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***NEG POLITICAL CAPITAL***



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***NEG POLITICAL CAPITAL***

Obama Gets Credit/Blame

Obama is the Velcro president – all agency action links.


Nicholas and Hook 10. (Peter and Janet, Staff Writers – LA Times, “Obama the Velcro president”, LA Times, 7-30, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/30/nation/la-na-velcro-presidency-20100730/3)

If Ronald Reagan was the classic Teflon president, Barack Obama is made of Velcro. Through two terms, Reagan eluded much of the responsibility for recession and foreign policy scandal. In less than two years, Obama has become ensnared in blame. Hoping to better insulate Obama, White House aides have sought to give other Cabinet officials a higher profile and additional public exposure. They are also crafting new ways to explain the president's policies to a skeptical public. But Obama remains the colossus of his administration — to a point where trouble anywhere in the world is often his to solve. The president is on the hook to repair the Gulf Coast oil spill disaster, stabilize Afghanistan, help fix Greece's ailing economy and do right by Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department official fired as a result of a misleading fragment of videotape. What's not sticking to Obama is a legislative track record that his recent predecessors might envy. Political dividends from passage of a healthcare overhaul or a financial regulatory bill have been fleeting. Instead, voters are measuring his presidency by a more immediate yardstick: Is he creating enough jobs? So far the verdict is no, and that has taken a toll on Obama's approval ratings. Only 46% approve of Obama's job performance, compared with 47% who disapprove, according to Gallup's daily tracking poll. "I think the accomplishments are very significant, but I think most people would look at this and say, 'What was the plan for jobs?' " said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.). "The agenda he's pushed here has been a very important agenda, but it hasn't translated into dinner table conversations." Reagan was able to glide past controversies with his popularity largely intact. He maintained his affable persona as a small-government advocate while seeming above the fray in his own administration. Reagan was untarnished by such calamities as the 1983 terrorist bombing of the Marines stationed in Beirut and scandals involving members of his administration. In the 1986 Iran-Contra affair, most of the blame fell on lieutenants. Obama lately has tried to rip off the Velcro veneer. In a revealing moment during the oil spill crisis, he reminded Americans that his powers aren't "limitless." He told residents in Grand Isle, La., that he is a flesh-and-blood president, not a comic-book superhero able to dive to the bottom of the sea and plug the hole. "I can't suck it up with a straw," he said. But as a candidate in 2008, he set sky-high expectations about what he could achieve and what government could accomplish. Clinching the Democratic nomination two years ago, Obama described the moment as an epic breakthrough when "we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless" and "when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Those towering goals remain a long way off. And most people would have preferred to see Obama focus more narrowly on the "good jobs" part of the promise. A recent Gallup poll showed that 53% of the population rated unemployment and the economy as the nation's most important problem. By contrast, only 7% cited healthcare — a single-minded focus of the White House for a full year. At every turn, Obama makes the argument that he has improved lives in concrete ways. Without the steps he took, he says, the economy would be in worse shape and more people would be out of work. There's evidence to support that. Two economists, Mark Zandi and Alan Blinder, reported recently that without the stimulus and other measures, gross domestic product would be about 6.5% lower. Yet, Americans aren't apt to cheer when something bad doesn't materialize. Unemployment has been rising — from 7.7% when Obama took office, to 9.5%. Last month, more than 2 million homes in the U.S. were in various stages of foreclosure — up from 1.7 million when Obama was sworn in. "Folks just aren't in a mood to hand out gold stars when unemployment is hovering around 10%," said Paul Begala, a Democratic pundit. Insulating the president from bad news has proved impossible. Other White Houses have tried doing so with more success. Reagan's Cabinet officials often took the blame, shielding the boss. But the Obama administration is about one man. Obama is the White House's chief spokesman, policy pitchman, fundraiser and negotiator. No Cabinet secretary has emerged as an adequate surrogate. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner is seen as a tepid public speaker; Energy Secretary Steven Chu is prone to long, wonky digressions and has rarely gone before the cameras during an oil spill crisis that he is working to end. So, more falls to Obama, reinforcing the Velcro effect: Everything sticks to him. He has opined on virtually everything in the hundreds of public statements he has made: nuclear arms treaties, basketball star LeBron James' career plans; Chelsea Clinton's wedding. Few audiences are off-limits. On Wednesday, he taped a spot on ABC's "The View," drawing a rebuke from Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell, who deemed the appearance unworthy of the presidency during tough times. "Stylistically he creates some of those problems," Eddie Mahe, a Republican political strategist, said in an interview. "His favorite pronoun is 'I.' When you position yourself as being all things to all people, the ultimate controller and decision maker with the capacity to fix anything, you set yourself up to be blamed when it doesn't get fixed or things happen." A new White House strategy is to forgo talk of big policy changes that are easy to ridicule. Instead, aides want to market policies as more digestible pieces. So, rather than tout the healthcare package as a whole, advisors will talk about smaller parts that may be more appealing and understandable — such as barring insurers from denying coverage based on preexisting conditions. But at this stage, it may be late in the game to downsize either the president or his agenda. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said: "The man came in promising change. He has a higher profile than some presidents because of his youth, his race and the way he came to the White House with the message he brought in. It's naive to believe he can step back and have some Cabinet secretary be the face of the oil spill. The buck stops with his office."

