Okay, this surprised me:
President Obama set a new record last year for getting Congress to vote his way, clinching 96.7 percent of the votes on which he had clearly staked a position.
That was a bit less than 4 percentage points higher than the previous record, set by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, according to an annual study by Congressional Quarterly.
You would never know this, however, because the biggest item on his agenda has not yet passed and the Senate version lacks the high-profile public option. Meanwhile, the Senate has not taken up the climate legislation, and several appointments remain in limbo. If this study included committee votes, the success rate would go down considerably. But, still, how many times have we read comments about how Obama should be more like LBJ? At least on this narrow metric, it looks like the comparison isn’t unfavorable after all.
