I was watching MSNBC this morning and former Counselor to the President Dan Bartlett was on talking about the similarities between Bush’s failed effort to privatize Social Security and Obama’s current effort to pass health care reform. Bartlett said that in both instances the administrations made the mistake of focusing too much on the process of passing the legislation through Congress and not enough on winning the argument in the public square. I think I agree with that in a general sense. But it isn’t exactly easy to win an argument of the merits of legislation when the other side is forcing you to constantly work on process. As Alexander Bolton ably explains in The Hill, the Republicans have been very successful in getting the American people to attribute shared blame for the gridlock in Washington.
Failure to advance must-pass legislation has added to the Democrats’ problems when Congress is suffering from its lowest approval ratings in years.
Democrats claim they can blame Republican obstruction for the gridlock, but political experts and some Democratic allies say the majority party will also suffer because it controls Congress.
This is even true in the current case of Sen. Jim Bunning denying unanimous consent to extend unemployment insurance (among other things):
Democrats decried Bunning and the GOP in a flood of press releases Monday, but those feeling the pain may not make distinctions.
“I certainly think the majority leadership understands what a catastrophe this is. They overestimated the good will of the Senate as a whole,” said Jody Conti, federal advocacy coordinator for the National Employment Law Project, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for low- and middle-income workers.
“The calls and e-mails we’re already getting are turning rapidly to, ‘Democrats have a supermajority, why can’t they move this through?’ Workers are placing the blame on both sides of the aisle,” said Conti.
Democratic strategists say their candidates will blast the GOP for obstruction. “If Republicans are stopping something as basic as helping the unemployed, they’re going to take a hit on it,” said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster…
…But he said gridlock would also hurt the party in control. “People are seeing that their lives are being played with because of party politics, and that’s bad for everyone,” he said.
The more people hate Congress, the more that feeds into the Republicans’ anti-government message. So, they have the luxury of using procedural moves to stall progress in Washington (even to the degree that it enrages a significant portion of the electorate) because the blame is spread out and hurts the party that wants to convince the people that the government can be a force for good.
There are obvious limits. The Republicans went too far in 1995 with the government shutdown and smoothed Clinton’s path to reelecton. But they enjoy a basic structural advantage in that the Democrats can’t really respond in kind when they are in the minority because they would catch nearly all the blame. In the case of Social Security privatization, it was a simple matter of the proposed legislation being incredibly unpopular. A less controversial bill proposed by a less unpopular president would not have been successfully stonewalled by the Democrats. It’s just not in their nature.
Getting back to the point at the top, the Obama administration certainly failed to communicate their strategy for passing health care reform in a way that would have made their friends comfortable with the compromises they were making, and this led to the narrative about backroom deals and selling out to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. But the kind of sordid deals that are required to pass reforms of this size are not the kind of things that look good in the light of day. It’s hard to win over a Ben Nelson to vote for your reforms if you are simultaneously telling your supporters that you cut something out of the reforms because Nelson is a whore to the insurance industry and it was the only way you could get his vote. And I don’t mean to single out Ben Nelson, because there were others who told the administration ‘no’ on a public option as far back as January.
It’s hard to be candid about the difficulties of passing reforms when you are reliant on the people who are creating those difficulties to help you in the end. And that’s what the GOP forced on the Obama administration with their unified opposition. Meanwhile, their use of procedural obstruction forced the administration to keep a constant eye on the congressional maze, which used up energy they needed to argue the case for reforms in the public square.
The Republicans really have been very effective. Even though they are incredibly unpopular, they’ve succeeded in making their opponents very unpopular, too. And the American people are wondering why the Democrats are having such a hard time passing their agenda, and giving them a healthy share of the blame.