Obama will get the blame for all policies passed – the hill is too polarized for any blame deflection.


Politico 9. [2-13-09 -- http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/18827.html]

The Washington climate, which led to a party-line vote on the stimulus, has big political implications: It means that Obama will have sole ownership -- whether that means credit or blame -- for all the massive changes in government he envisions over the coming year.

Presidents are the focal point of politics – they get the credit/blame.


CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer 4/28/02

Bruce Morton, Cnn Correspondent: Networks will often air whatever the president says, even if he's praising the Easter Bunny. Blitzer: Competing for face time on the cable news networks. Stay with us. Blitzer: Welcome back. Time now for Bruce Morton's essay on the struggle for balanced coverage on the cable networks. Morton: The Democrats have written the three cable news networks -- CNN, Fox and MSNBC -- complaining that the Bush administration gets much more coverage than elected Democrats. They cite CNN, which they say, from January 1 through March 21, aired 157 live events involving the Bush administration, and 7 involving elected Democrats. Fox and MS, they say, did much the same thing. The coverage gap is certainly real, for several reasons. First, since September 11, the U.S. has been at war in Afghanistan, so the president has been an active commander in chief. And covering the war, networks will often air whatever the president says, even if he's praising the Easter Bunny. Plus, the White House press secretary's briefing, the Pentagon's, maybe the State Department's. Why not? It's easy, it's cheap, the cameras are pooled, and in war time, the briefings may make major news. You never know. But there's a reason for the coverage gap that's older than Mr. Bush's administration. In war or peace, the president is a commanding figure -- one man to whose politics and character and, nowadays, sex life, endless attention is paid. Congress is 535 people. What it does is complicated, compromises on budget items done in private, and lacks the drama of the White House. There's a primetime TV show about a president. None about the Congress. If a small newspaper has one reporter in Washington, he'll cover two things, the local congressional delegation and, on big occasions, the White House. So the complaining Democrats have a point, but it's worth remembering that coverage of a president, while always intense, isn't always positive. You could ask the Clintons. 9 Presidents will always get more coverage than Congresses. They're sexier. But it won't always be coverage they like.

Presidency is the focal point of politics – president gets the credit or the blame, deserved or not


Rosati 4. [Jerel A., University of South Carolina Government and International Studies professor THE POLITICS OF UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY, 2004, p. 80]

Given the popular image of presidential power, presidents receive credit when things are perceived as going well and are blamed when things go badly. Unfortunately, American politics and the policy process are incredibly complex and beyond considerable presidential control. With so many complex issues and problems to address – the debt problem, the economy, energy, welfare, education, the environment, foreign policy – this is a very demanding time to be president. As long as presidential promises and public expectations remain high, the president’s job becomes virtually an impossible task. Should success occur, given the lack of presidential power, it is probably not by the president’s own design. Nonetheless, the president – the person perceived to be the leader of the country – will be rewarded in terms of public prestige, greater power, and reelection (for him or his successor). However, if the president is perceived as unsuccessful – a failure – this results not only in a weakened president but one the public wants replaced, creating the opportunity to challenge an incumbent president or his heir as presidential nominee.


AT: He’ll Avoid the Plan- Thumper Proves

Our story on the thumper is consistent – presidents make choices about which initiatives to push and spend capital on.


