Hss assignment – Due 6/5

Presidential capital isn’t significant – party support and divisions are key

Neustadt is correct that weak political parties in American politics do not bridge the gap created by the constitutional separation of powers. We would add: neither does skilled presidential leadership or popularity with the public. In fact, the forces that Neustadt stressed as the antidote for weak parties are even less successful in linking the president and Congress than are weak parties. Our findings indicate that members of Congress provide levels of support for the President that are generally consistent with their partisan and ideological predispositions. Because party and ideology are relatively stable, facing a Congress made up of more members predisposed to support the president does increase the likelihood of success on the floor. There is, however, considerable variation in the behavior of the party factions. As expected, cross-pressured members are typically divided, and when they unify, they unify against about as often as they unify for the president. Even members of the party bases who have reinforcing partisan and ideological predispositions frequently fail to unify for or against the president's position. Our analysis of party and committee leaders in Congress reveals that support from congressional leaders is associated with unity of the party factions. The party bases are likely to unify only if the party and committee leader of a party take the same position. But party and committee leaders within each party take opposing stands on a significant proportion of presidential roll calls. Because members of the party factions and their leaders frequently fail to unify around a party position, there is considerable uncertainty surrounding the outcome of presidential roll calls.

Ideology statistically outweighs PC

Beckmann and Kumar 11(Matthew N Beckmann and Vimal Kumar 11, Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine, econ prof at the Indian Institute of Tech, “Opportunism in Polarization”, Presidential Studies Quarterly; Sep 2011; 41, 3)

First, as previous research has shown, the further away the pivotal voter's predisposition from the president's side, the lower his chances for prevailing on "key" contested Senate votes (b = -2.53, se = .79,p < -05). Holding everything else at its 2008 value, the president's predicted probability of winning a key, contested vote runs from .42 to .77 across the observed range of filibuster pivot predispositions (farthest to closest), with the median distance yielding a .56 predicted probability of presidential success. Plainly, the greater the ideological distance between the president and pivotal voter, the worse the president's prospects for winning an important, controversial floor vote in the Senate.

Prefer qualified evidence – PC is irrelevant

Dickinson 9 professor of political science at Middlebury College (Matthew, “Sotomayor, Obama and Presidential Power,” May 26, 2009 Presidential Power http://blogs.middlebury.edu/presidentialpower/2009/05/26/sotamayor-obama-and-presidential-power/]

What is of more interest to me, however, is what her selection reveals about the basis of presidential power. Political scientists, like baseball writers evaluating hitters, have devised numerous means of measuring a president’s influence in Congress. I will devote a separate post to discussing these, but in brief, they often center on the creation of legislative “box scores” designed to measure how many times a president’s preferred piece of legislation, or nominee to the executive branch or the courts, is approved by Congress. That is, how many pieces of legislation that the president supports actually pass Congress? How often do members of Congress vote with the president’s preferences? How often is a president’s policy position supported by roll call outcomes? These measures, however, are a misleading gauge of presidential power – they are a better indicator of congressional power. This is because how members of Congress vote on a nominee or legislative item is rarely influenced by anything a president does. Although journalists (and political scientists) often focus on the legislative “endgame” to gauge presidential influence – will the President swing enough votes to get his preferred legislation enacted? – this mistakes an outcome with actual evidence of presidential influence. Once we control for other factors – a member of Congress’ ideological and partisan leanings, the political leanings of her constituency, whether she’s up for reelection or not – we can usually predict how she will vote without needing to know much of anything about what the president wants. (I am ignoring the importance of a president’s veto power for the moment.) Despite the much publicized and celebrated instances of presidential arm-twisting during the legislative endgame, then, most legislative outcomes don’t depend on presidential lobbying. But this is not to say that presidents lack influence. Instead, the primary means by which presidents influence what Congress does is through their ability to determine the alternatives from which Congress must choose. That is, presidential power is largely an exercise in agenda-setting – not arm-twisting. And we see this in the Sotomayer nomination. Barring a major scandal, she will almost certainly be confirmed to the Supreme Court whether Obama spends the confirmation hearings calling every Senator or instead spends the next few weeks ignoring the Senate debate in order to play Halo III on his Xbox. That is, how senators decide to vote on Sotomayor will have almost nothing to do with Obama’s lobbying from here on in (or lack thereof). His real influence has already occurred, in the decision to present Sotomayor as his nominee. If we want to measure Obama’s “power”, then, we need to know what his real preference was and why he chose Sotomayor. My guess – and it is only a guess – is that after conferring with leading Democrats and Republicans, he recognized the overriding practical political advantages accruing from choosing an Hispanic woman, with left-leaning credentials. We cannot know if this would have been his ideal choice based on judicial philosophy alone, but presidents are never free to act on their ideal preferences. Politics is the art of the possible. Whether Sotomayer is his first choice or not, however, her nomination is a reminder that the power of the presidency often resides in the president’s ability to dictate the alternatives from which Congress (or in this case the Senate) must choose. Although Republicans will undoubtedly attack Sotomayor for her judicial “activism” (citing in particular her decisions regarding promotion and affirmative action), her comments regarding the importance of gender and ethnicity in influencing her decisions, and her views regarding whether appellate courts “make” policy, they run the risk of alienating Hispanic voters – an increasingly influential voting bloc (to the extent that one can view Hispanics as a voting bloc!) I find it very hard to believe she will not be easily confirmed. In structuring the alternative before the Senate in this manner, then, Obama reveals an important aspect of presidential power that cannot be measured through legislative boxscores.

