm.”

Obviously, Ms. Wilhelm continued:

“Just kidding!  Visibly irritated, he ripped his opposition, lumping them together as a bunch of sniveling cowards afraid of widows and orphans.”

Ms. Wilhelm is not a supporter of the President so her sarcastic comments may not be a surprise.  On the other hand, they have an element of truth to them.  And they fit with a comment that President Obama made in a recent interview in GQ magazine:

“But what I didn’t fully appreciate, and nobody can appreciate until they’re in the position, is how decentralized power is in this system. … A lot of the work is not just identifying the right policy but now constantly building these ever shifting coalitions to be able to actually implement and execute and get it done.”

This is an amazing comment – and it’s not true.  Plenty of people know that is how government works.  They understand how important the persuasive part of the President’s job is and how important coalition building is.  Teddy Roosevelt didn’t talk about the “bully pulpit” of the presidency for nothing.  Lyndon Johnson worked with Republicans like Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed even before his landslide election in November of that year.

But President Obama’s comment to GQ fits with something he said to Matt Lauer in 2012¹:

“Well, it turns out our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change that I would like sometimes.”

Once again, an amazing statement.  I am surprised a candidate for President, especially one who got elected twice, could be so naïve about the American political process.  I thought everybody understood about the Constitution’s division of powers and how the Founders devised a system that required cooperation between the executive and the legislature, while also providing a role for the judiciary.  It is explained in the The Federalist Papers and in most college classes about our government (or at least I hope it is). 

But apparently, President Obama didn’t get it.  It seems he didn’t learn it while he was a backbench state senator in Illinois² or during the four years he served in the U.S. Senate (perhaps he was too busy campaigning for president to learn how Congress works – or at least how it could work).

President Obama seems to have believed all he had to do was come up with the right policy and everything would flow from there.  People would see how great the policy was and just agree with its obvious correctness.  It wasn’t necessary to convince people or cajole them to support what he wanted to do.

I can’t help but say it again.  President Obama’s naiveté is amazing.  And depressing.  Can you imagine what he might have been able to accomplish if he really had done what Heather Wilhelm said in her first quote above.  You can see Bill Clinton doing it.  I understand that President Obama might not be the kind of “people person” that Bill Clinton was (and still is), but just because he didn’t like doing it doesn’t mean he didn’t need to do it.  Or that he might have been able to accomplish more as president if he had done it.

As for those who would argue that the Republicans have been so confrontational and partisan that it wouldn’t matter what President Obama did, I disagree.  That might be true for most of the Republicans, but not all of them.  For example, I can’t believe that, if President Obama had been willing to really address their concerns, he couldn’t have gotten Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine to vote for Obamacare. Vice President Biden was able to work with Senator Mitch McConnell to resolve the 2012 year-end fiscal cliff crisis: they made permanent most of President Bush’s 2003 tax cuts while raising taxes on the rich: they agreed on a permanent patch for the AMT and on tax rates for the federal estate tax; and they raised the debt ceiling.  President Obama could have done similar things if he had been willing to “build coalitions” and if he had understood that “bring[ing] about change” required more than just coming up with the “right policy.”

For the next twenty or thirty years, historians writing the story of the Obama administration will probably place the blame for its failings on Republican obstructionism (academics, after all, lean to the left).  But at some point in the future, I think they will look at the promise of the Obama administration, versus what it accomplished, and consider whether some fair part of the difference was a result of (i) President Obama’s self-professed lack of understanding of how our system works and (ii) his unwillingness (or inability) to do what a president needs to do to get things done.
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¹ Let me thank Steven Hayward of the Powerline blog for pointers to these quotes.

² Interestingly, Representative Peter Roskam (R-IL) has talked about how, when he and President Obama were both in the Illinois state senate, they were able to work together to get things done:

“You know, in the legislature, Barack Obama was somebody you could sit down and negotiate with.  We did some of [death penalty] things together that were helpful and implemented good reforms because he was able to sit down, negotiate, and accept yes for an answer.”

It appears that President Obama did not bring this lesson with him to the presidency.