Alan Ehrenhalt does some amazing work in the Times this morning. He explains why Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton had difficult first years in office, demonstrates why the current situation is fundamentally different, and then urges Barack Obama ... to overlearn the lessons of Carter and Clinton and be as cautious and conservative as possible. To whit:
Barack Obama is a man of compelling gifts, but in the end he was elected primarily because the Republicans had made a hash of things, not because of his charm or elegance. If he shows any early signs of being the ideological left-wing president John McCain warned of, he will be stepping into his own kind of political trap, different from the ones that ensnared Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, but potentially just as debilitating.
...A president who commands the allegiance of most Americans can usually find a way to reach 60 votes in the Senate, as George W. Bush did in his first term on tax cuts and education reform. But a president who does not have that allegiance can’t get there no matter how many Democrats are sitting in the chamber. The route to breaking filibusters runs through the court of public opinion more than it does the Senate chamber. And, despite the Democrats’ remarkable gains over the last two national elections, the party remains to the left of the electorate.
All of this suggests that, to escape the fate of Messrs. Carter and Clinton, Barack Obama needs to preserve the centrist image he cultivated during the campaign; to reinforce the personal good will that both parties genuinely seemed to feel for him on election night; to avoid letting impatient Democratic majorities tempt him into pushing initiatives that the electorate won't support; and still somehow emerge with a record of accomplishment that bears some resemblance to the promises he made all over the country this fall.
Because the guy who just won the largest share of the popular vote in two decades (and incidentally, more than both of Bush's elections) doesn't have the allegiance of most Americans. What's amazing about this column is you can really see the author trying to shoehorn inconvenient facts into his worldview, referring to debilitating political traps without explaining what they are. (You can see a similar effort when Bill Kristol notes that Obama and Clinton won by nearly the same margin, but fails to mention that Obama won a majority at 52.6 percent while Clinton only won a plurality at 43 percent. Mmhmm)
Here's the deal: Not only is Obama personally popular, his policies are popular. Not only did Obama win, but Democratic congressional candidates outperformed him. Mandate is a fuzzy word to throw around, but here's the story: The American populace just voted overwhelmingly for a center-left political party that ran on the platform of pulling out of Iraq, universal health care, taxing the rich, Keynesian stimulus, infrastructure investment, and energy independence. The greatest fear this new government faces isn't that they'll overreach, it's that they won't do enough. Only by demonstrating competence and passing the programs they ran on will they see continued electoral success. The inimitable Jon Cohn suggests following the Bush model to a certain extent. There are obviously pitfalls to launching big policy initiatives, but as Ehrenhalt (weirdly) suggests in the piece, Obama has the discipline, sobriety and realistic appraisal of the political process to succeed in passing some serious policy programs.
--Tim Fernholz