Presidential leadership’s irrelevant

Jacobs and King 10, University of Minnesota, Nuffield College, (Lawrence and Desmond, “Varieties of Obamaism: Structure, Agency, and the Obama Presidency,” Perspectives on Politics (2010), 8: 793-802)

But personality is not a solid foundation for a persuasive explanation of presidential impact and the shortfalls or accomplishments of Obama's presidency. Modern presidents have brought divergent individual traits to their jobs and yet they have routinely failed to enact much of their agendas. Preeminent policy goals of Bill Clinton (health reform) and George W. Bush (Social Security privatization) met the same fate, though these presidents' personalities vary widely. And presidents like Jimmy Carter—whose personality traits have been criticized as ill-suited for effective leadership—enjoyed comparable or stronger success in Congress than presidents lauded for their personal knack for leadership—from Lyndon Johnson to Ronald Reagan.7 Indeed, a personalistic account provides little leverage for explaining the disparities in Obama's record—for example why he succeeded legislatively in restructuring health care and higher education, failed in other areas, and often accommodated stakeholders. Decades of rigorous research find that impersonal, structural forces offer the most compelling explanations for presidential impact.8 Quantitative research that compares legislative success and presidential personality finds no overall relationship.9 In his magisterial qualitative and historical study, Stephen Skowronek reveals that institutional dynamics and ideological commitments structure presidential choice and success in ways that trump the personal predilections of individual presidents.10 Findings point to the predominant influence on presidential legislative success of the ideological and partisan composition of Congress, entrenched interests, identities, and institutional design, and a constitutional order that invites multiple and competing lines of authority. The widespread presumption, then, that Obama's personal traits or leadership style account for the obstacles to his policy proposals is called into question by a generation of scholarship on the presidency. Indeed, the presumption is not simply problematic analytically, but practically as well. For the misdiagnosis of the source of presidential weakness may, paradoxically, induce failure by distracting the White House from strategies and tactics where presidents can make a difference. Following a meeting with Obama shortly after Brown's win, one Democratic senator lamented the White House's delusion that a presidential sales pitch will pass health reform—“Just declaring that he's still for it doesn't mean that it comes off life support.”11 Although Obama's re-engagement after the Brown victory did contribute to restarting reform, the senator's comment points to the importance of ideological and partisan coalitions in Congress, organizational combat, institutional roadblocks, and anticipated voter reactions. Presidential sales pitches go only so far.

