Aff Internals
2ac – winners win + pc not key - Hirsh
PC isn’t finite or key – the plan is a win that spills over to future victories
Hirsh 2/7 – chief correspondent of National Journal (Michael, “There’s No Such Thing as Political
Capital”, http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/there-s-no-such-thing-as-political-capital20130207, CMR)
On Tuesday, in his State of the Union address, President Obama
will do what every president does this time of year. For about 60 minutes,
he will lay
out a sprawling and ambitious wish list highlighted by gun control and immigration reform, climate change and debt
will do what they always do this time of year: They will talk about how unrealistic most of the
proposals are, discussions often informed by sagacious reckonings of how much “political capital” Obama possesses to
push his program through.¶ Most of this talk will have no bearing on what actually happens over the next
reduction. In response, the pundits
four years.¶ Consider this: Three months ago, just before the November election, if someone had talked seriously about Obama having enough
political capital to oversee passage of both immigration reform and gun-control legislation at the beginning of his second term—even after
winning the election by 4 percentage points and 5 million votes (the actual final tally)—this person would have been called crazy and stripped
of his pundit’s license. (It doesn’t exist, but it ought to.) In his first term, in a starkly polarized country, the president had been so frustrated by
GOP resistance that he finally issued a limited executive order last August permitting immigrants who entered the country illegally as children
to work without fear of deportation for at least two years. Obama didn’t dare to even bring up gun control, a Democratic “third rail” that has
cost the party elections and that actually might have been even less popular on the right than the president’s health care law. And yet, for
reasons that have very little to do with Obama’s personal prestige or popularity—variously put in terms of a “mandate” or “political capital”—
chances are fair that both will now happen.¶ What changed? In the case of gun control, of course, it wasn’t the election. It was the horror of the
20 first-graders who were slaughtered in Newtown, Conn., in mid-December. The sickening reality of little girls and boys riddled with bullets
from a high-capacity assault weapon seemed to precipitate a sudden tipping point in the national conscience. One thing changed after another.
Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association marginalized himself with poorly chosen comments soon after the massacre. The pro-gun
lobby, once a phalanx of opposition, began to fissure into reasonables and crazies. Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was shot in the
head two years ago and is still struggling to speak and walk, started a PAC with her husband to appeal to the moderate middle of gun owners.
Then she gave riveting and poignant testimony to the Senate, challenging lawmakers: “Be bold.”¶ As a result, momentum has appeared to build
around some kind of a plan to curtail sales of the most dangerous weapons and ammunition and the way people are permitted to buy them. It’s
impossible to say now whether such a bill will pass and, if it does, whether it will make anything more than cosmetic changes to gun laws. But
one thing is clear: The political tectonics have shifted dramatically in very little time. Whole new possibilities exist now that didn’t a few weeks
ago.¶ Meanwhile, the Republican members of the Senate’s so-called Gang of Eight are pushing hard for a new spirit of compromise on
immigration reform, a sharp change after an election year in which the GOP standard-bearer declared he would make life so miserable for the
11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. that they would “self-deport.” But this turnaround has very little to do with Obama’s personal
influence—his political mandate, as it were. It has almost entirely to do with just two numbers: 71 and 27. That’s 71 percent for Obama, 27
percent for Mitt Romney, the breakdown of the Hispanic vote in the 2012 presidential election. Obama drove home his advantage by giving a
speech on immigration reform on Jan. 29 at a Hispanic-dominated high school in Nevada, a swing state he won by a surprising 8 percentage
points in November. But the movement on immigration has mainly come out of the Republican Party’s recent introspection, and the realization
by its more thoughtful members, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, that without such a shift the party
may be facing demographic death in a country where the 2010 census showed, for the first time, that white births have fallen into the minority.
It’s got nothing to do with Obama’s political capital or, indeed, Obama at all.¶ The point is not that “political capital” is a meaningless term.
Often it is a synonym for “mandate” or “momentum” in the aftermath of a decisive election—and just about every politician ever elected has
tried to claim more of a mandate than he actually has. Certainly, Obama can say that because he was elected and Romney wasn’t, he has a
better claim on the country’s mood and direction. Many pundits still defend political capital as a useful metaphor at least. “It’s an
unquantifiable but meaningful concept,” says Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. “You can’t really look at a president and
say he’s got 37 ounces of political capital. But the fact is, it’s a concept that matters, if you have popularity and some momentum on your
side.Ӧ The real problem is that the
idea of political capital—or mandates, or momentum—is so poorly defined that
presidents and pundits often get it wrong. “Presidents usually over-estimate it,” says George Edwards, a presidential scholar
at Texas A&M University. “The best kind of political capital—some sense of an electoral mandate to do something—is very rare. It
almost never happens . In 1964, maybe. And to some degree in 1980.” For that reason, political capital is a concept that
misleads far more than it enlightens. It is distortionary. It conveys the idea that we know more than we really do about
the ever-elusive concept of political power, and it discounts the way unforeseen events can suddenly change everything. Instead, it
suggests, erroneously , that a political figure has a concrete amount of political capital to invest, just
as someone might have real investment capital—that a particular leader can bank his gains, and the
size of his account determines what he can do at any given moment in history.¶ Naturally, any president has
practical and electoral limits. Does he have a majority in both chambers of Congress and a cohesive coalition behind him? Obama has neither at
present. And unless a surge in the economy—at the moment, still stuck—or some other great victory gives him more momentum, it is
inevitable that the closer Obama gets to the 2014 election, the less he will be able to get done. Going into the midterms, Republicans will
increasingly avoid any concessions that make him (and the Democrats) stronger.¶ But the abrupt emergence of the immigration and guncontrol issues illustrates how suddenly shifts in mood can occur and how political interests can align in new ways just as suddenly. Indeed, the
pseudo-concept of political capital masks a larger truth about Washington that is kindergarten simple:
You just don’t know what you can do until you try. Or as Ornstein himself once wrote years ago, “ Winning
wins .” In theory, and in practice, depending on Obama’s handling of any particular issue, even in a polarized
time , he could still deliver on a lot of his second-term goals, depending on his skill and the breaks. Unforeseen
catalysts can appear, like Newtown. Epiphanies can dawn, such as when many Republican Party leaders suddenly woke up in panic to the huge
disparity in the Hispanic vote.¶ Some political
scientists who study the elusive calculus of how to pass legislation
and run successful presidencies say that political capital is, at best, an empty concept , and that almost
nothing in the academic literature successfully quantifies or even defines it. “It can refer to a very abstract thing,
like a president’s popularity, but there’s no mechanism there. That makes it kind of useless,” says Richard Bensel, a government professor at
Cornell University. Even Ornstein concedes that the calculus is far more complex than the term suggests. Winning
on one issue often
changes the calculation for the next issue ; there is never any known amount of capital. “The idea here is, if
an issue comes up where the conventional wisdom is that president is not going to get what he wants,
and he gets it, then each time that happens, it changes the calculus of the other actors” Ornstein says. “If
they think he’s going to win, they may change positions to get on the winning side. It’s a bandwagon
effect .”¶ ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ¶ Sometimes, a clever practitioner of power can get more done just because
he’s aggressive and knows the hallways of Congress well. Texas A&M’s Edwards is right to say that the outcome of the
1964 election, Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, was one of the few that conveyed a mandate. But one of the main
reasons for that mandate (in addition to Goldwater’s ineptitude as a candidate) was President Johnson’s masterful use of power leading up to
that election, and his ability to get far more done than anyone thought possible, given his limited political capital. In the newest volume in his
exhaustive study of LBJ, The Passage of Power, historian Robert Caro recalls Johnson getting cautionary advice after he assumed the presidency
from the assassinated John F. Kennedy in late 1963. Don’t focus on a long-stalled civil-rights bill, advisers told him, because it might jeopardize
Southern lawmakers’ support for a tax cut and appropriations bills the president needed. “One of the wise, practical people around the table
[said that] the presidency has only a certain amount of coinage to expend, and you oughtn’t to expend it on this,” Caro writes. (Coinage, of
course, was what political capital was called in those days.) Johnson replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”¶
2ac – winners win – gop unity
Forcing controversial fights key to Obama’s agenda—the alt is gridlock
Dickerson ’13 John Dickerson, Slate, 1/18/13, Go for the Throat!,
www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/01/barack_obama_s_second_inaugural_addre
ss_the_president_should_declare_war.single.html, CMR
On Monday, President Obama will preside over the grand reopening of his administration. It would be altogether fitting if he stepped to the
microphone, looked down the mall, and let out a sigh: so many people expecting so much from a government that appears capable of so little.
