Category Archives: The Obamas

The President To Vermont: Show Me The Money!

President Obama’s campaign tour just completed a stop here in Burlington, Vermont with the President giving a rousing and well received speech before 4,500 of the party faithful on the University of Vermont campus. (They even cheered when Obama said Vermont had gone the longest of any state without a presidential visit, and again when he mispronounced the Governor’s name.) Why Vermont, you ask? Isn’t this the bluest state in the nation? Didn’t he win more than 2/3 of the votes here four years ago? Is he afraid that the state is in play this year?

Hardly. This was a fundraising event. Patrons coughed up $40 to a $100 to attend the rally on the UVM campus. Prior to that there was a more intimate event for about 100 of the really big donors, where for a cool $10,000 you could get your picture taken with President. Money from the tickets sold today alone will likely total $500,000 or more. But that’s not the only revenue source – you can buy hats, shirts, buttons, mugs – all sorts of campaign paraphernalia to help the President’s reelection effort. Estimates are that the total haul may approach $750,000. Not bad for what amounts to essentially a two-hour layover.

Remember, the dynamics of the fundraising contest have changed since 2008. Then, Obama used social networking sites to smash all previous fundraising records enroute to amassing a rather large financial advantage over John McCain. That’s not likely to happen this year no matter who the Republicans nominate. Although Obama continues to raise money hand over fist – he had more than $80 million cash on hand at the end of 2011 – the Republican money machine is matching the president dollar for dollar. This is largely because of the superpacs. While Mitt Romney only had about $19.9 million in the bank at the end of December, his superpac Restore Our Future was sitting on $23.6 million. And that’s not the only superpac in play – Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, which will likely play a big role this fall, had $15.6 million banked.

In contrast, Obama-aligned superpacs haven’t been nearly as effective raising money – perhaps because the President has been so strident in opposing their role in campaigns. Priorities USA, an Obama-leaning superpac, had only $1.5 million banked as of December 30. The Democratic Party’s congressional superpacs, such as House Majority PAC, haven’t done much better. Although the Democratic National Committee did report $12.6 million on hand, that was less than the Republican National Committee’s $20 million. When you add it all up – candidate cash, superpacs, party organizations – there is rough parity between Obama’s coalition and Republican groups in terms of cash on hand. And that’s why the President came to Vermont. Show me the money!

The speech itself was designed to motivate the faithful to give more – not just in terms of money, but also in commitment to the cause. The President listed his record of accomplishments, but did so in a way that resonated with Vermont voters. He cited job growth, but also ending Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell. He paired the killing of Bin Laden with withdrawal from Iraq, and from Afghanistan. He also mentioned some Vermont-centric issues, such as the need to expand internet access, and to invest in renewable energy. (Internet has been slow to come here, and there’s an ongoing debate regarding whether to shut down the local nuclear power plant.) And, as might be expected given the on-campus location, he cited the need to reduce tuition costs and to lower interest rates on student loans. Part of Obama’s goal in speaking on a college campus is to reignite the passion among younger voters that was so apparent in 2008, but which was noticeably lacking in the 2010 midterms.

As one might expect, the adoring crowd lapped it up, and the President seemed to feed off that positive energy. (There were the usual suspects protesting outside, but they didn’t get much coverage). And let’s face it – it has to be rewarding to appear before supporters who give you a 30-second ovation just for climbing the stage, and another one for taking off your jacket. Obama was clearly feeling the love. And let’s not forget the residual spillover to local politicians. Obama gave a shout-out to Burlington’s newly-elected Mayor and to our Governor Sumlin – er, Shumlin. (Blame the name slipup on the advance team!) He was accompanied on Air Force One (this was the smaller Boeing, not the big 747) by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy and his wife, and met at the tarmac by Vermont’s other Senator Bernie Sanders. It’s always good to get face time with the President. It’s even better to be seen getting face time.

From here the President flies to Maine – another blue state that likely won’t be in play come November, but which can be counted on to help replenish his coffers. There’s also an open Senate race there and no doubt the President will try to court independent candidate Angus King.

Another day, another dollar. And the general campaign is still five months away. Give early, and give often! It’s the American way… .

Are Obama’s Approval Ratings On The Rise?