PC Not Key – Gridlock

PC fails – polarization and Obama controversy

PBS, 12-15 [2014 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/whats-outlook-compromise-next-congress/]

On the Democratic side, there is much more unity around policies. Procedure, they may have differences. So that’s number one. The second part, when we talk about the polarization of Congress and why it’s getting to be as bad as it is, there just are simply no moderates left. There are five Democrats in the House right now, five, who sit in a district that Barack Obama didn’t carry. When we talk about, how does John Boehner find allies, how does Mitch McConnell find allies, they’re gone. The other big piece of this too is, in more than 100 years, we have never had this many House members serving in the United States Senate, which is why the House is looking — I mean the Senate — I’m sorry — is looking a lot more like the House in terms of its behavior, the all or none, the not compromising, the not working sort of behind the scenes in a clubby way. JUDY WOODRUFF: Taking it to the brink. AMY WALTER: Yes. JUDY WOODRUFF: Taking it to the brink. AMY WALTER: Yes. JUDY WOODRUFF: And so that’s what we have to look forward to. TODD ZWILLICH: Well, I think a lot of that, Barack Obama is controversial. He’s controversial on the right. He’s got two more years. He still ties House Republicans especially, congressional Republicans, in knots. Look, they this know how to make deals. Their base, their constituency — constituency doesn’t want any deals with Barack Obama. That’s not going to change. And that’s going to pull both Speaker Boehner as he tries to deal with the reaction to immigration and Mitch McConnell as he tries to steer his party towards a successful run in 2016, it’s going to pull them to the right. It’s not easy.

Obama PC fails post-election – low approval ratings, no compromise, controversial XOs, summit travel and 2016 election focus

Clark and Kumar 11-4 [Lesley Clark and Anita Kumar, McClatchy Washington Bureau 11-4-2014 http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/11/04/245686_president-obama-is-now-truly-a.html?rh=1]

Now, President Barack Obama limps into his final two years in office. All second-term presidents lose considerable clout at this mark. But Obama’s time as a lame duck comes amid a political climate so fractured that compromise between Congress and him is all but impossible. And the Republican takeover of the Senate only further complicates his power to confront a confounding array of foreign and domestic policy challenges. The range of crises is daunting. Though the U.S. economy is growing at a healthy clip, wages are stagnant and the global economy is faltering. The Islamic State group has racked up victories in Iraq and Syria, testing the administration’s policies, even as the U.S. rains down airstrikes. The appearance of the deadly Ebola virus in the United States has rattled Americans and raised questions about whether a weary White House can handle several crises at once. A budget deal that bought peace with Congress for a while is nearing its end. Against that backdrop, Obama will head to Asia and Australia next week for summit meetings, even as the old Congress returns to Washington for its own lame-duck session to finish work on the budget and other issues. And a new Republican-led Senate looms over the horizon. Obama will make one move without Congress. Aides said Tuesday that he’d sign an executive order by the end of December giving temporary legal status to help some of the 11 million immigrants who are in the country illegally stay and work in the U.S. He’d delayed the order earlier this fall, when endangered Democrats feared that a backlash would cost them their jobs. With that, he might have little room left to work with a GOP-led Congress. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said after he won re-election Tuesday and appeared poised to become Senate majority leader that he and Obama “have an obligation to work together on issues on which we agree.” But he also was defiant. “I don’t expect the president to wake up tomorrow morning and view the world any differently,” McConnell said. “He knows I won’t, either.” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said after his party took control of the Senate that voters rejected Obama’s “failed polices” and that he hoped Obama would “listen to the American people” just like the Republicans planned to do. Obama is likely to speak publicly Wednesday about the election results. A meeting on Friday with congressional leaders at the White House could be chilly. “There would have to be some really exceptional set of events to get people who have shown no interest in cooperating to get something done,” said Ken Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the presidency. “It is very hard to see how there is any substantial legislation.” All this while much of Washington and the political world tunes out Obama and starts looking in earnest for his successor. The political calendar renders the outgoing president “yesterday’s news” as soon as the midterm elections are over and the 2016 presidential race begins, said Lou D’Allesandro, a veteran New Hampshire state senator and Democratic operative. “If you’re the president, what big initiatives are you going to do here?” asked D’Allesandro, who’s already seen a parade of 2016 hopefuls courting voters in New Hampshire. “Republicans will do everything they can to accomplish nothing.” Obama enters these final months already hampered by low approval ratings that made him radioactive to most Democrats running in close elections this year. He spent the last two days leading up to Election Day in meetings at the White House.