A second inaugural suggests new beginnings, but this one is being bookended by dead-end debates. Gridlock over the fiscal cliff
preceded it and gridlock over the debt limit, sequester, and budget will follow. After the election, the same people are in
power in all the branches of government and they don't get along. There's no indication that the
president's clashes with House Republicans will end soon. Inaugural speeches are supposed to be huge and stirring. Presidents haul
our heroes onstage, from George Washington to Martin Luther King Jr. George W. Bush brought the Liberty Bell. They use history to make
greatness and achievements seem like something you can just take down from the shelf. Americans are not stuck in the rut of the day. But this
might be too much for Obama’s second inaugural address: After the last four years, how do you call the nation and its elected representatives
to common action while standing on the steps of a building where collective action goes to die? That bipartisan bag of tricks has been tried and
it didn’t work. People don’t believe it. Congress' approval rating is 14 percent, the lowest in history. In a December Gallup poll, 77 percent of
those asked said the way Washington works is doing “serious harm” to the country. The
challenge for President Obama’s speech is
term: how to be great when the environment stinks. Enhancing the president’s
legacy requires something more than simply the clever application of predictable stratagems . Washington’s partisan
rancor, the size of the problems facing government, and the limited amount of time before Obama is a lame duck
all point to a single conclusion: The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and
cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP . If he wants to transform American politics, he must
the challenge of his second
go for the throat . President Obama could, of course, resign himself to tending to the achievements of his first term. He'd make sure
health care reform is implemented, nurse the economy back to health, and put the military on a new footing after two wars. But he's more
ambitious than that. He ran for president as a one-term senator with no executive experience. In his first term, he pushed for the biggest
overhaul of health care possible because, as he told his aides, he wanted to make history. He may already have made it. There's no question
that he is already a president of consequence. But there's no sign he's content to ride out the second half of the game in the Barcalounger. He
is approaching gun control, climate change, and immigration with wide and excited eyes. He's not going for caretaker. How should the
president proceed then, if he wants to be bold? The Barack Obama of the first administration might
have approached the task
by finding some Republicans to deal with and then start agreeing to some of their demands in hope that he would win some
of their votes. It's the traditional approach. Perhaps he could add a good deal more schmoozing with lawmakers, too. That's the old
way. He has abandoned that. He doesn't think it will work and he doesn't have the time. As Obama
Republicans are dead set on opposing him . They cannot be
unchained by schmoozing. Even if Obama were wrong about Republican intransigence, other
constraints will limit the chance for cooperation. Republican lawmakers worried about primary
challenges in 2014 are not going to be willing partners. He probably has at most 18 months before people start dropping the
lame-duck label in close proximity to his name. Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in
passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents. Through a series of clarifying
fights over controversial issues , he can force Republicans to either side with their coalition's most extreme elements
explained in his last press conference, he thinks the
or cause
a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in disarray .
1ar winners win - general
Winners win – legislative victories build momentum
Hirsh 2/7 – chief correspondent of National Journal (Michael, “There’s No Such Thing as Political
Capital”, http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/there-s-no-such-thing-as-political-capital20130207, CMR)
In terms of Obama’s second-term agenda, what all these shifting tides of momentum and political
calculation mean is this: Anything goes
there is no reason to think he can’t win far more victories than any of the
careful calculators of political capital now believe is possible
¶
If he can get some early wins
. Obama has no more elections to win, and he needs to worry only about the support he will have in the House and Senate after 2014. But if he picks issues that the country’s
mood will support—such as, perhaps, immigration reform and gun control—
, including battles over tax reform and deficit reduction.
more mature Obama seems to be emerging, one who has his agenda clearly in mind and will ride the mood of the country more adroitly.
income tax increase—
Amid today’s atmosphere of Republican self-doubt, a new,
—as he already has, apparently, on the fiscal cliff and the upper-
that will create momentum, and one win may well lead to others. “Winning wins.”
Winners Wins
Marshall & Prins, Poli Sci Profs, 11 (September 2011, Bryan W. Marshall --- associate professor of
political science at Miami University, Brandon C. Prins --- associate professor of political science at the
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Presidential Studies Quarterly, “Power or Posturing? Policy
Availability and Congressional Influence on U.S. Presidential Decisions to Use Force”, online, CMR)
Presidents rely heavily on Congress in converting their political capital into real policy
success. Policy success not only shapes the reelection prospects of presidents, but it also
builds the president’s reputation for political effectiveness and fuels the prospect for
subsequent gains in political capital
(Light 1982). Moreover, the president’s legislative success in foreign policy is
correlated with success on the domestic front. On this point, some have largely disavowed the two-presidencies distinction while
others have even argued that foreign policy has become a mere extension of domestic policy (Fleisher et al. 2000; Oldfield and
Wildavsky 1989) Presidents
implicitly understand that there exists a linkage between their
actions in one policy area and their ability to affect another. The use of force is no exception; in promoting
and protecting U.S. interests abroad, presidential decisions are made with an eye toward managing political capital at home
(Fordham 2002).
Winners win – plan rebuilds capital
Garrett 7/19/12 (Major, “The Upside Down Smile”,
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/president-obama-as-pit-bull-20120719, CMR)
Top Obama advisers say that the
president has no choice but to trade on his likability ; preserving it in a losing effort would
amount to political malpractice. “ Political
capital comes from strength ,” a top campaign adviser said. “If Obama wins and wins
big enough, he’ll have the political strength to push things through. If
he wins but is perceived as weak , then the Republicans
will block everything he wants to do and he’ll be a four-year lame duck.”
Right now, Obama’s team will take any victory , even the narrowest kind that leaves much of Obama’s old persona bleached and
battered. Why? Without victory, there is no governing. As Vince Lombardi said: “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a
loser.”
--Winners win
Wagner, ‘11 [Alex, “Keeping Calm and Carrying On: Obama's Focused Style Brought Wins in the End”, http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/12/23/keeping-calm-and-carrying-onobamas-focused-style-brought-wins/print/, CMR]
"Keep Calm and Carry On" -- a British poster created at the start of World War II to boost morale in advance of what would be a very dark few years on the continent -- has been revived of
late: on mugs, t-shirts, and Joe Scarborough's Twitter account. Americans have been collectively bummed out for the last two years (the economy, unemployment, war, terrorism, and a
general sense of doom), so the resurgence of this motto speaks, perhaps, to some deeper desire for guidance, or as a rejoinder to those inclined toward depression. It's also apparent, here at
the end of 2010, that it is a template for the governing style of President Barack Obama. For all the "hopey changey stuff" for which Obama was both praised and derided, and despite the
soaring, shivery rhetoric of his speeches and rallies, the president has proven himself to be quite a bit more terrestrial than all that. In his first two years in office, Obama has made considered,
Throughout
this year, the White House has had to defend itself against what critics called the president's deliberative management style during the
health care debate, his lack of passion over the BP oil spill, his forsaking of congressional Democrats in the midterm elections. Yet despite this furor and outrage,
Obama and his team have scored a stunning number of legislative victories and have accrued a hefty
stash of political capital going into 2011. As much as the public and the media decreed that Obama had to change, speak to the base, or get emotional, he never really did.
Apparent to most Americans now is that Obama's fundamental inability to be anything other than what he is -- extremely patient and very, very focused -- has served him well. The
president's pragmatism and distaste for drama have compelled him to broker landmark agreements
with Republicans and win historic victories in the lame-duck session of Congress. As Obama said on Wednesday, "I am
persistent. If I believe in something strongly, I stay on it." While Obama's recent deal with Senate Republicans included extending tax cuts for
specific moves, shied away from both confrontation and praise, and remained sanguine in the face of voter insurrection -- or, as he put it, a shellacking at the polls.
high-income earners -- an about-face from one of his core campaign promises -- it also guaranteed $858 billion in incentives that will directly benefit the middle class and an extension of
unemployment benefits for 13 months -- the longest period in the program's history. "Governing is hard. It involves achieving the possible, not the perfect," said Les Francis, White House
deputy chief of staff for President Jimmy Carter. "Did the wealthy get something they shouldn't get? Yes. So what? If he didn't do what he did, what was the alternative? Yell louder? Yell
longer? And then what would we have gotten out of a Republican-controlled House? I think the liberal base should be popping champagne corks." After a protracted -- and at times dicey --
Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, handing a major civil rights victory to gay Americans.