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

Returning to our model and its implications, we see a prerequisite to presidential influence is the president's willingness and ability to spend political capital lobbying lawmakers. When a president either chooses not to get involved (A = 0) or lacks political capital to spend (B = 0), the pivotal senator will propose and pass her preferred bill. In such circumstances, the chamber's preference distribution does not matter; the president will have no influence. In other circumstances - ones commonplace since Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the Oval Office - the president not only seeks to exert influence on Capitol Hill, but also wields some political capital to invest to that end. We now turn to these cases and in doing so uncover how presidents' influence turns on more than his supply of political capital and the location of the pivotal voter; it also depends on the level ideological polarization. Let us explain.


This agenda prioritization is key to passage.


Beckmann and Kumar 11. [Matthew, Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine, Vimal, econ prof at the Indian Institute of Tech, “How presidents pus, when presidents win: A model of positive presidential power in US lawmaking” Journal of Theoretical Politics, Vol 23 Issue 1]

The first and perhaps most important prescription is that the White House does not treat all presidential positions equally: most receive nothing more than a mere comment, a precious few get the White House’s ‘full court press’, and such prioritizing matters. Specifically, our basic hypothesis holds that presidents’ positive influence depends heavily on lobbying to work. The corollary, therefore, is that the crucial test of presidents’ influence is not whether ‘skilled’ presidents fare better than their ‘unskilled’ counterparts, but rather whether Congress responds differently to bills depending on the presidents’ lobbying, all else being equal.

President has to push the plan – otherwise it never makes the agenda


Cohen and Collier 99 – Jeffrey Cohen, professor of political science at Fordham University, and Ken Collier, assistant professor at the University of Kansas, 1999, Presidential Policymaking: An End of Century Assessment, ed. Shull, p. 45

Presidential influence over the congressional agenda aims not only to open the gates for some issues but to block other issues from progressing through the policymaking process. Presidents may try to block some issues by not addressing them, by being inattentive. Often presidential involvement is required for a policy to get onto the agenda. Lack of presidential attention may signal that the problem is not as important as others. Policy advocates seek to prove that their issue is worthy of national attention; getting the presidential “stamp of approval,” may be a necessary step in making an issue “national.”


Normal Means = Obama Push – Bulk Data

Obama will push Congress to reform – that links


  1. Empirics (2) Gridlock (3) GOP majority (4) Terrorism fears

Hattern 15 [Julian Hattem, Staff Writer at The Hill 2-11-2015 http://thehill.com/policy/technology/232437-obama-defers-to-congress-to-end-nsa-phone-tracking]

President Obama won’t end the government’s controversial collection of data about millions of Americans on his own, because he’d rather the matter be dealt with by Congress. “I’m still hopeful that we can actually get a bill passed,” Obama told BuzzFeed News in an interview this week. “There is bipartisan support for the bill, and, as has been true in a lot of instances — including on immigration — my preference is always to actually get legislation passed because it’s a little longer lasting.” In the year and a half since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks revealed how the NSA was secretly collecting “metadata” about Americans’ phone calls — including information about who was calling whom and when — civil liberties advocates have called on Obama to end the program with the stroke of a pen. The programs needs to be continually reauthorized by the courts every 90 days. If he wanted to, critics say, Obama could simply end it by neglecting to have it renewed. Instead, he has made some minor changes to the structure of the program, such as limiting searches to records about people two steps removed from a target, instead of the previous three. In the meantime, Congress has struggled with legislation to effectively end the program and require the government to get data from private phone companies. The USA Freedom Act came two votes shy of overcoming a GOP-led filibuster in the Senate last year, serving as a bitter reminder of the high hurdles NSA critics need to surmount to rein in the agency. The issue is likely to come to a head in the next four months, before the current legislative authorization for the program runs out, when a critical part of the Patriot Act expires on June 1. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the head of the House Judiciary Committee, said on Wednesday that that deadline “will help focus both the House and the Senate on passing this.” Speaking to a tech lobbying group’s breakfast meeting on Capitol Hill, Goodlatte predicted that final legislation would look “quite similar” to a version of the USA Freedom Act that passed through the House last year. Civil libertarians said the bill had effectively been gutted by the time it hit the floor of the chamber by including broad definitions that would have allowed the NSA to search for everyone in a certain area code or some other large category. Goodlatte pledged that new legislation would address some of its critics’ fears about the definitions in the law. “Stay tuned on that one,” he said. Still, Congress’s inability to pass reform last year and the new Republican majority in both chambers have darkened the prospects of significant reform in coming weeks, especially given rising fears about terrorism around the globe.