Nothing will pass and Obama PC fails

WSJ, 10-15 [Wall Street Journal, 2014 http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/10/15/low-expectations-for-congresss-lame-duck-session/]

There are two schools of thought about the coming lame-duck session. The Optimist School believes that Congress will work on a whole slew of must-pass legislation, including an omnibus appropriations bill, a host of tax extenders, terrorism risk insurance, perhaps some trade bills, and other cats and dogs. The optimists are all about scoring last-minute touchdowns. The Pessimist School believes that nothing will get done during the lame duck, with the possible exception of a continuing resolution that has some agreed-upon updated spending bills attached to it. The pessimists are all about punting. Over and over again. The optimists think that the new Republican Senate majority would want to get several things off the docket so it can start fresh in the president’s final two years in office. The pessimists think that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would burn up most of the time in the lame duck pushing through nominations and judicial appointments, including the replacement for Attorney General Eric Holder. My heart aligns me with the optimists, because I want to see Congress actually do its job. My head, however, has learned to be realistic about the dysfunction that now rules the United States Senate. President Barack Obama should want Congress to get the mundane stuff finished so that he can focus on his legacy in his final years in office. But he is so ineffectual, beleaguered, and disengaged that his opinions are unlikely to matter much. With so much in the world going to pieces these days, it’s hard to be optimistic about anything–especially the coming lame duck.

PC Not Key – Doesn’t Spillover

PC doesn’t spill over – compartmentalization

Timothy Sherratt 12-1, Capital Commentary, 12/1/14, “Governing After the Midterms: Intransigence or Productivity?,” http://www.capitalcommentary.org/midterm-elections/governing-after-midterms-intransigence-or-productivity

There is reason to think that President Obama may survive his executive action on immigration given the incentives for Republican leadership to lead the party firmly away from intransigence towards productivity. What will guard against spillover effects from the immigration struggle is that each of the congressional committees is a separate fiefdom with its own dynamics, and Republican committee chairs will be eager to put their own imprint on their respective policy domains, especially in the Senate where the G.O.P. assumes control in January. For some of those Republicans, among them Senators Paul, Rubio, Cruz and a few others, presidential aspirations for 2016 will lend extra urgency to these efforts.

So, Senator Hatch at Senate Finance will want repeal of the medical device tax whether or not Senator Inhofe at Environment and Public Works successfully steers the Keystone XL Pipeline to the president. The new House Ways and Means chair, Paul Ryan, will press for renewing Trade Promotion Authority, which “fast tracks” trade agreements through a simple up-or-down vote in Congress. President Obama will support such a move irrespective of attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Bipartisan support for tax reform can survive Republican intransigence on judicial appointments.

PC Not Key – Obama Can’t Use

Obama won’t fight – he has never used political capital

Newsweek 10 (“Learning from LBJ,” 3-25, http://www.newsweek.com/2010/03/25/learning-from-lbj.html)