Some gay rights advocates had privately groused that the administration was not doing enough to support
repeal, outsourcing advocacy to the Defense Department. But as Michael Cole-Schwartz, press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, a prominent gay rights group, told me in
advance of the vote, regardless of who did what (and when), "the measure of success is whether the repeal happens." While Obama
expended little political capital on the issue, he reaped the rewards -- winning over his base at a critical moment, while keeping his
centrist bona fides intact. But nowhere was Obama's temperament and dedication better rewarded than on the New
START arms treaty with Russia. Long a priority for the White House and a personal concern for the president, the nuclear weapons treaty was the issue on which the president himself had
congressional debate, the president on Wednesday signed into law the repeal of the military's "
done the most visible advocacy. He discussed it with international heads of state at NATO, met with former secretaries of state, including Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright,
and pressed the issue behind the scenes with key Republicans lawmakers amid resistance from others. On Wednesday afternoon, eight months after the first hearings on New START began, it
was finally ratified. "Once this treaty is signed, this is the only game in town," said John Isaacs, executive director of the non-proliferation advocacy group, Council for a Livable World. "New
START is the precondition to treaties with anyone else." Isaacs explained that concerns about other countries' nuclear arsenals, including "China, Pakistan, France, Israel -- those are important
questions, but until the U.S. and Russia significantly reduce their stockpiles, we aren't going to get to that." It has been a very impressive end to a very tumultuous year. For all the bickering
even Republicans have sounded bullish on Obama lately. Ken Duberstein, former chief of staff for President
Obama deserves credit for leading the efforts to resolve the tax-cut issue and to resolve unemployment compensation, but more fundamentally, to bring people together.
He has showed some real leadership."
and talk of a one-term presidency,
Reagan, said, "
Creates perception of success --- builds momentum
Green, 10 --- professor of political science at Hofstra University (6/11/10, David Michael Green, "The Do-Nothing 44
th
President,” http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Do-Nothing-44th-Presid-by-David-Michael-Gree-100611-648.html)
In the same way that nothing breeds
success like success, nothing sets the president up for achieving his or her next goal better than
succeeding dramatically on the last go around.
This is absolutely a matter of perception, and you can see it best in the way that Congress and especially
the Washington press corps fawn over bold and intimidating presidents like Reagan and George W. Bush. The
political teams surrounding these presidents understood the psychology of power all too well. They
knew that by simultaneously creating a steamroller effect and feigning a clubby atmosphere for
Congress and the press, they could leave such hapless hangers-on with only one remaining way to
pretend to preserve their dignities. By jumping on board the freight train, they could be given the
illusion of being next to power, of being part of the winning team. And so, with virtually the sole exception of the now retired Helen
Moreover, there is a continuously evolving and reciprocal relationship between presidential boldness and achievement.
Thomas, this is precisely what they did.
--Winners win—plan boosts capital
Ornstein 8/15/2011 (Norman, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a weekly
columnist at Roll Call, 2011, “How to Win When You’re Unpopular: What Obama Can Learn From
Truman”, http://www.tnr.com/articles/Politics?page=2)
But it
was Truman’s triumph to realize that the hyper-partisan Congress was as much a political boon as
it was a political liability. Truman seized upon the conservative over-reaching and openly fought against what he dubbed
the “Do-Nothing Eightieth Congress.” That rhetorical strategy paid dividends, as voters rebelled against the ideologues
and the Democratic base was energized to elect a president they had long disparaged and opposed. Not only was Truman reelected—pulling off
the upset of the century in a four-way race with a popular Republican nominee, Tom Dewey, and Democrats running to his left (former Vice
President Henry Wallace) and right (states’ rights advocate Strom Thurmond)—but Democrats picked up nine seats in the Senate and a full 75
in the House to recapture both bodies. “The luckiest thing that ever happened to me,” Truman remarked years later, “was the Eightieth
Congress.” Barack Obama ought to be able to leverage his own recalcitrant Congress for political gain. The
sitting 112th Congress, like Truman’s 80th, is dominated by a Republican House that believes that its sweeping victory reflected a huge public
mandate to dismantle government as we know it. The overreaching in this case does not involve passing laws that get enacted over a
presidential veto, but in precipitating artificial crises—over appropriations that are set to expire in a new fiscal year, over a debt limit that has
always been raised without preconditions—to create hostages and force extreme actions. Far more than the 80th, the 112th is a true “DoNothing” Congress, producing little progress, and showing little interest, on key national policy areas from education to energy. But, unlike
Truman, Obama has constantly sought common ground with Congress. While that strategy averted a descent into national default, it has not
been met with an olive branch on the other side. Obama’s embrace of the “Gang of Six” debt reduction proposal in the Senate, a call for
substantial changes in core entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, along with major tax reform and more revenues, was not
greeted with applause by most Republicans. Instead, it only reinforced Republicans’ ideological partisanship. Speaker of the House John
Boehner rejected any attempt at a “Grand Bargain”, because his caucus would not countenance a deal that included any revenues at all. The
message was clear: anything that Obama is for, Republicans will be instantly against. It’s a playbook
from which the GOP is unlikely to diverge anytime soon. There’s an argument to be made that the president’s passiveaggressive approach to policy-making actually paid big benefits in terms of policy successes in his first two years. There is no way the House and
Senate both would have passed health reform bills, for example, if the president had intervened aggressively and demanded things like a public
option that would never have survived a filibuster in the Senate. But however much Obama
deserves to be commended for his
instinctual pragmatism and his commitment to finding common ground with his political adversaries,
that doesn’t mean it amounts to a wise electoral strategy in the year ahead. Obama must reckon with
the fact that the 112th Congress will be an implacable political foil. If he does so, he’ll be able to profit
from the Republicans’ ideological overreach. But a continued willingness to compromise without
pushback will only encourage Republicans in Congress to increase their demands and push for more
confrontation . The resulting turmoil will soon irredeemably sour independents against the entire government, including the president.
The alternative is not for the president to abandon negotiation or make his own set of non-negotiable
demands, but to channel his inner Harry Truman. That means first redefining the terms of debate,
framing a narrative across the country by both decrying the bickering and describing the consequences
for voters everywhere if the Republican Congress has its way—what the budget cuts in the House budget would mean
for medical research, how people with serious disabilities would be forced onto the streets, Medicaid patients unable to get organ transplants,
and so on. The president’s domestic policy achievements from his first two years were not received enthusiastically by voters, and the record
this year is dismal, but he can take a chapter from Truman’s playbook by describing in detail the many pressing issues facing the country, which
the 112th House, and the Republican minority in the Senate, have refused to address. Harry Truman’s
1948 campaign showed
how much voters yearn for a strong and demanding leader and how powerful the presidential bully
pulpit can be—not just in political terms, but by shaping the narrative, putting his pugnacious adversaries on the
defensive, and mobilizing voters to demand a different approach to problem-solving. Rhetoric does not
change the facts on the ground or in and of itself provide a new direction in policy. But the absence of an energized
and angry president demanding better of the do-nothings in Congress can only lead to something
worse.
Legislative wins build capital
Mitchell, 9 – Assistant Professor in the Practice of International Politics at Columbia University
(Lincoln, Huffington Post, “Time for Obama to Start Spending Political Capital,” 6/18/2009,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lincoln-mitchell/time-for-obama-to-start-s_b_217235.html)
Throughout his presidential campaign, but more notably, during his presidency, President Obama has shown himself to have an impressive ability to accumulate political capital. During his
tenure in the White House, Obama has done this by reaching out to a range of constituencies, moderating some of his programs, pursuing middle of the road approaches on key foreign policy
questions and, not insignificantly, working to ensure that his approval rating remains quite high.
Political capital has a shelf life,
and often not a very long one. If it is not used relatively quickly, it dissipates and becomes useless to its owner. This is the
Political capital is not, however, like money, it cannot be saved up interminably while its owner waits for the right moment to spend it.
moment in which Obama, who has spent the first few months of his presidency diligently accumulating political capital, now finds himself. The next few months will be a key time for Obama.
If Obama does not spend this political capital during the next months, it will likely be gone by the New
Year anyway.
