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January 22, 2009

Sizing Up Obama's Mandate

By Mike Memoli

For the first time in twelve years, Americans went to sleep on election night knowing who their next president would be. For the first time in sixteen years, one party will control the White House at the same time it maintains sizable margins in Congress. And Barack Obama, who won the general election by more than eight million popular votes, boasts historically high approval ratings as he assumes the presidency.

So what does this mean for his agenda?

Looking at the totality of these facts, it would seem that the new President has a mandate unmatched by any of his predecessors. But those same facts, when given a historical tilt, show that it's not quite that simple.

Total Control

Obama will have at least a 17-vote cushion in the Senate and a 78-seat majority in the House. When Bill Clinton took office - the last president to start with his party in the majority - he had an edge of 14 seats and 82 seats in those respective chambers. Clinton did pass a host of legislation in his first term. But he also suffered an embarrassing defeat when his biggest legislative proposal, health care reform, failed to even get a vote.

Clinton won his first term with only 43 percent of the popular vote in a three-person race. George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan won in landslides, but faced Democratic majorities in the House. You have to go as far back as Lyndon Johnson to find a president who won both a popular vote mandate and had a Congressional majority. But Johnson won his first election after having served as President for more than a year in the wake of JFK's assassination.

So one could argue that Obama finds himself with a mandate unequaled in recent history.

Spending His Capital

You would not know that by listening to Obama's rhetoric. He warns in practically every public statement that things will get worse before they get better, that he will make mistakes, and that there are no magic solutions to the country's problems. Obama rarely, if ever, has mentioned his margin of victory, preferring instead to talk about the national sentiment toward change. And on his first major piece of legislation, a stimulus package, Obama made a point of saying there was "no pride of authorship," and that he would consider any idea put on the table.

"One of the things that I think I'm trying to communicate in this process is for everybody to get past the habit that sometimes occurs in Washington: Whose idea is it, what ideological corner does it come from?" he said on January 9. "Just show me. If you can show me that something is going to work, I will welcome it. If it works better than something I have proposed, I will welcome it."

Compare that tone to his predecessor, who after winning more than 50 percent of the vote in 2004, famously declared, "I have earned capital, and I intend to spend it." After 2000, any margin of victory would have seemed large, but after his re-election Bush also had a wider majority in the Senate and House to work with. When he chose to expend that political capital on a Social Security plan that proved toxic, however, it weakened his hand on subsequent policy proposals. He has since said that choice was a mistake.

The Unforeseen Crisis

There is no doubt Obama has political capital. But how he spends may not be entirely up to him. Obama rolled out a long list of promises during his campaign knowing the economy was weakening, though certainly not expecting it to be in such dire straits as it is today. Now, with the unprecedented $775 billion stimulus package dominating the legislative landscape, other domestic priorities of the incoming President like national health care will remain stuck on his to-do list for the foreseeable future.

Even though Obama's party has a firm grip on Congress, brushback pitches thrown by some fellow Democrats already suggest that the new President will not have a rubber stamp on The Hill. There have been flare-ups over some senior administration picks, like Leon Panetta for CIA. This past Sunday House Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled more disagreements with Obama, saying she is open to prosecuting members of the Bush administration (Obama demurred on the same question in a television interview last Sunday) and also indicating she would prefer to repeal tax cuts on the top earners. Obama has hinted that he would wait until they expire on their own, or at least delay the repeal for one year.

Who Wants Change, After All?

The Obama team has said that while it knows the economic crisis will be at the forefront, the president is capable of pursuing his other goals as well. As Obama has said on multiple occasions, a president has to be able to multi task. And while the American people are, he believes, primed for change, it remains to be seen how much he can accomplish off the bat.

President Clinton's experience is instructive. With a similarly healthy majority to work with in Congress - though also a more conservative one - Clinton fired on a number of fronts in his first 100 days. Yet by the end of the period he had suffered several setbacks and was given a mixed report card.

"Clearly, I had overestimated how much I could do in a hurry," he wrote in his autobiography, My Life. "I may have overestimated the amount of change I could achieve, as well as how much of it the American people could digest."

Referring to one analyst who said that he may have spread himself thin, Clinton surmised: "He was probably right, but there was so much to do, and I didn't stop trying to do it all at once until the voters hit me between the eyes with a two-by-four in the 1994 midterm elections.

"I had let my sense of urgency blot out the memory of another of my laws of politics: Everyone is for change in general, but against it in particular, when they themselves have to change," he concluded.

Obama aides have downplayed the significance of the "First 100 Days" as a media creation, and Obama himself outlined the daunting road ahead in his inaugural address.

"The challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time," he said. "But know this, America: they will be met."

The outpouring thus far indicates that the nation will give its new leader time. Just how long remains to be seen.

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