Obama Invoked Lincoln To Get House Dems Behind Climate Change Bill
Here’s a fascinating glimpse into President Obama’s private efforts to persuade dozens of House Dems on a crucial Congressional committee to back the climate change bill. It turns out he invoked Abraham Lincoln to infuse them with historical urgency:
When Obama entered the fray on May 5, summoning all 36 committee Democrats to the White House, he didn’t make a single demand. Rather, participants say, he pointed to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and said, “He had a chance to affect history. You, too, have a chance to affect history.”
This gets at a crucial, if under-appreciated, aspect of Obama’s style. It’s often pointed out that Obama likes to articulate big goals and leave the details to Congress. But he does more than that. He uses his very presence in the White House, which is itself obviously a major world-historical event, to compel members of Congress to act in rough accordance with his goals, by acting as their historical conscience, or historical scold.
This approach irks critics on the right who think Obama is far too intoxicated by his own world-historical importance. It also has some drawbacks, particularly in the Senate. Obama tends to the belief that he can inspire lawmakers into finding common ground with him, and his reluctance to dirty his hands (and his above-politics image) by playing rough with Republicans and weak-kneed centrist Democrats could imperil his agenda.
For good or for ill, Obama’s message to lawmakers, as they confront the enormous challenges of health care and climate change, is this: Hop on my historical bandwagon, or risk being relegated to history’s doghouse.
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I don’t know about not getting his hands dirty. Maybe not getting them dirty to the extent we would all like. But his chief of staff Rahm guided the passage of the stimulus bill albeit one that a lot of us felt wasn’t big enough. And the word is the White House whipped the House to get the number of votes necessary to pass the bill last week. I know most of us on the left myself included wish he would take the gloves off and start smacking around the GOP a bit more but thats not how he campaigned and i don’t know that its ever going to be his style. But I will say that at very opportune moments he does step up and call them and their ridiculous arguments. The other week when he called them out for the hypocrisy of on the one hand saying the govt can’t run anything well but then saying a public option would run health insurance companies out of business was CLASSIC and without calling them out specifically it was clear who he meant and it basically took that talking point away from them as being credible everywhere but FoxNews
SG — you could be right about Rahm’s role, but obviously Obama has a lot more influence over individual lawmakers than Rahm does. The question is how far will he go to use it. I still tend to the view expressed by Krugman, which is that Obama has a sense that there’s a common ground out there when there often isn’t one at all. Of course, maybe Obama will prove right. We’ll see.
“…which is that Obama has a sense that there’s a common ground out there when there often isn’t one at all.” Since he and Rahm actually know those people (repuglicans lawmakers) personally, they might actually know more about them than those of us who do not. On the other hand, even if there is some actual common ground on policy in the abstract, in practice the repugs are showing themselves to be unwilling to work with this president for the good of the country in any substantive way.
For example, here’s Benen with THE LATEST MCCAIN DISAPPOINTMENT.
There was a brief moment when it looked like McCain might work constructively with Obama. That moment is long gone.
Greg
I think Paul Krugman is a great economist but a poor political pundit. His approach would be good advise for a member of the House but not the POTUS. Hell even Bush tried to give the appearance that he was bipartisan in public on his flawed policies. And I don’t think there was ever a time where Dems had the discipline to have ever single member in the House vote against a major initiative of Bush’s. I think that Obama knows he has to look like he is being bipartisan to appease the middle. But lets not forget that even though the stimulus bill was lacking in a lot that we would have wanted on the left, we wouldn’t have even gotten that if he hadn’t basically said to hell with trying to get 70 or 80 votes on it and just went for the 3 Republicans. It also showed when he pressed to have reconciliation rules put in place for health care reform so if it comes down to it they can pass it with a simple majority.
The sad thing is a lot of the Paul Krugman type of criticism stems from people who really still aren’t believing what their eyes are telling them. The only way Paul Krugman could believe some of the things he says about Pres Obama’s moves is if he truly believes that Obama is weak willed and weak minded when all evidence is contrary to that. On the Wall Street stuff Krugman acts as if Obama is being led around the nose, never taking into account that maybe Pres Obama just doesn’t agree with him. Then on stuff like health care he says Obama is letting Republicans run over them when again if you look at any polling on the issue he is CRUSHING Repubs in d@mn near every category.
Pres Obama is far from perfect but he isn’t some weak kneed push over either and the sooner people realize it the sooner a lot of them will stop throwing some of these criticisms at him just because they don’t agree with how he is handling something.
I think I’d rather see Obama invoke the crack of a whip alongside Reid more often than not.
mike
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The truth is Reid IS the problem. The Senate Majority Leader is the one who needs to be the knuckledragger not the President. I mean Reid’s numbers suck @ss already so I don’t know what he thinks he is gaining by being Mr Nice Guy and allowing the Republicans to force him to put every single bill up for cloture. He ought to be telling every single Repub up for reelection that if they obstruct the agenda he is going to pour every resource into their state from start to finish to get them the hell out of there. But nah, he wants to be “respectful” of the other side. What d@mn wuss.
sg, normally, you and I are on the same wavelength, but this time, I think that you are missing the Krugman POV. Krugman is only doing what David Sirota and Chris Bowers (and now Robert Reich) have been advocating for months now…putting pressure on Obama from the Left to do the things that he promised during the campaign that the establishment is pushing back against (the make him do it dynamic). Krugman probably does personally believe that Obama is weak willed and weak minded (he is a college professor after all and don’t they all think that about everyone?). When it comes to the Banks, Krugman has sat down with the President and discussed their views and we can all see that he has been going easy on the Banks when they don’t deserve to be gone easy on (and come on, he is being led around by the nose on the bank stuff; he’s not that brilliant to know the ins-and-out of the global banking sytsem after never having studied the subject, no matter how bright he is at all the other trappings of politics). I think we all need to remember that OUR criticism from the left is seemingly the only rational criticism of the President right now, as the centrist/independent views are well represented in Congress and in the White House and the right’s views aren’t worth the spit trails they are leaving behind while screaming their wackiness.
To end on a lighter note though, I’ll agree with you on Harry Reid; he’s such a limp d*ck…
“Hop on my historical bandwagon, or risk being relegated to history’s doghouse.”
This would be more effective if weak-kneed centrist Dems and GOPers actually cared about their place in history, or the planet. But they don’t. They care only for short-term political goals and continued adherence to utterly discredited right-wing bromides of every stripe. They are simply not serious.
Obama’s continued failure to recognize this imperils his agenda in this country because it results in bad (watered down) bills coming out of Congress that are insufficient to meet the pressing challenges we face. Maybe Obama doesn’t fully grasp how broken our political system is, or how influenced, compromised and ossified the political establishment has become. I don’t know but whatever it is, I hope he rights the ship—and soon—for all of our sakes.
Many thanks for the post. I liked it. You have a very well-designed blog.