Much of what President Obama has done in his first six months or so in office has been designed to build political capital, interestingly he has sought to build this capital from both domestic
and foreign sources. He has done this by traveling extensively, reintroducing to America to foreign audiences and by a governance style that has very cleverly succeeded in pushing his political
opponents to the fringes. This tactic was displayed during the effort to pass the stimulus package as Republican opposition was relegated to a loud and annoying, but largely irrelevant,
distraction. Building political capital was, or should have been, a major goal of Obama's recent speech in Cairo as well.
Significantly, Obama has yet to spend any of his political capital by meaningfully taking on any powerful interests. He declined to take Wall Street on regarding the financial crisis, has prepared
to, but not yet fully, challenged the power of the AMA or the insurance companies, nor has he really confronted any important Democratic Party groups such as organized labor.
This strategy, however, will not be fruitful for much longer. There are now some very clear issues where Obama should be spending political capital. The most obvious of these is health care.
The battle for health care reform will be a major defining issue, not just for the Obama presidency, but for American society over the next decades. It is imperative that Obama push for the
best and most comprehensive health care reform possible. This will likely mean not just a bruising legislative battle, but one that will pit powerful interests, not just angry Republican
ideologues, against the President.
The legislative struggle will also pull many Democrats between the President and powerful interest groups. Obama must make it clear that there will be an enormous political cost which
Democrats who vote against the bill will have to pay. Before any bill is voted upon, however, is perhaps an even more critical time as pressure from insurance groups, business groups and
doctors organizations will be brought to bear both on congress, but also on the administration as it works with congress to craft the legislation. This is not the time when the administration
must focus on making friends and being liked, but on standing their ground and getting a strong and inclusive health care reform bill.
Obama will have to take a similar approach to any other major domestic legislation as well. This is, of course, the way the presidency has worked for decades. Obama is in an unusual situation
because a similar dynamic is at work at the international level. A major part of Obama's first six months in office have involved pursuing a foreign policy that implicitly has sought to rebuild
both the image of the US abroad, but also American political capital. It is less clear how Obama can use this capital, but now is the time to use it.
A cynical interpretation of the choice facing Obama is that he can remain popular or he can have
legislative and other policy accomplishments, but this interpretation would be wrong. By early 2010, Obama, and his
party will, fairly or not, be increasingly judged by what they have accomplished in office, not by how deftly they have handled political challenges. Therefore, the only way he
can remain popular and get new political capital is through converting his current political capital into
concrete legislative accomplishments. Health care will be the first and very likely most important, test.
Passing even controversial policies boosts Obama’s political capital
Singer, 9 – Juris Doctorate candidate at Berkeley Law (Jonathon, “By Expending Capital, Obama Grows His Capital,” 3/3/2009,
http://www.mydd.com/story/2009/3/3/191825/0428)
Obama's favorability rating is at an all-time high. Two-
Despite the country's struggling economy and vocal opposition to some of his policies, President
thirds feel hopeful about his leadership and six in 10 approve of the job he's doing in the White House.
"What is amazing here is how much political capital Obama has spent in the first six weeks," said Democratic
pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "And against that, he stands at the end of this six weeks
with as much or more capital in the bank."
Peter Hart gets at a key point. Some believe that political capital is finite, that it can be used up. To an extent that's true. But it's important to note, too, that
political capital can be regenerated -- and, specifically, that when a President expends a great deal of capital on a
measure that was difficult to enact and then succeeds, he can build up more capital. Indeed, that appears to be what is
happening with Barack Obama, who went to the mat to pass the stimulus package out of the gate, got it passed
despite near-unanimous opposition of the Republicans on Capitol Hill, and is being rewarded by the American
public as a result.
Take a look at the numbers. President Obama now has a 68 percent favorable rating in the NBC-WSJ poll, his highest ever showing in the survey. Nearly half of those surveyed (47 percent)
view him very positively. Obama's Democratic Party earns a respectable 49 percent favorable rating. The Republican Party, however, is in the toilet, with its worst ever showing in the history of
the NBC-WSJ poll, 26 percent favorable. On the question of blame for the partisanship in Washington, 56 percent place the onus on the Bush administration and another 41 percent place it on
Congressional Republicans. Yet just 24 percent blame Congressional Democrats, and a mere 11 percent blame the Obama administration.
with President Obama seemingly benefiting from his ambitious actions and the Republicans sinking further and
further as a result of their knee-jerked opposition to that agenda, there appears to be no reason not to push forward on anything from universal
healthcare to energy reform to ending the war in Iraq.
So at this point,
--Pushing the plan builds capital
Newstex 11 (1/26, On Done Deals, Or, Sometimes Losing Is How You Win, Lexis)
,
Right off the bat, you might be surprised how often you can win even when you did not think you would; the fights over
DADT and Elizabeth Warren's nomination are a couple of recent examples that come to mind. Beyond that, losing a political fight, and doing it
well, helps to move the conversation incrementally over the longer term; I would suggest that it took two political cycles before the tide turned
on the war in Iraq, and now it's beginning to look like the military's plan for "Victory In Afghanistan Through Massive Force" is a proposition
that's tougher and tougher to sell every day-even within the White House. Conservatives know this well, and efforts to advocate for gun rights,
to advance "pro-life" policies, and to radically change the form and function of government have extended over decades, with incremental
changes often being the incremental goal ("let's create these temporary tax cuts today...and let's try to extend them forever another day...").
Ironically, another good
reason to "fight the good fight", even in an environment where you might not see victory as possible, is
one that is very familiar to the most fervent of Obama's '08 supporters: the very fight, in and of itself, is often a
way to create political capital-even if you lose. How many of us have wished this very President would
have stood up and fought for things that he might not have thought he would get? Would you support this
President more if he had demanded that Congress pass a single-payer plan, or if he was pushing harder to end renditions and close
Guantanamo, even if Congress was blocking him? I bet you would. And it makes sense: if you support single-payer, and you see someone out
there fighting hard for the idea...that's a good thing, and that's someone you're likely to come back and support later. It worked for three
Congressional Democrats who lost elections this fall: Feingold, Grayson, and Patrick Murphy are all in a great position to seek support from the
very people who are the most frustrated with pretty much all the other Democrats today. Some of those supporters aren't even waiting for the
future candidates; the "Draft Feingold for President" movement goes back to at least 2004, Grayson and Murphy also have supporters ready
and willing to go. So...if it's true that if this President would fight like Bernie Sanders, even in a losing cause, then we would treat him with the
same degree of affection and respect we feel toward Bernie Sanders...is it also true that we should, maybe, apply that lesson to ourselves?
There is an argument to be made that trying to move your opponent when you don't think you can, and in the process showing how they
appear to be either intransigent, or ignorant, or corrupt by comparison...or just plain wrong about something...can regularly end up moving
voters, instead-and that the result of that movement is that your opponent sometimes has to move your way as well. I would submit that the
2005 effort to "reform" Social Security, when we had a Republican President, House, and Senate, went exactly nowhere fast because being
wrong did move a bunch of voters to say...well, to say that all those Republicans were wrong. So there you go, folks: I'm here today to suggest
that, even when
we might not feel we have a good chance of winning a political fight-or even a fair chance-you
still have to get out and fight the fight, if only to advance the cause for another day. It's also a great way to accrue
political capital that can be used to your advantage later-and if the resistance from the other side is
perceived as being too heavy-handed, they can suffer from a sort of "attrition", as their own political
capital is diminished. And even if you lose, there's still a lot to be gained in the effort, although you might not see
the results until further down the road. As we said at the top of the story, there are lots of battles left over, including what is going to happen to
Social Security and the potential for reforming Senate rules; but win
or lose, it's probably a better idea to be trying to
fight these fights, loudly and logically, just as we wish the President would, then to find ourselves hanging back and doing nothing at all
today...and then voting for Jack Box for President 2012 as a way of expressing our frustration.
1ar winners win – confrontation = momentum
Winners-win --- confrontation yields political momentum
Klein, 2/16/12 (Ezra, 2/16/2012, “Wonkbook: For White House, compromise through confrontation,” http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/wonkbook-forwhite-house-compromise-through-confrontation/2012/02/16/gIQAYrySHR_blog.html)
Most in the White House will admit it: Over the past few months, their strategy has swung from seeking
compromise to welcoming confrontation. After the debt-ceiling debacle, they stopped believing that they could reach a deal with House Republicans. And so
they stopped emphasizing policies they thought Republicans would like and began emphasizing policies -- like the Buffett rule -- that they thought the public would like. But then a funny thing
began to happen. The president's numbers began to rise. And with it,
the possibility that seeking confrontation might force the
Republicans to welcome compromise.