An apparent uptick in President Obama’s Gallup Poll approval ratings triggered a flurry of stories these past two days speculating what might have caused the change and what it portends for the future. Politico’s story was headlined Obama job approval surges, while the Hill was a bit more restrained noting only a “jump” in Obama’s approval ratings. Many other pundits weighed in as well, with several attributing Obama’s polling rise to his “victory” in the payroll tax cut extension debate with House Republicans.

But were the headlines warranted? Did Obama really experience a significant uptick in his popular support? You decide. Here are the Gallup numbers from the past two weeks that were driving many of these stories. The second column are his approval numbers, and the third his disapproval.

12/13-15/2011	41	51
12/14-17/2011	42	51
12/16-18/2011	42	50
12/17-19/2011	43	50
12/18-20/2011	43	49
12/19-21/2011	43	48
12/20-22/2011	44	48
12/21-23/2011	47	45
12/22-26/2011	46	48

All told since mid-December, his approval ratings have gone up about 4-5%, and his disapproval ratings have dropped by about 3%. When we consider the random variation inherent in the sampling that produces these polls (the tracking poll has a margin of error of +/-3%), it appears that Obama’s approval ratings may have ticked up a hair – but it is hardly enough to warrant headlines heralding a polling surge or jump. So why the sudden focus on what appears to be a slight uptick at best? It’s primarily due to that one-day result in Gallup’s three-day tracking poll indicating that, for the first time since July, his approval ratings were – barely – higher than his disapproval ratings, at 47-45. Substantively, that number was really no different from what came the day before, and what followed the next day. But psychologically, the fact that his approval was higher than his disapproval – even if for only one day! – was a big boost to the President’s backers, and it prompted a flurry of news stories speculating that Obama may have received a significant and enduring boost in support due to the recent “victory” over House Republicans.

Of course, we’ve been through this before. Remember this TPM headline from this past January? That was after the extension of the Bush tax cuts and Obama’s post-Gifford’s shooting speech had progressives in a tizzy that we were witnessing a game-changing upswing in Obama’s poll numbers. It never happened. Nor did Bin Laden’s killing produce more than a momentary spike in the President’s approval ratings. So what has caused this latest upturn – if we can even call it that? My guess – and it’s primarily a guess – is that the slight uptick in his Gallup numbers are driven primarily by the better unemployment figures that came out earlier this month and have little to do with the payroll tax cut extension.

However, this good news notwithstanding, without a major and sustained uptick in the economic numbers, Obama’s approval ratings aren’t going to change much from where they have been for the past several months – mired in the mid-to-low 40’s range. And this is not a good place to be. Historically, Obama’s November polling average was among the lowest ever recorded for a president at this point in his term, and his December poll numbers are not, at this stage, looking much better unless the latest numbers are in fact a harbinger of things to come.

Indeed, at this juncture Obama is on track to have the lowest December, third-year approval ratings of any president since Gallup began public approval surveys.

The bottom line is this: don’t be fooled by the Beltway spin regarding purported winners and losers based on pundits’ scorecards that judge one high-profile event. For Joe Sixpack and his wife Jane, it’s still the economy, stupid.

An Imperial Presidency? Obama, Signing Statements and the Unwritten Constitution

Last Friday Barack Obama signed into law H.R. 2055, the “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2012,” which is an omnibus year-end spending bill. While signing the bill into law, however, he issued a statement that declared several provisions within the bill as either unconstitutional or as infringing on his executive powers. These include provisions limiting his flexibility in dealing with enemy combatants now held at Guantanamo Bay prison, and others that forced him to consult with congressional committees before authorizing military exercises costing above a specified dollar amount or that required congressional approval before allowing U.S. forces to operate under U.N. command. In the signing statement posted on the White House website, Obama notes, “My Administration has repeatedly communicated my objections to these provisions, including my view that they could, under certain circumstances, violate constitutional separation of powers principles. In approving this bill, I reiterate the objections my Administration has raised regarding these provisions, my intent to interpret and apply them in a manner that avoids constitutional conflicts, and the promise that my Administration will continue to work towards their repeal.”

As the name suggests, a signing statement is simply a declaration by the president explaining how he interprets the legislation that he has signed into law. Sometimes those statements merely clarify language, but often they declare a president’s intent to, in effect, disregard those portions of the law that he deems unconstitutional. Although presidents dating back to Monroe have made use of signing statements, they became controversial during the Bush presidency, in part because of a highly-publicized Boston Globe article by Charlie Savage in 2006 that claimed “President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office.” More accurately, as the Globe later acknowledged, Bush had in fact challenged about 750 provisions contained in about 125 bills during his first six years in office, although this correction was often overlooked by Bush’s critics. The distinction is not inconsequential; for example, using Savage’s original method of counting, Obama would have challenged 20 “laws” alone in this one signing statement. So we need to be careful how we define a “law.”

