With the increasing likelihood of an incredibly depressing defeat for the jobs bill in the Senate -- which would reinforce the social safety net; cut taxes; and provide funding for small business, infrastructure investment, and research and development -- it's worth thinking about how it failed.
Matt Yglesias does just that, noting that even the Imperial Presidency can't force 40 + 1 senators to do something they don't want to do all the time, and that a full-court press simply can't be deployed for every vote -- and even then, the political calculus still doesn't offer any guarantee that a president can get a senator to vote his way. Yglesias observes,
[O]ne problem with this system is that it allows the White House to be deliberately ambiguous about what positions it supports, secure in the knowledge that “the votes aren’t there” for certain things and therefore saying you support them is a freebie. That’s a bad thing, but it doesn’t change the fact that this option is usually available precisely when it’s true that the votes aren’t there.
Much of the analysis -- and indeed division -- on the left comes from profound disagreements about the potential vote count on a given piece of legislation -- whether it is the public option, breaking up the banks, or cramdown. Whether you assign more importance to structural factors or presidential will is the key dividing line between the people who are satisfied with President Obama and those who are disappointed in him.
-- Tim Fernholz