Since August, President Obama's job approval has risen from 43 percent to 49 percent. Disapproval of his job performance has fallen from 53 percent to 46 percent. Much of that likely reflects
renewed signs of economic recovery. Some, perhaps, is due to the the White House's new communications strategy, which has been to hang back from the congressional fray and campaign on
what is popular rather than what is possible. And the Republican primary probably hasn't hurt, both in terms of attracting Democrats back into the president's corner and leaving independents
wondering whether there weren't better off sticking with Obama.
As the president's numbers have improved, some in the White House have begun talking quietly, cautiously, about the possibility -- which they admit is slim -- of a "1996 moment."
From 2009 to 2011, Ronald Klain was chief of staff to Vice President Joe Biden. Before that, he was chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore. And in a January Bloomberg View column, he
explained the way the White House understands what happened in 1996:
"Back in 1995, as in 2011, powerful Republican leaders (including Gingrich, then speaker of the House) faced a Democratic president who had been weakened by a stinging midterm defeat.
They blocked the president’s initiatives, and tried to use their power in Congress to bring him down. By the end of 1995, gridlock had reached a new high with the government shutdown and
the failure of budget talks between the White House and Congress. Sound familiar?"
"Most experts expected things to get even worse in 1996. Then, a few things happened to change that outcome. Bill Clinton, the Democratic president, regained his footing, sharpened his
message for re-election and was buoyed by improving economic news. Congress grew less popular as voters became dissatisfied with the lack of progress and obstructioznism. There were
mounting signs of another tidal wave election, this one to sweep out the new Republican members who had been seated in the previous election. As 1996 unfolded, the party lost enthusiasm
for its lackluster emerging nominee, Bob Dole."
"The result: Gingrich and fellow Republican leaders in Congress decided to work with Clinton to pass a raft of important legislation. These included a balanced budget deal, an extension of
health-care coverage (the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act) and sweeping welfare reform."
The
negotiations over the payroll tax cut, the unemployment-insurance benefits, and the Medicare doc fix
moved from deadlock to deal. And it didn't happen at the last minute, or because the markets were about to tumble into the abyss. It happened
because Republicans coolly assessed the politics and decided they were better off compromising with
the Democrats than taking this one to the edge.
But there hasn't been much evidence of a 1996 moment in the offing. At least, not until this week. Over the last few days, however, something remarkable happened:
Would this deal have happened if the president's numbers were weaker, if the economy was in worse shape, and if the Republican primary was producing a more able set of champions?
it looks as if the president's strengthened position and his clear appetite for further
conflict led Republicans to conclude that compromise might serve them better in this case.
Perhaps. But perhaps not. Rather,
The payroll tax cut deal is, to be sure, not a 1996 moment all on its own. It's very likely a one-off. It may even still fall apart. But it is, at the least, a template for how further deals might go. If
Obama's numbers continue to rise, if the economy continues to recover, and if the GOP's presidential nominee falls behind in the polls, it's easy to see how Boehner and McConnell and Cantor
and Kyl begin worrying more about their own majorities than about what happens at the top of the ticket. And if that happens, they may decide their members need a few accomplishments of
their own. A big infrastructure bill, perhaps. Or, if gas prices rise, a serious compromise on energy.
But if that happens, it won't be because the White House offered Republicans a deal they couldn't refuse. It will be because they offered them a confrontation they couldn't win.
1ar winners win – framing
Their answers assume a different environmentA. PR strategy has changed- Obama wants to capitalize
Madhani, USA Today, 12
(Aamaer and David Jackson, "Obama has had rare run of luck with elite SEAL operations," USA Today, 1-25-12,
www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2012-01-25/obama-navy-seals-bin-laden/52795442/1)
The most remarkable thing that changed over time is the PR component — the idea these are the
kind of operations that the administration thinks are going to be met with broad public
approval," Hall said. "There's a desire to capitalize on whatever strategic communications benefit can be derived from
"
these operations."
B. GOP has lost control of the narrative
Bowen, Examiner staff, 11
(Robert, former member of the Colorado legislature, appointed by three different governors to serve on various boards and commissions, "Are Republicans losing control of the political
narrative?," The Examiner, 10-31-11, www.examiner.com/economic-policy-in-national/are-republicans-losing-control-of-the-political-narrative)
Republicans and the Republican Tea Party controlled the narrative and the political dialogue in the 2010 election blasting Democrats for the economy and
the high unemployment rate. Their TV ads coupled with candidates who stuck to the narrative, Republicans triumphed in the mid-term election. For the first few months of 2011, Republicans
Then
something happened . Republicans in the House took us to the brink of a default on our debt. The
American people blamed them more than Democrats for the nonsensical crisis, and things
began changing. First of all, President Obama gave up efforts to compromise with Republicans who never had any intention of working
with him to begin with. Their strategy from the day he was sworn in was to block each and every thing he tried to do. Obama finally saw through this and began to fight
back.
continued to dominate the national political discussion and again, they controlled the narrative despite the fact Democrats controlled the White House and the Senate.
C. This is a different Obama- he’s fired up and wants to tout successes
Costello, CNN staff, 11
(Carol, "Talk Back: Is President Obama's new fiery persona resonating?," Talk Back, 9-26-11)
President Obama is kicking it up a notch these days. Hit with polls showing low approval ratings and loss of confidence in his economic plan, the
president seems -- well, he seems fired up. As Politico's Roger Simon says, we're seeing a rock 'em sock 'em Obama. Witness his passionate speech before the
Congressional Black Caucus. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I'm going to press on for jobs. I'm going to press on for equality. I'm going to press on for
the sake of our children. I'm going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. I don't have time to complain. I'm going
the new alpha Obama first appeared in that jobs speech before Congress, and then, when he
The hopey
changey thing, it's still there." In a private Democratic fund-raiser, President Obama was downright feisty, saying about Rick Perry,
to press on. (END VIDEO CLIP) COSTELLO: In case you hadn't noticed,
blasted the rich for not paying their fair share of taxes. The president even acknowledged Sarah Palin's criticism of this "hopey changey" thing, sarcastically saying, "
"You've got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change." And Mr. Obama said this about the Republican debate audiences. He said, "Cheering at the prospect of somebody dying
No question about it, President Obama is throwing
some red meat to a liberal base upset that he seems weak in the face of Republican attacks . Oh, but
because they don't have health care and booing a service member in Iraq because they're gay, come on."
the big question this morning is -- and this is our "Talk Back" -- Is President Obama's new fiery persona resonating?
1ar winners win – link magnifies
Stronger the link, the stronger the win
Ellison ‘11 (Charles D, Chief Political Correspondent for The Philadelphia Tribune, author of the critically-acclaimed urban political thriller TANTRUM and a nationally recognized,
frequently featured expert on politics, “Obama’s Aversion To Ugly Wins”, 9/2, 2011, http://ww.atlantapost.com/2011/09/02/obamas-aversion-to-ugly-wins/)
This White House forgets football fans love ugly wins. They also dig soul-stirring inspirational speeches in the locker room before kick-off,
like Al Pacino’s classic pre-game monologue in Any Given Sunday. Every moment wasted in a now aimless El Segundo road trip
on quest for “bipartisanship” is a moment when the President should be searching for a bully
pulpit and yelling “charge!” On jobs, folks are looking for their medieval Scottish hero in blue paint who moons the enemy.