Savage, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on this topic, linked Bush’s seemingly extraordinary use of signing statements (in fact, Bush issued far fewer than did his predecessor Bill Clinton) to Bush’s broader claim of enhanced executive power rooted in the theory of the “unitary executive”. That controversy was not lost on candidate Obama who, in running for the Presidency, made it clear he would not follow Bush’s precedent. Signing statements, Obama proclaimed in 2008, are “not part of his power, but this is part of the whole theory of George Bush that he can make laws as he goes along. I disagree with that. I taught the Constitution for 10 years. I believe in the Constitution and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We’re not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end-run around Congress.”

The reality, however, is that President Obama has been quite willing to utilize signing statements, albeit at a slightly reduced rate compared to recent presidents. By one count he has issued almost 20 such statements to date. For comparison purposes, Bill Clinton issued some 92 signing statements in his first three years in office – almost as many as Bush did in six years – and close to 400 during his two terms. However, as this Congressional Research Service report suggests, a focus on the number of signing statements alone can be misleading. Indeed, constitutional scholars on both the Left and the Right are in basic agreement that signing statements themselves are not the issue – it is the president’s intent when issuing the statement that is of concern. In particular, beginning with the Reagan administration there has been a marked increase in the number of signing statements issued by presidents that raise constitutional objections to laws. According to the CRS report issued in 2007, “President Reagan issued 250 signing statements, 86 of which (34%) contained provisions objecting to one or more of the statutory provisions signed into law. President George H. W. Bush continued this practice, issuing 228 signing statements, 107 of which (47%) raised objections. President Clinton’s conception of presidential power proved to be largely consonant with that of the preceding two administrations. In turn, President Clinton made aggressive use of the signing statement, issuing 381 statements, 70 of which (18%) raised constitutional or legal objections. President George W. Bush has continued this practice, issuing 152 signing statements, 118 of which (78%) contain some type of challenge or objection.” To date, based on a quick read of his statements, I estimate loosely that about half of Obama’s signing statements contain constitutional objections but, until I do a more systematic analysis, this should be viewed as a very rough estimate.

It appears, then, that Obama has had a significant change of heart when it comes to signing statements during the transition from candidate to President and instead has adopted the view of every president going back to Reagan that their use is not only acceptable but necessary. But why? The answer, I think, is that Obama – as he did with other precedents centered on the War on Terror – has realized that signing statements serve a useful purpose in the modern lawmaking process. Rather than a grab for power, signing statements instead illustrate what Don K. Price called the unwritten constitution: adaptations in how the President and Congress interact that, by filling in interstices in the written Constitution, helped adapt that document to the exigencies of governing in the modern age. In this case, the signing statements serves as a means through which presidents can influence the legislative process.

However, doesn’t the Constitution’s veto provision specify what a president should do if he finds a bill constitutionally objectionable? The problem from a president’s perspective with the veto is that it is often an all-or-nothing alternative. Because presidents cannot selectively excise those portions of a bill they find objectionable, a veto means rejecting the entire piece of legislation, even though it may contain many provisions the president supports. Congress, of course, realizes this, and in the modern era has become adept at larding bills with extraneous provisions to which they know the President may object. This is particularly the case with appropriations bill, which now frequently contain non-budgetary policy-relevant provisions that presidents – as Obama did with the 2012 omnibus appropriation bill – cannot accept on constitutional grounds. But if they include enough legislative sweeteners, or attach the provisions to bills that must pass every year, they calculate the president will be forced to accept the entire dose of legislative medicine. Faced with this strategy, presidents have adapted by signing these bills into law while publicly stating which provisions they accept, and which they find objectionable on constitutional grounds. Note that Congress can and does grumble about this, and more than once members have threatened legislative retaliation. But these bills have gone nowhere – an implicit acknowledgement, I think, that legislators view signing statements as consistent with the system of shared powers rather than a repudiation of it. They recognize why presidents’ issue these statements, and as long as the dispute in interpretation stays at the level of rhetoric, both sides are willing to look the other way.

