For once, I have to disagree with Steve Benen. There are certain instances where a president actually moves the country onto a long-term trajectory in a left or rightward direction. When Franklin Roosevelt created the SEC, FDIC, FHA, the Fair Labor standards, and Social Security, he moved the country decisively (and in some ways, irrevocably) to the left. When Ronald Reagan appointed conservative Supreme Court Justices, fired the Air Traffic controllers, hired conservatives to run his administration, and rewrote the tax code, he started a thirty-year movement to the right.
There have been other presidents since World War Two, but only Lyndon Johnson can stake a claim to being a transformative president, and his legacy is ambiguous. Arguably, he built on and entrenched the welfare state at the same time that he split the left and provided the momentum that the conservative movement needed to come into power with Reagan. The rest of the post-war presidents haven’t moved things too much in any particular direction, at least not in any enduring way. But Obama is different, and that is what Pete Wehner is worrying about when he says this:
Pete Wehner, a former top official in the George W. Bush administration and a social conservative thinker, described the resistance to Obama as “beyond politics.”
“What we’re having here are debates about first principles,” Wehner said. “A lot of people think he’s trying to transform the country in a liberal direction in the way that Ronald Reagan did in a conservative direction. This is not the normal push and pull of politics. It gets down to the purpose and meaning of America.”
Benen interprets that statement as a kind of double-standard, where it’s okay for the pendulum to move to the right under Reagan, but not okay for it to swing back to the left under a Democratic president. But that’s not what Wehner is getting at. He’s worried that a successful Obama presidency will wipe away all the progress (as he sees it) that the conservatives have made since Reagan took office. It’s not a ridiculous concern. No conservative wants to look around in 2016 and realize that they’re back to square one, circa 1980.
A lot of confusion has arisen because Obama has by instinct and necessity pursued a fairly traditional center-left course. His health care bill, for example, left liberals feeling half-full. His Wall Street reforms didn’t go far enough for their taste. His foreign policies have failed to forcefully challenge the Establishment’s assumptions. But just the health care bill alone has the power to permanently shift the political landscape in Washington in a way not seen since the enactment of Social Security. Liberals like to carp that the bill is similar to the Heritage Foundation’s 1994 counterproposal to HillaryCare. Yet, those liberals forget that that the counterproposal was offered in bad faith. The goal was to scuttle any health care bill while appearing to be reasonable. Obama established the principle that the federal government is responsible for making sure every U.S. citizen has access to health care. From now on, the debate will focus on how to improve services, not on whether or not they should exist. That’s transformation. And that’s what Pete Wehner fears. The health care bill punched a hole through Reagan’s sails, and by the time they get the thing patched up the boat will be headed in a leftward direction.
So, yes, the Republicans freak out any time a Democrat is in the White House. But this isn’t just the push and pull of politics. And the reaction on the right shows that they know this.
That’s why we’re seeing this unprecedented obstruction and open hallucination. They may have held the line on Wall Street reform (although that remains to be seen) and they’re holding steady (for now) on the Supreme Court, but they’ll be damned if they’re going to let the president pass immigration reform or cap and trade because they actually have the power to stop that kind of transformation.