Obama needs to prove he’s strong- he’ll be backed even on unpopular policies
Blow, NY Times columnist, 11
(Charles, "Rise of the Fallen?" NY Times, 9-9-11, www.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/opinion/blow-rise-of-the-fallen.html?_r=1)
Americans value
struggle
Has he come to understand that
valiant
over bloodless surrender? Does he have any interest in becoming the Obama of people’s
imaginations, the one they thought they saw through the showers of streamers, and explosions of confetti in 2008 — the man who only ever existed in their own minds? Is the “transformative
president” more than an opportunistic transformer, shifting shape to suit the moment, but truly settling on none? And can any adjustment halt the precipitous slide in the number of people
the number of people who rated the
president “very good” at having strong leadership qualities has steadily dropped from 70 percent the month
who see him as an effective leader? According to a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released last week,
he took office to 42 percent last month. It’s not that people don’t believe him, it’s that an increasing number don’t believe in him. And that is far more dangerous politically. Obama can and
he’s battling the rapidly
hardening public perception that he himself is a product of what I call the doughnut doctrine of
leadership — soft, glazy, hollow in the middle and ideally suited for getting dunked. Americans want him to
clearly identify his core beliefs. It’s simple: They want to fully understand his values and how they apply to us as individuals and as a country. Moreover, they
want to be completely convinced that he is willing to defend it all. The vacillation between hot and cold, stern and pliable,
resolute and accommodating hasn’t inspired that confidence. Americans respect authenticity and conviction even when they
don’t fully agree with it. Conviction bespeaks strength; strength bespeaks power; and, for better or worse, this is a culture that applauds and is comforted by power.
must answer these questions, and quickly. He isn’t only battling a calcifying cynicism about the inefficacy of government in general,
1ar winners win – obama specific
More evidence – its true for Obama
Creamer ‘12, political organizer and strategist for four decades (Robert, he and his firm, Democracy Partners, work with
many of the country’s most significant issue campaigns, one of the major architects and organizers of the successful campaign to defeat the privatization of Social Security, he has been a
consultant to the campaigns to end the war in Iraq, pass universal health care, pass Wall Street reform, change America’s budget priorities and enact comprehensive immigration reform, he
has also worked on hundreds of electoral campaigns at the local, state and national level, "Why GOP Collapse on the Payroll Tax Could be a Turning Point Moment," 1-2,
www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-creamer/why-gop-collapse-on-the-p_b_1167491.html, CMR)
Strength and victory are enormous political assets . Going into the New Year, they now belong to the President and the Democrats. One of the
reasons why the debt ceiling battle inflicted political damage on President Obama is that it made him appear ineffectual - a powerful figure who had been ensnared and held hostage by the
Lilliputian pettiness of hundreds of swarming Tea Party ideological zealots. In the last few months -- as he campaigned for the American Jobs Act -- he has shaken free of those bonds. Now
voters have just watched James Bond or Indiana Jones escape and turn the tables on his adversary. Great stories are about a protagonist who meets and overcomes a challenge and is
capitulation of the House Tea Party Republicans is so important because it feels like the beginning of that
heroic narrative
victorious. The
kind of
. Even today most Americans believe that George Bush and the big Wall Street Banks - not by President Obama -- caused the economic crisis. Swing voters
have never lost their fondness for the President and don't doubt his sincerity. But they had begun to doubt his effectiveness. They have had increasing doubts that Obama was up to the
The narrative set in motion by the events of the last several weeks could be a
turning point in voter perception. It could well begin to convince skeptical voters that Obama is precisely the kind of leader they thought
he was back in 2008 - a guy with the ability to lead them out of adversity - a leader with the strength, patience, skill, will and resoluteness to lead them to victory. That
challenge of leading them back to economic prosperity.
now contrasts with the sheer political incompetence of the House Republican Leadership that allowed themselves to be cornered and now find themselves in political disarray. And it certainly
Inspiration is
the feeling of empowerment - the feeling that you are part of something larger than yourself and can personally play a significant role in achieving that goal. It
comes from feeling that together you can overcome challenges and win . Nothing will do more to
inspire committed Democrats than the sight of their leader -- President Obama - out maneuvering the House
Republicans and forcing them into complete capitulation. The events of the last several weeks will send a jolt of
electricity through the Progressive community. The right is counting on Progressives to be demoralized and dispirited in the coming election. The
President's victory on the payroll tax and unemployment will make it ever more likely that they will be wrong. 4). When you have them on the run, that's
the time to chase them. The most important thing about the outcome of the battle over the payroll tax and unemployment is that it
shifts the political momentum at a critical time. Momentum is an independent variable in any competitive activity including politics. In a football or basketball game you can feel the momentum shift. The tide of battle is all about momentum. The same is true in politics. And in politics it is even more
important because the "spectators" are also the players - the voters. People follow - and vote -- for winners. The bandwagon effect is
enormously important in political decision-making. Human beings like to travel in packs. They like to be
at the center of the mainstream. Momentum shifts affect their perceptions of the mainstream. For the last two
contrasts with the political circus we have been watching in the Republican Presidential primary campaign. 3). This victory will inspire the dispirited Democratic base.
years, the right wing has been on the offensive. Its Tea Party shock troops took the battle to Democratic Members of Congress. In the Mid-Terms Democrats were routed in district after
district. Now the tide has turned. And
them.
when the tide turns -when you have them on the run - that's the time to chase
2ac pc not key
Political capital is irrelevant
Dickinson 9 (Matthew, previously taught at Harvard University, where he also received his Ph.D, professor of political science at Middlebury College, “Sotomayor, Obama and
Presidential Power,” May 26, 2009 Presidential Power http://blogs.middlebury.edu/presidentialpower/2009/05/26/sotamayor-obama-and-presidential-power/]
As for Sotomayor, from here the path toward almost certain confirmation goes as follows: the Senate Judiciary Committee is slated to hold hearings sometime this summer (this involves both
written depositions and of course open hearings), which should lead to formal Senate approval before Congress adjourns for its summer recess in early August. So Sotomayor will likely take
her seat in time for the start of the new Court session on October 5. (I talk briefly about the likely politics of the nomination process below). What is of more interest to me, however, is what
Political scientists, like baseball writers evaluating hitters, have devised
numerous means of measuring a president’s influence in Congress. I will devote a separate post to discussing these, but in brief,
they often center on the creation of legislative “box scores” designed to measure how many times a
president’s preferred piece of legislation, or nominee to the executive branch or the courts, is approved
by Congress. That is, how many pieces of legislation that the president supports actually pass Congress?
How often do members of Congress vote with the president’s preferences? How often is a president’s policy position supported
by roll call outcomes? These measures, however, are a misleading gauge of presidential power – they are a better
indicator of congressional power. This is because how members of Congress vote on a nominee or legislative item is
rarely influenced by anything a president does. Although journalists (and political scientists) often
focus on the legislative “endgame” to gauge presidential influence – will the President swing enough
votes to get his preferred legislation enacted? – this mistakes an outcome with actual evidence of
presidential influence. Once we control for other factors – a member of Congress’ ideological and
partisan leanings, the political leanings of her constituency, whether she’s up for reelection or not – we
can usually predict how she will vote without needing to know much of anything about what the
president wants. (I am ignoring the importance of a president’s veto power for the moment.) Despite the much publicized and celebrated
instances of presidential arm-twisting during the legislative endgame, then, most legislative outcomes
don’t depend on presidential lobbying. But this is not to say that presidents lack influence. Instead, the primary means by which presidents influence what
her selection reveals about the basis of presidential power.
Congress does is through their ability to determine the alternatives from which Congress must choose. That is, presidential power is largely an exercise in agenda-setting – not arm-twisting.
And we see this in the Sotomayer nomination. Barring a major scandal, she will almost certainly be confirmed to the Supreme Court whether Obama spends the confirmation hearings calling
every Senator or instead spends the next few weeks ignoring the Senate debate in order to play Halo III on his Xbox. That is, how senators decide to vote on Sotomayor will have almost
nothing to do with Obama’s lobbying from here on in (or lack thereof). His real influence has already occurred, in the decision to present Sotomayor as his nominee. If we want to measure
Obama’s “power”, then, we need to know what his real preference was and why he chose Sotomayor. My guess – and it is only a guess – is that after conferring with leading Democrats and
Republicans, he recognized the overriding practical political advantages accruing from choosing an Hispanic woman, with left-leaning credentials. We cannot know if this would have been his
ideal choice based on judicial philosophy alone, but presidents are never free to act on their ideal preferences. Politics is the art of the possible. Whether Sotomayer is his first choice or not,
however, her nomination is a reminder that the power of the presidency often resides in the president’s ability to dictate the alternatives from which Congress (or in this case the Senate) must
choose. Although Republicans will undoubtedly attack Sotomayor for her judicial “activism” (citing in particular her decisions regarding promotion and affirmative action), her comments
regarding the importance of gender and ethnicity in influencing her decisions, and her views regarding whether appellate courts “make” policy, they run the risk of alienating Hispanic voters –
an increasingly influential voting bloc (to the extent that one can view Hispanics as a voting bloc!) I find it very hard to believe she will not be easily confirmed. In structuring the alternative
before the Senate in this manner, then, Obama reveals an important aspect of presidential power that cannot be measured through legislative boxscores.