And, of course, this is the crucial question: are these mere rhetorical disputes, or have presidents’ signing statements had a measurable impact on how legislation has been implemented? Alas, it is difficult to answer this question. For one such effort, see this GAO study which looked at the implementation of 10 provisions in laws signed by George Bush but which included a signing statement. The bottom line? The GAO found no evidence that the signing statements hindered implementation; in their words “Although we found that three provisions have not yet been implemented, we cannot conclude that agency noncompliance was the result of the President’s signing statements.”

The lack of systematic evidence that signing statements have altered the balance of power has not stopped critics from viewing their use as evidence of the rise of an imperial president. Of course, who makes these charges depends on whose ox is being gored; under Bush, the charges emanated from the Left. Today, they come from the Right. Rather than an imperial presidency, however, I think signing statements are better viewed as the latest manifestation of how the President and Congress adapt the lawmaking process within a system of shared powers. The increase in the use of signing statements for constitutional reasons really starts with Reagan, not Bush, and it does so because this is when an increasingly polarized Congress begins to make greater use of the budget process to push broader policy goals. Obama has followed in Reagan’s – and Bush’s – footsteps not because he embraces an imperial presidency. It’s because in the current governing context their use follows logically from the Constitutional-based incentives that give him a stake in the legislative process.

6:30 Addendum: I just noticed that Andy Rudalevige has a related piece up here at the Monkey Cage site.

Why Obama Continues Bush’s Foreign Policy

Against the backdrop of today’s joint Obama-al Maliki press conference it is worth noting that perhaps the strongest portion of Obama’s presidential record so far has been his handling of foreign policy. Public opinion polls give the President much higher marks for his conduct of foreign policy than of domestic issues, and some of his most notable policy successes – killing Bin Laden, overthrowing Gadhafi – have taken place abroad. The irony, of course, is that Obama’s success in this policy realm has come largely by building on the foundation laid down by his predecessor George W. Bush rather than dismantling it. And when Obama has sought to deviate from the path charted by Bush, more often than not he’s been unsuccessful. Continuity, then, and not change, has been the byword of Obama’s foreign policy.

The most immediate reminder of this will occur at the end of this month, when after nine years, the last of the U.S military forces in Iraq will return home. At its peak, the U.S. had over 170,000 troops in Iraq – now it is down to about 6,000. (The U.S. will retain a sizable force of military trainers and other civilian support staff, in addition to its diplomatic corps, although the exact size and composition is a matter still under negotiation.) The troop withdrawal, of course, is based on the status of forces agreement negotiated by Bush with the Iraqis – an agreement the Obama administration had hoped to amend to allow some U.S. military forces to remain in Iraq to prevent a return to the sectarian violence that plagued the country in recent years. The Iraqi government, however, proved unwilling to do so on terms acceptable to the U.S., and so Obama will largely adhere to Bush’s original withdrawal schedule. In terms of electoral politics, however, this is not necessarily a bad thing – the U.S. military presence in Iraq was not very popular, and the military withdrawal allows Obama to keep a campaign promise to wind down the Iraqi war.

There are many other areas of continuity between Bush and Obama in the conduct of foreign policy. Obama has expanded Bush’s use of drones as both offensive weapons in the War on Terror, but also in intelligence-gathering and reconnaissance operations. Although Obama purportedly closed secret CIA prisons holding suspected terrorists, he continues the policy of rendition under which suspected terrorists can be sent to foreign prisons for interrogation. He has authorized the use of military commissions to try some terrorists, and – with the courts’ consent – supports the Bush policy of holding enemy combatants indefinitely without charge. Despite opposition from both conservative Republicans and many Democrats, he signed a four-year extension of the Patriot act which, among other provisions, provides federal authorities roving wiretap power to listen in on conversations of foreign suspects even when they change phones or locations, and gives the government the authority to investigate foreigners who have no known affiliation with terrorist groups. (To do so, however, requires approval from a secret federal court.)

In some instances, Obama has out-Bushed Bush in the conduct of the war on terror. In Afghanistan, of course, Obama built up the U.S. military presence in order to stabilize a rapidly deteriorating situation there, and thus lay the groundwork for an earlier U.S. withdrawal. To date, Obama appears committed to the withdrawal schedule although his commanders on the ground are fighting a rearguard action in order to extend the U.S. presence there. Perhaps the most notable foreign policy success, of course, was the killing of Bin Laden, which required violating Pakistan’s airspace. And, in perhaps the most dramatic example of Obama’s willingness to push the limits of his authority, he authorized the assassination of an American citizen overseas who was suspected of actively working as a terrorist.