It's called "the treatment." All presidents administer it, one way or another. The trick is to use the perks of the office and the power of personality to bring around doubters and foes. LBJ was the most outlandish and sometimes outrageous practitioner. With three televisions blasting in the background, Johnson would get about six inches away from the face of some beleaguered or balky senator or cabinet secretary. Sometimes LBJ would beckon the man into the bathroom and continue to cajole or harangue while he sat on the toilet. Air Force One is a favorite tool presidents use to inspire and overawe. With much guffawing and backslapping, recalcitrant lawmakers are led to a luxurious cabin where they are granted a presidential audience and bestowed with swag, like cuff links with the presidential seal (Johnson gave away plastic busts of himself). Dennis Kucinich, seven-term congressman from Ohio and potential vote-switcher for health reform, was invited aboard Air Force One a couple of weeks before the climactic vote in the House. He had dealt with Presidents Clinton and Bush before, but Obama was different. The president was sitting in shirt sleeves behind a desk, computer to one side, notepad and pen at the ready. "He doesn't twist arms," recalls Kucinich. Rather, the president quietly listened. He was "all business," and sat patiently while Kucinich expressed his concerns, which Obama already knew. Then the president laid out his own arguments. Kucinich wasn't persuaded by the president, he told NEWSWEEK. But he voted for the bill because he did not want the presidency to fail, and he was convinced Obama would work with him in future. A president's first year in office is often a time for learning. The harshest lessons are beginners' mistakes, like the Bay of Pigs fiasco for JFK. The real key is to figure out how to use the prestige of the office to get things done: when to conserve your political capital, and when and how to spend it. Judging from Obama's campaign, which revolutionized politics with its ability to tap grassroots networks of donors and activists, many expected President Obama to go over the heads of Congress and mobilize popular passions to achieve his top priorities. But on what may be his signature issue, that wasn't really the case. Obama came close to prematurely ending his effectiveness as president before finally pulling out the stops. In the last push for the health-care bill, he reminded voters of Obama the candidate, fiery and full of hope. But during the health-reform bill's long slog up and around Capitol Hill, Obama was a strangely passive figure. He sometimes seemed more peeved than engaged. His backers naturally wondered why he seemed to abandon the field to the tea partiers. The answer may be that at some level he just doesn't like politics, not the way Bill Clinton or LBJ or a "happy warrior" like Hubert Humphrey thrived on the press of flesh, the backroom deal, and the roar of the crowd. That doesn't mean Obama can't thrive or be successful—even Richard Nixon was elected to two terms. But it does mean that the country is run by what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wryly called "the conquering professor"—a president who leads more from the head than the heart, who often relies more on listening than preaching. Obama entered politics as a community organizer, and as a presidential candidate he oversaw an operation that brilliantly organized from the ground up. So it was a puzzle to Marshall Ganz, a longtime community organizer, that Obama seemed to neglect the basic rule of a grassroots organizer: to mobilize and, if necessary, polarize your popular base against a common enemy. Instead, President Obama seemed to withdraw and seek not to offend while Congress squabbled. "It was a curiously passive strategy," says Ganz, who worked for 16 years with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers and now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School. In a way, he says, Obama's "fear of a small conflict made a big conflict inevitable."

PC Not Key – Obama

Political capital theory isn’t true with this congress

Bouie 11 =(Jamelle, graduate of the U of Virginia, Writing Fellow for The American Prospect magazine, May 5, [prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=05&year=2011&base_name=political_capital)

Unfortunately, political capital isn’t that straightforward. As we saw at the beginning of Obama’s presidency, the mere fact of popularity (or a large congressional majority) doesn’t guarantee support from key members of Congress. For Obama to actually sign legislation to reform the immigration system, provide money for jobs, or reform corporate taxes, he needs unified support from his party and support from a non-trivial number of Republicans. Unfortunately, Republicans (and plenty of Democrats) aren’t interested in better immigration laws, fiscal stimulus, or liberal tax reform. Absent substantive leverage—and not just high approval ratings—there isn’t much Obama can do to pressure these members (Democrats and Republicans) into supporting his agenda. Indeed, for liberals who want to see Obama use his political capital, it’s worth noting that approval-spikes aren’t necessarily related to policy success. George H.W. Bush’s major domestic initiatives came before his massive post-Gulf War approval bump, and his final year in office saw little policy success. George W. Bush was able to secure No Child Left Behind, the Homeland Security Act, and the Authorization to Use Military Force in the year following 9/11, but the former two either came with pre-9/11 Democratic support or were Democratic initiatives to begin with. To repeat an oft-made point, when it comes to domestic policy, the presidency is a limited office with limited resources. Popularity with the public is a necessary part of presidential success in Congress, but it’s far from sufficient.