1ar pc not key
Political capital’s not key—Dickinson is a former Harvard professor and says people
vote on partisanship and ideology—the plan is one issue and won’t affect how people
feel about _________— their authors are media hacks and don’t explain what
Obama’s doing to influence votes
--8% chance of the internal link
Beckmann 11 [Matthew N Beckmann and Vimal Kumar 11, Associate Professor of Political Science at UC
Irvine, econ prof at the Indian Institute of Tech, “Opportunism in Polarization”, Presidential Studies
Quarterly; Sep 2011; 41, 3, CMR]
presidents' political capital— also finds support in these analyses, though the results here
are less reliable. Presidents operating under the specter of strong economy and high approval ratings get
an important, albeit moderate, increase in their chances for prevailing on "key" Senate roll-call votes (b =
.10, se = .06, p < .10). Figure 4 displays the substantive implications of these results in the context of polarization, showing that going from the lower third of
political capital to the upper third increases presidents' chances for success by 8 percentage points (in a
setting like 2008). Thus, political capital's impact does provide an important boost to presidents' success on
Capitol Hill, but it is certainly not potent enough to overcome basic congressional realities . Political
capital is just strong enough to put a presidential thumb on the congressional scales, which often will
not matter, but can in close cases.
The final important piece in our theoretical model—
--Presidential leadership’s irrelevant
Jacobs and King 10, University of Minnesota, Nuffield College, (Lawrence and Desmond, “Varieties of
Obamaism: Structure, Agency, and the Obama Presidency,” Perspectives on Politics (2010), 8: 793-802)
personality is not a solid foundation for a persuasive explanation of presidential impact and the
shortfalls or accomplishments of Obama's presidency. Modern presidents have brought divergent individual traits to their jobs and
yet they have routinely failed to enact much of their agendas. Preeminent policy goals of Bill Clinton (health reform) and George W. Bush (Social
But
Security privatization) met the same fate, though these presidents' personalities vary widely. And presidents like Jimmy Carter—whose personality traits have been criticized as ill-suited for
effective leadership—enjoyed comparable or stronger success in Congress than presidents lauded for their personal knack for leadership—from Lyndon Johnson to Ronald Reagan.7 Indeed,
a
personalistic account provides little leverage for explaining the disparities in Obama's record—for
example why he succeeded legislatively in restructuring health care and higher education, failed in other
areas, and often accommodated stakeholders.
Decades of rigorous research find that impersonal, structural forces offer the most compelling
explanations for presidential impact.8 Quantitative research that compares legislative success and
presidential personality finds no overall relationship .9 In his magisterial qualitative and historical study, Stephen Skowronek reveals that
institutional dynamics and ideological commitments structure presidential choice and success in ways that trump the personal predilections of individual presidents.10 Findings point to the
predominant influence on presidential legislative success of the ideological and partisan composition of Congress, entrenched interests, identities, and institutional design, and a constitutional
order that invites multiple and competing lines of authority.
The widespread presumption, then, that Obama's personal traits or leadership style account for the obstacles to his
policy proposals is called into question by a generation of scholarship on the presidency. Indeed, the
presumption is not simply problematic analytically, but practically as well. For the misdiagnosis of the source of presidential
weakness may, paradoxically, induce failure by distracting the White House from strategies and tactics where
presidents can make a difference. Following a meeting with Obama shortly after Brown's win, one Democratic senator lamented the White House's delusion that a
presidential sales pitch will pass health reform—“Just declaring that he's still for it doesn't mean that it comes off life support.”11 Although Obama's re-engagement after the Brown victory did
contribute to restarting reform, the senator's comment points to the importance of ideological and partisan coalitions in Congress, organizational combat, institutional roadblocks, and
anticipated voter reactions.
Presidential sales pitches go only so far.
--Ideology statistically outweighs PC
Beckmann and
Matthew N
Vimal
Presidential Studies Quarterly; Sep 2011; 41, 3
Kumar 11, Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine, econ prof at the Indian Institute of Tech, “Opportunism in Polarization”,
the further away the pivotal voter's predisposition from the president's side, the
lower his chances for prevailing on "key" contested Senate votes (b = -2.53, se = .79,p < -05). Holding everything else at its 2008 value, the
First, as previous research has shown,
president's predicted probability of winning a key, contested vote runs from .42 to .77 across the observed range of filibuster pivot predispositions (farthest to closest), with the median
the greater the ideological distance between the president and
pivotal voter, the worse the president's prospects for winning an important, controversial floor vote in
the Senate.
distance yielding a .56 predicted probability of presidential success. Plainly,
PC theory is wrong
Moraes 1/8 – PhD in Atmospheric Physics (Frank, “Political capital is a myth”, http://thereaction.blogspot.com/2013/01/political-capital-is-myth.html, CMR)
Yesterday, Jonathan Chait metaphorically scratched his head: "Nominating Hagel Most Un-Obama Thing Ever." He can't understand this
nomination given that (1) Hagel will be a hard sell and (2) Obama doesn't much listen to his advisers anyway. It is interesting speculation, but I
wouldn't have even thought about it had he not written, "Why waste political capital picking a fight that isn't essential to any policy goals?"¶
This brought to mind something that has been on my mind for a while, as in posts like "Bipartisan Consensus Can Bite Me." I'm afraid that just
like Santa Claus and most conceptions of God, " Political Capital" is a myth. I think it is just an idea that Villagers find
comforting. It is a neat narrative in which one can straightjacket a political fight. Otherwise, it is just bullshit.¶ Let's go
back to late 2004, after Bush Jr was re-elected. He said, "I earned capital in the political campaign and I intend to spend it." What was this thing
that Bush intended to spend? It is usually said that political capital is some kind of mandate from the masses. But that is clearly not what Bush
meant. He got a mandate to fuck the poor and kill the gays. But he used his political capital to privatize Social Security. One could say that this
proves the point, but does anyone really think if Bush had decided to use his political capital destroying food stamps and Medicaid that he
would have succeeded any better? The truth was that Bush's political capital didn't exist.¶ Let's look
at more recent events: the Fiscal
Cliff. Obama didn't win that fight because the people who voted for him demanded it. He won it because
everyone knew that in the new year he would still be president. Tax rates were going up. Boehner took
the Fiscal Cliff deal because it was the best deal that he felt he could get. He didn't fold because of
some magic political capital that Obama could wave over him.¶ There is no doubt that public opinion does affect how
politicians act. Even politicians in small safe districts have to worry that larger political trends may end up
making them look stupid, out of touch, or just cruel. But beyond that, they really don't care. If they did, then everyone in the
House would now be a Democrat: after all, Obama won a mandate and the associated political capital. But they don't, because presidential
elections have consequences -- for who's in the White House. They don't have much consequence for the representative from the Third District
of California.
--Studies prove PC makes no difference
Rockman 9, Purdue University Political Science professor, (Bert A., October 2009, Presidential Studies Quarterly, “Does the revolution in presidential studies mean "off with the
president's head"?”, volume 39, issue 4, Academic OneFile. accessed 7-15-10)
Edwards (e.g., 1980, 1989, 1990, 2003) and others
have tested Neustadt's ideas about skill and prestige translating into leverage with
other actors. In this, Neustadt's ideas turned out to be wrong and insufficiently specified. We know from the work of empirical scientists
that public approval (prestige) by itself does little to advance a president's agenda and that the effects of
approval are most keenly felt--where they are at all--among a president's support base. We know now,
too, that a president's purported skills at schmoozing, twisting arms, and congressional lobbying add
virtually nothing to getting what he (or she) wants from Congress. That was a lot more than we knew prior to the publication of
Although Neustadt shunned theory as such, his ideas could be made testable by scholars of a more scientific bent. George
(e.g., Bond and Fleisher 1990)
Presidential Power. Neustadt gave us the ideas to work with, and a newer (and now older) generation of political scientists, reared on Neustadt but armed with the tools of scientific inquiry,
That the empirical tests demonstrate that several of these propositions
are wrong comes with the territory. That is how science progresses. But the reality is that there was almost nothing of a propositional nature prior to Neustadt.
could put some of his propositions to an empirical test.