When Obama has sought to step back from Bush-era policies governing the War on Terror, however, he has often been unsuccessful. After months of wrangling with Congress, Obama has implicitly admitted that Guantanamo Bay prison will not be closed, and in fact will continue to hold high value targets who may be caught in the anti-terror campaign. His effort to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a civil court collapsed in face of domestic opposition from New York officials. And even Obama’s decree banning the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique is now under reconsideration in the Republican House.

What explains this continuity in foreign policy between a Republican and a Democratic President? Why was Obama largely unsuccessful when he did try to break with his predecessor’s policies? At the most fundamental level, it reflects the common pressures both Bush and Obama feel, as chief executive and commander in chief, to protect the nation against attack. Political scientists have long debated whether the president wields a greater panoply of powers in the foreign versus domestic realm. Depending on who one consults (and when), presidents are either characterized as imperial (think FDR, Nixon or Bush) or imperiled (Ford or Carter) in their ability to conduct foreign policy. I’ve long argued that this debate misses the crucial aspect of foreign policy that differentiates it from domestic issues as seen from the president’s perspective: because the repercussions of a foreign policy failure are far more damaging not to just to him (someday her) – but to the nation, presidents feel they have no choice but to expand their foreign policy powers as much as political constraints allow. Put another way, they don’t feel nearly as powerful in foreign affairs as they think they should be to meet expectations. From the perspective of one sitting in the Oval Office, the constraints on the president’s ability to protect the nation feel far more onerous because the burden of responsibility that weighs on the president is so much greater.

Because Bush was the one in power when 9-11 occurred, he endured most of the political fallout resulting from his desire to meet the new expectations associated with fighting a different type of war. The ensuing debate over how to balance the desire to give the President the powers necessary to prevent another attack with the need to hold him accountable for utilizing those powers was politically costly to Bush, but in the end a framework for balancing energy and accountability was developed. That debate continues today, but mostly in fine tuning the measures negotiated between Bush, Congress and the courts in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. The most recent manifestation, of course, is Obama’s threat to veto the military authorization bill because it limits his flexibility in handling suspected terrorists. Obama’s opposition to a provision in the bill allowing Americans captured on American soil to be held in military custody without charge is only partly motivated by a concern for civil liberties. Of greater concern to Obama are the limits the bill places on him in his ability to prosecute the War on Terror.

In this desire for maximum flexibility, Obama is no different from Bush. Indeed, Bush did not just bequeath Obama hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan against the backdrop of a global war on terror – he also handed over a set of policy tools, forged in heated debate between our governing institutions, for fighting those wars. For the most part, Obama has chosen to use those tools because, as did Bush, he feels more than does anyone else the pressure to protect the nation from another terrorist attack.

When it comes to foreign policy, presidents may appear to be imperial – but they feel anything but.

Obama’s Leadership Style: Carter Redux?

Historical comparisons, particularly between presidents, can be notoriously misleading, primarily because no two presidents govern in exactly the same context. Instead, I have often argued that each presidency is best viewed as sui generis. Still, this is not to deny that previous presidencies may provide some insights into issues related to the current officeholder. In that vein, it is increasingly clear to me that the closest modern analogue to President Obama – focusing only on leadership style – is Jimmy Carter.

Let me reiterate: my concern here is with Obama’s approach to governing, and not on his likely political fate or place in the presidential pantheon. That is, I am not saying that Obama will go down in history as a one-term president of dubious historical ranking. Instead, my comparison here is between Carter’s and Obama’s governing ethos. The evidence is still impressionistic, of course, but three years into Obama’s first term, the cumulative details that have emerged so far suggest he is a president who leads not on the basis of a core set of political convictions or principles, but instead by laying out policy solutions developed on their merits and then trusting that others will follow his lead primarily due to the logic of his argument. The latest evidence that this is Obama’s preferred style comes in this in-depth Washington Post story by Scott Wilson. Published two days ago, Wilson’s article describes Obama as “a political loner who prefers policy over the people who make politics in this country work.” That approach, according to Wilson, led Obama and his key advisers to focus primarily on the substance of policy problems, confident that they could make the case for their proposed solutions on the merits alone. Wilson writes, “In the first two years, the phrase I heard often in the White House was ‘Good policy makes for good politics.’” In so doing, however, they downplayed the need to engage in the type of outreach to experienced politicians whose advice might have helped temper Obama’s policy ambitions by injecting a dose of political realism. It was a leadership strategy, Wilson opines, that “seemed based on a naive reading of a hyperpartisan capital.”