History and empirics prove Obama PC irrelevant

Norman Ornstein is a long-time observer of Congress and politics. He is a contributing editor and columnist for National Journal and The Atlantic and is an election eve analyst for BBC News. He served as codirector of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project and participates in AEI's Election Watch series. 5-8-2013 http://www.aei.org/article/politics-and-public-opinion/executive/the-myth-of-presidential-leadership/

The theme of presidential leadership is a venerated one in America, the subject of many biographies and an enduring mythology about great figures rising to the occasion. The term “mythology” doesn’t mean that the stories are inaccurate; Lincoln, the wonderful Steven Spielberg movie, conveyed a real sense of that president’s remarkable character and drive, as well as his ability to shape important events. Every president is compared to the Lincoln leadership standard and to those set by other presidents, and the first 100 days of every term becomes a measure of how a president is doing.¶ I have been struck by this phenomenon a lot recently, because at nearly every speech I give, someone asks about President Obama’s failure to lead. Of course, that question has been driven largely by the media, perhaps most by Bob Woodward. When Woodward speaks, Washington listens, and he has pushed the idea that Obama has failed in his fundamental leadership task—not building relationships with key congressional leaders the way Bill Clinton did, and not “working his will” the way LBJ or Ronald Reagan did.¶ Now, after the failure to get the background-check bill through the Senate, other reporters and columnists have picked up on the same theme, and I have grown increasingly frustrated with how the mythology of leadership has been spread in recent weeks. I have yelled at the television set, “Didn’t any of you ever read Richard Neustadt’s classic Presidential Leadership? Haven’t any of you taken Politics 101 and read about the limits of presidential power in a separation-of-powers system?”¶ But the issue goes beyond that, to a willful ignorance of history. No one schmoozed more or better with legislators in both parties than Clinton. How many Republican votes did it get him on his signature initial priority, an economic plan? Zero in both houses. And it took eight months to get enough Democrats to limp over the finish line. How did things work out on his health care plan? How about his impeachment in the House?¶ No one knew Congress, or the buttons to push with every key lawmaker, better than LBJ. It worked like a charm in his famous 89th, Great Society Congress, largely because he had overwhelming majorities of his own party in both houses. But after the awful midterms in 1966, when those swollen majorities receded, LBJ’s mastery of Congress didn’t mean squat.¶ No one defined the agenda or negotiated more brilliantly than Reagan. Did he “work his will”? On almost every major issue, he had to make major compromises with Democrats, including five straight years with significant tax increases. But he was able to do it—as he was able to achieve a breakthrough on tax reform—because he had key Democrats willing to work with him and find those compromises.¶ For Obama, we knew from the get-go that he had no Republicans willing to work with him. As Robert Draper pointed out in his book Do Not Ask What Good We Do, key GOP leaders such as Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan determined on inauguration eve in January 2009 that they would work to keep Obama and his congressional Democratic allies from getting any Republican votes for any of his priorities or initiatives. Schmoozing was not going to change that.¶ Nor would arm-twisting. On the gun-control vote in the Senate, the press has focused on the four apostate Democrats who voted against the Manchin-Toomey plan, and the unwillingness of the White House to play hardball with Democrat Mark Begich of Alaska. But even if Obama had bludgeoned Begich and his three colleagues to vote for the plan, the Democrats would still have fallen short of the 60 votes that are now the routine hurdle in the Senate—because 41 of 45 Republicans voted no. And as Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., has said, several did so just to deny Obama a victory.¶ Indeed, the theme of presidential arm-twisting again ignores history. Clinton once taught Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama a lesson, cutting out jobs in Huntsville, Ala. That worked well enough that Shelby switched parties, joined the Republicans, and became a reliable vote against Clinton. George W. Bush and Karl Rove decided to teach Sen. Jim Jeffords a lesson, punishing dairy interests in Vermont. That worked even better—he switched to independent status and cost the Republicans their Senate majority. Myths are so much easier than reality.

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