Obama pushing legislative action – causes backlash


Cassidy 14 [John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He joined the Sunday Times, in London, in 1986, and served as the paper’s Washington bureau chief for three years, and then as its business editor, from 1991 to 1993. From 1993 to 1995, he was at the New York Post, where he edited the Business section and then served as the deputy editor. 1-17-2014 http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/obamas-n-s-a-strategy-over-to-you-congress]

That was President Obama today, delivering his much anticipated policy response to Edward Snowden’s revelations and to last month’s report by his own Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies. Credit where credit is due: some of the President’s proposals went further than I had suggested in a post on Thursday that was based on some news reports about the speech. The main takeaway from Obama’s speech, though, was that the White House is seeking to toss this hot potato to Congress. And since Congress is hopelessly divided, it is perfectly possible that nothing very meaningful will change. The President’s overarching message was that practically all of the N.S.A.’s activities are necessary for national-security reasons, but some of them need to be tweaked to reflect concerns about privacy, oversight, and public trust. His address was somewhat short on specifics. On all the main issues—the future of the Prism program, in which the N.S.A. sweeps up the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans; the government’s use of national-security letters to obtain private data without a court warrant; and the operations of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court—the President, rather than spelling out his own reforms, said that he wanted to work with Congress to map out a way forward. The immediate headline was that Obama accepted his Review Group’s call for a restructuring of the Prism program, and would begin a “transition” toward moving over-all custody of telephone metadata out of the hands of the N.S.A. But he didn’t spell out how this should be done, and it’s far from clear what, if anything, will end up happening. Under the current system, the phone companies hand over their customer records to the agency at regular intervals, pursuant to orders from the FISA court. Once the N.S.A. obtains the metadata, its analysts can examine it more or less at will, if they come up with a reason to do so. To prevent possible abuses, the Review Group called for the telephone companies, or a third party of some sort, to store the phone logs, and it also said that the N.S.A. should have to obtain court approval each time it wants to run queries through them. Obama called for a “mechanism that preserves the capabilities we need without the government holding this bulk metadata.” As a first step, he said, the Administration would limit the number of individuals that N.S.A. analysts can target when querying the Prism databases, and he asked the Attorney General, Eric Holder, “to work with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court so that, during this transition period, the database can be queried only after a judicial finding, or in a true emergency.” If that sounded a bit vague, it was crystal clear compared with how the second stage of the reform process will proceed. Acknowledging that the phone companies don’t want to act as a government storage depot, and that setting up a third party to do the job would create some “legal ambiguities,” Obama said that he had asked Holder to consult with the intelligence agencies. “They will report back to me with options for alternative approaches before the program comes up for reauthorization on March 28th,” he said. “During this period, I will consult with the relevant committees in Congress to seek their views, and then seek congressional authorization for the new program as needed.” Privacy advocates were disappointed that he didn’t go still further. “The president’s decision not to end bulk collection and retention of all Americans’ data remains highly troubling,” the A.C.L.U. said, in a statement. It went on, “The president should end—not mend—the government’s collection and retention of all law-abiding Americans’ data. When the government collects and stores every American’s phone call data, it is engaging in a textbook example of an ‘unreasonable search’ that violates the Constitution.” As expected, Obama also called for the creation of a public advocate to represent privacy interests in the FISA court, but, evidently, not in all cases, or even in most of them. And, once again, he put the burden on Capitol Hill: “I am calling on Congress to authorize the establishment of a panel of advocates from outside government to provide an independent voice in significant cases before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.” In other important areas, the President didn’t announce any new proposals. Going ahead, agencies like the N.S.A. and the F.B.I. will still be able to obtain personal data from communications companies without a court order, by issuing national-security letters. Obama rejected the suggestion that the FISA courts should have to approve such letters, saying that “we should not set a standard for terrorism investigations that is higher than those involved in investigating an ordinary crime.” (As you may have guessed, this was another area in which he said he was “prepared to work with Congress.”) And from what Obama said, or didn’t say, the N.S.A. still appears to be free to hack into the data centers of companies like Google and Yahoo, which, according to documents released by Edward Snowden, it does routinely. Politically, the White House’s strategy is not lacking in cunning. As the President knows all too well, many senior Democrats and Republicans on the Hill, including the heads of the intelligence committees, don’t think any big changes are necessary. In asking for their coöperation and putting them in the firing line, he is clearly hoping to defuse some of the criticisms that he has faced. If the congressional opponents of reform hold their ground, we could even end up with a political stalemate that resembles the one surrounding Guantánamo Bay, with the White House conveniently able to blame Congress for frustrating its publicly stated intentions.


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