Presidential historian Robert Dallek has a nice piece detailing Lyndon Johnson's strategy for securing congressional votes and trying to draw out some lessons for Barack Obama. The problem is, he can't. And though Dallek doesn't quite say this, there are good reasons that more late night phone calls to legislators and cocktail parties for congressmen won't assure hefty majorities. The Senate was a different place in 1964. The filibuster was rarely used and treated entirely differently. Indeed, it would see its most famous application in the civil rights era, when it was used not to block a bill, but to allow 25 hours of performative obstruction from Strom Thurmond. Now it's used constantly. You can name a lot of reasons for this. Senators are less independent than they used to be. The country is more polarized. Majority margins tend to be slimmer. But I think it's hard to overstate the role of the 1994 midterms. There, a strategy of relentless obstructionism generated a historic win for the minority party. Republicans took the House of Representatives for the fist time in over 40 years after winning more than 50 seats. The Democrats had a not dissimilar experience in 2006: After two years of unified opposition, which included killing Bush's Social Security privatization plan, they swept the midterm elections. It was the first time in memory that a party won a major election without dropping a single seat. There's a sense right now that opposition works. Indeed, it's not even obvious what the alternative strategies are: It's hard to recall an election where the minority was spectacularly punished for opposition or rewarded for cooperation. And no amount of presidential flattery will prove sufficient to compel legislators to cooperate so long as they think non-cooperation makes it more likely that they will keep their jobs and return to the majority.