Wilson’s description of Obama’s leadership style hews quite closely to previous accounts that also describe the president as “problem solver in chief.” See, for example, Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men, which focuses on how Obama made economic policy, and Bob Woodward’s Obama’s War, which describes the decision process leading to the “surge and withdraw” Afghan policy. Both paint portraits of a President who helped craft complex policies that, although reflecting a substantive logic, often seemed to lack any ideological cohesion or animating principle. The same argument can be made regarding Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment, health care reform, as well as the economic stimulus package. Facing very complex policy problems, Obama typically and quite understandably sought comprehensive solutions that often merged elements of different plans based on different political principles. While evincing a superficial political pragmatism, this approach also meant that few political actors felt fully vested in the entirety of any of Obama’s major policy initiatives.

This portrait of a President who has “supreme confidence in his intellectual abilities and faith in the power of good public policy” is not without historical precedent; as Obama implicitly acknowledged to Suskind, he shares Jimmy Carter’s and Bill Clinton’s policy wonkishness “disease”. The comparison to Carter is particularly apt, a point that became increasingly clear to me after spending several days this past January immersed in files at the Carter Library. Carter, another very intelligent man, also believed that leadership was best exercised by crafting policy solutions based on their substance, and then counting on others to recognize the intellectual merits of the President’s position. Not surprisingly, Carter’s supreme belief in his own persuasive powers was rooted in part in his surprise victory in the 1976 campaign, one that saw Carter defy conventional wisdom to defeat more seasoned opponents. Bolstered by that win, Carter and his senior campaign aides entered office convinced that they would win over Washington in the same manner as they won election: by eschewing traditional politicking based on bargaining and coalition building in favor of a new style of leadership that sought to rise above partisan politics and instead focused on solving problems.

If Wilson is to be believed, this was precisely the attitude adopted by Obama and his senior staff during their first days in office: “To veterans of the campaign, though, it was more a matter of Washington not understanding the leadership upgrade that had just taken place. ‘He’s playing chess in a town full of checkers players,’ a senior adviser and campaign veteran told me in the first months of the administration.” With hindsight, it is easy to dismiss this as the overconfident – arrogant? – musing of a campaign adviser fresh off a historic election victory. But, in fact, it was a belief shared by thousands of Obama’s most fervent supporters, who were certain that because he was a supremely intelligent person (and, not incidentally, one who possessed none of the crippling temperamental defects of his predecessor) he could somehow bring a new style of political leadership to Washington, one that transcended partisan politics.

I should be clear here: there is nothing intrinsically wrong, in theory, with the Obama/Carter problem-solving approach to governing. I am not dismissing the utility of bringing smart people to Washington, and relying on them to devise solutions to complex policy problems. The difficulty, however, is that it is almost always true that the president’s policy solutions fall short of the mark, because the problems they are designed to solve are so complex , and the powers the president wields are so limited. When that happens, presidents must hope they have a reservoir of political support on which they can depend during the political hard times. A presidency crafted primarily on a problem-solving ethos, however, rather than on a carefully honed and clearly articulated political philosophy, often lacks that political foundation, and will find itself struggling to define itself in the face of political adversity and failed policies. If you are elected as a problem solver, and problems endure, you have little left on which to base your case for reelection.

This, I think, is where in part the presidencies of Clinton and Carter – both of whom were elected in part because of their policy wonkishness – diverged. When the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, Clinton found his political voice in part by positioning himself as the bulwark against Republican extremism. He stood for a political ethos that opposed Republican policy proposals whose goal seemed not to mend the social safety net, but to end it. Carter, who “enjoyed” Democratic congressional majorities throughout his first term, had no such opportunity to define what he stood for.

Of course, there was a more fundamental reason for Clinton’s victory in 1996, and Carter’s defeat in 1980: in the former case, the public perceived that the economy was picking up steam. It remains to be seen whether Obama will experience similar good fortune. The fear is that, in the absence of tangible evidence of an economic upswing, and having governed as a political pragmatist, Obama will have little in the way of a built-in political coalition on which to rely come November, 2012.