RSS Feed MenuMatt Yglesias had a blogpost the other day arguing that it’s not Obama’s fault that his healthcare agenda has stalled.
The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it’s the fact that the country has become ungovernable.
The more historically minded will remember that we have heard this complaint before.
A particular shortcoming in need of a remedy is the structural inability of our government to propose, legislate and administer a balanced program for governing. In parliamentary terms, one might say that under the U.S. Constitution it is not now feasible to “form a Government.”
That’s former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler, writing in Foreign Affairs in Fall 1980 at the end of Jimmy Carter’s disastrous single term in office. A few weeks later, American voters concluded that if Carter could not govern, maybe his opponent could. Over the next eight years, Ronald Reagan presided over the most dramatic reform program since the New Deal – despite the opposition party holding the House throughout both his terms, and the loss of the Senate in his second. Turned out the country was governable after all.
Obama isn’t looking like Carter yet. But the sound of this kind of excuse is the sound of Carterization.
CentristNYer // Dec 16, 2009 at 4:06 pm
First of all, let’s distinguish between what a blogger — a completely non-interested party — observes with what an actual WH official puts out. This is as apples-to-oranges as you get.
Secondly, Yglesias’ point is certainly more well founded than Cutler’s, who was operating in an era in which talk radio was in its infancy, the Internet was barely a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, GOP-TV (aka Fox News) was non-existent and the power to mobilize large, fanatical forces was significantly more difficult. You also didn’t have elected members of the opposition party wasting a year trying to delegitimize the president with phony birther controversies and screams of “socialism!” and “death panels!” over his efforts to reform the health care industry.
While I concur that calling the nation ungovernable is certainly a stretch, it’s more than fair to say that the forces aligned against Obama are far more toxic, far more ideologically extreme and far more unhinged than anything Carter ever faced.
balconesfault // Dec 16, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Yglesias is wrong – the country is actually being governed much better these days.
If you speak with anyone on the regulatory side of the fence, you’ll find out that they are being empowered to perform their audit and enforcement functions with an authority to comply with the law they haven’t had in almost a decade. Other parts of the bureaucracy are being rebuilt after years of being run by people who fundamentally believed they shouldn’t even exist.
What the Dems are hampered by right now is the Republican obstructionism over legislation – which is only one aspect of governance. The problem here are Republicans who believe that failure of the system is better than repairs that they don’t like. Obama was wrong to think that he could broach this divide.
sinz54 // Dec 16, 2009 at 4:29 pm
I think it’s premature to compare Obama to Carter.
1. Unlike the Carter Administration, the Obama Administration has not whined that the job of President looks impossible. Yglesias is entitled to his own opinion.
2. Unlike Carter, Obama has not blamed the American people for his own difficulties. At least, not yet.
The Carter Administration didn’t crash and burn in this way till 1979, the third year of Carter’s presidency. At the close of Carter’s first year, things didn’t yet look too bad.
So let’s wait and see how things are in a year or two.
balconesfault // Dec 16, 2009 at 5:08 pm
At the close of Carter’s first year, things didn’t yet look too bad.
Well, to be fair, Nixon/Ford were FAR better Presidents than GW was.
mlindroo // Dec 16, 2009 at 5:11 pm
CentristNYer wrote:
> While I concur that calling the nation ungovernable is certainly a stretch,
> it’s more than fair to say that the forces aligned against Obama are far more toxic,
> far more ideologically extreme and far more unhinged than anything Carter ever faced.
Well, the parties are certainly much more ideologically sorted now… When Carter was president, the GOP still had many Rockefeller Republicans while the Democrats had lots of conservatives from the South. Congress wasn’t as polarized, e.g. there were far fewer filibusters than today.
MARCU$
sinz54 // Dec 16, 2009 at 5:37 pm
mlindroo: Well, the parties are certainly much more ideologically sorted now
The nation is more ideologically sorted.
Studies have shown that in recent years, a greater percentage of Congressional districts are so-called “landslide districts,” in which one party usually wins handily, than in decades past.
balconesfault // Dec 16, 2009 at 7:25 pm
The nation is more ideologically sorted.
Studies have shown that in recent years, a greater percentage of Congressional districts are so-called “landslide districts,” in which one party usually wins handily, than in decades past.
Well, you can thank computers for that. It’s made it MUCH easier for demographers and state legislatures to play with congressional boundaries and come up with abominations like the Texas Congressional District Map:
http://congdistdata.tamu.edu/USCongressionalDistricts.pdf
Check out the shapes – particularly 6, 10, 14, 15, 17, 19, and 21. That wasn’t ideological sorting by any natural process – that was ideological sorting by legislative fiat.
Carney // Dec 16, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Remember how New York City was “ungovernable” too? Permanently in the grip of leftist interests who benefited from its downward spiral? Rudy changed that.
sinz54 // Dec 17, 2009 at 9:33 am
balconesfault: That wasn’t ideological sorting by any natural process – that was ideological sorting by legislative fiat.
Yes, and the trend is actually working to the Dems’ disadvantage.
In recent decades, gerrymandering has herded huge numbers of minority voters into minority districts. Such a district, with a huge number of minority voters, will always vote strongly Dem–but it will still get just one Representative, equal to some sparsely populated white Repub district in a Red State somewhere.
I posted an analysis on this by FiveThirtyEight.com some time ago.
True, there are also gerrymandered white conservative districts in Red States–but those districts tend to have smaller populations. The result is that a small population in a Red State can outvote a large minority population in a Blue State.
This was a major factor in explaining the Gingrich sweep of Congress in 1994. Polls showed that the voters were roughly evenly split between preferring Dems and preferring Repubs. But the gerrymandering factor tilted the race toward a conservative sweep.