--Obama won’t fight – he has never used political capital
Newsweek 10 (“Learning from LBJ,” 3-25, http://www.newsweek.com/2010/03/25/learning-from-lbj.html)
It's called "the treatment." All presidents administer it, one way or another. The trick is to use the perks
of the office and the power of personality to bring around doubters and foes. LBJ was a desk, computer to one side, notepad
and pen at the ready. "He doesn't twist arms," recalls Kucinich. Rather, the president quietly listened. He was "all business,"
and sat patiently while Kucinich expressed his concerns, which Obama already knew. Then the president laid out his
own arguments. Kucinich wasn't persuaded by the president, he told NEWSWEEK. But he voted for the bill
because he did not want the presidency to fail, and he was convinced Obama would work with him in future. A president's first year in office is often a
time for learning. The harshest lessons are beginners' mistakes, like the Bay of Pigs fiasco for JFK. The real key is to figure out how to use the prestige of the office to get things done: when to
conserve your political capital, and when and how to spend it. Judging from Obama's campaign, which revolutionized politics with its ability to tap grassroots networks of donors and activists,
many expected President Obama to go over the heads of Congress and mobilize popular passions to
achieve his top priorities the most outlandish and sometimes outrageous practitioner. With three televisions blasting in the background, Johnson would get about six
inches away from the face of some beleaguered or balky senator or cabinet secretary. Sometimes LBJ would beckon the man into the bathroom and continue to cajole or harangue while he sat
With much guffawing and backslapping, recalcitrant
lawmakers are led to a luxurious cabin where they are granted a presidential audience and bestowed
with swag, like cuff links with the presidential seal (Johnson gave away plastic busts of himself). Dennis Kucinich, seven-term congressman from Ohio and potential vote-switcher for
health reform, was invited aboard Air Force One a couple of weeks before the climactic vote in the House. He had dealt with Presidents Clinton and Bush before, but Obama was
different. The president was sitting in shirt sleeves behind. But on what may be his signature issue, that wasn't really
the case. Obama came close to prematurely ending his effectiveness as president before finally pulling out the stops. In the last push for the health-care bill, he reminded voters of
Obama the candidate, fiery and full of hope. But during the health-reform bill's long slog up and around Capitol Hill, Obama
was a strangely passive figure. He sometimes seemed more peeved than engaged. His backers naturally wondered why he
seemed to abandon the field to the tea partiers. The answer may be that at some level he just doesn't like politics, not the way Bill Clinton
or LBJ or a "happy warrior" like Hubert Humphrey thrived on the press of flesh, the backroom deal, and
the roar of the crowd. That doesn't mean Obama can't thrive or be successful—even Richard Nixon was elected to two terms. But it does mean that the country is
run by what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wryly called "the conquering professor"—a president who leads more from the head than
the heart, who often relies more on listening than preaching. Obama entered politics as a community organizer, and as a presidential
candidate he oversaw an operation that brilliantly organized from the ground up. So it was a puzzle to Marshall Ganz, a longtime community organizer, that Obama seemed to
neglect the basic rule of a grassroots organizer: to mobilize and, if necessary, polarize your popular base
against a common enemy. Instead, President Obama seemed to withdraw and seek not to offend while Congress
squabbled. "It was a curiously passive strategy," says Ganz, who worked for 16 years with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers and now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School. In
on the toilet. Air Force One is a favorite tool presidents use to inspire and overawe.
a way, he says, Obama's "fear of a small conflict made a big conflict inevitable."
--Obama’ll back off
Alter 10, previously editor at Newsweek, now a columnist at Bloomberg, (Jonathan, “The promise: President Obama, year one,”
a candidate who came to office in part because of his silver tongue
was unable until 2010 to explain convincingly why the country should follow him on health care. The president
had trouble mastering the persuasive powers of the office. He failed to give voice to public anger or to convince the middle class that he was
focused enough on their number one concern: jobs. He failed to persuade his fellow Democrats to use their fleeting sixty-vote
supermajority in the Senate to enact more of his program. And he failed to attach more conditions to the bank bailouts, which cost him
Better communication would have helped. The great irony was that
leverage he might have exercised to restructure the financial industry and lessen the likelihood of another grave economic crisis.
He had promised something that
he couldn't deliver—a capital culture where Democrats and Republicans worked together. It wasn't just that the
From the start Obama was boxed in not only by the mess that Bush left him but by the contradictions at the center of his appeal.
rhetoric of campaigning and the reality of governing were at odds; that's always true in politics. The difference this time was that millions more people than usual took the rhetoric to heart,
Fulfilling Obama's campaign promises required getting
bills passed, which in turn required working inside the same broken system he was pledging to reform.
The congressional sausage making stank so bad that for a time it spoiled everyone's appetite for the
meal.
then turned on the television to see the ugly reality more vividly than they expected.
--Political capital isn’t key to the agenda – vote preferences are resilient and unrelated
to presidential pushes
Dickinson 11 – Professor of Political Science [Matthew, professor of political science at Middlebury College and taught
previously at Harvard University where he worked under the supervision of presidential scholar Richard Neustadt, 3-21-2011, “Friedman
Weighs In On the “Passionless” President – But Is He Right?,” http://blogs.middlebury.edu/presidentialpower/2011/03/21/friedman-weighs-inon-the-passive-president-but-is-he-right/, CMR]
Friedman’s complaint regarding Obama’s “passive” leadership approach is not original – I noted in my previous posts that it has become a recurring leitmotif among pundits, particularly those,
the idea that presidents can “sell” their policy to Congress by leveraging
public opinion is one that has little-to-no empirical support among political scientists. It’s not for lack of trying: a
number of scholars have sought to establish a link between a president’s public standing and their
effectiveness in getting legislation through Congress. More than three decades ago Sam Kernell, in his book Going Public, made the most cogent
like Friedman, who write generally from the Left. However,
theoretical case for the idea that presidents can rally public opinion on behalf of their legislative program. Alas, Kernell rested much of his argument on Ronald Reagan’s presidency –
particularly Reagan’s success in getting Congress, including a Democratically-controlled House, to pass his 1981 package of tax and spending cuts. Upon closer inspection, however, it turns out
that Reagan’s success in getting that legislation passed depended as much if not more on old-fashioned horse-trading with key members of Congress, rather than any speechmaking by the
President. With hindsight, it appears that Kernell was much more effective at documenting changes in presidents’ communication strategies than he was in showing that those changes had
research has found that presidents’ efforts to “go public” on behalf of their
legislative program are only marginally successful and then under only the most stringent conditions.
Indeed, most political scientists view the idea that presidents can go on national television to rally support for their
legislation very much outdated (something Kernell acknowledges in the latest edition of his classic text). In an era in which the media has increasingly fragmented
any impact on their legislative success. Subsequent
into smaller and more opinionated news outlets (think of the change in your lifetime from the three major evening news broadcasts to the dozens of cable news programs), presidents are
going local” by targeting local newspapers and television stations. However, the initial
too has proved to be of distinctly limited effectiveness
more likely to bypass national news media outlets altogether, and instead adopt a strategy of “
studies of this change in tactics suggest it
. As a case in point, one need only recall George
W. Bush’s ultimately fruitless effort to barnstorm through 60 cities on behalf of social security reform in 2005. In his memoirs, Bush recalls laying out his “going local” strategy with Republican
congressional leaders. The response? “If you lead, we’ll be behind you…but we’ll be way behind you.” And so they were. Despite giving speeches, convening town halls, and even holding an
event “with my favorite Social Security beneficiary, Mother” Bush’s legislation went nowhere in a Republican-controlled Congress. Upon consideration, it is easy to see why, and to identify the
weaknesses in Friedman’s reasoning more generally. First,
approval
the “going public/local” thesis presumes that presidents can affect their
But as Obama is discovering, this is not the case
popular
as measured, for example, by Gallup polls.
. Many pundits were convinced that
his presidency had reached a turning point when the lame-duck 111th Congress passed several pieces of legislation shortly after the 2010 midterms. In faact, as this chart shows, after a brief
bump up in approval, his ratings have dropped down again closer to what they were prior to the midterms. As I noted in an earlier post, they aren’t likely to go much higher than this, barring a
significant uptick in the economy, until the 2012 presidential campaign is well underway, and voters began evaluating him in comparison to a single Republican opponent. At that point I expect
Friedman
assumes those approval ratings are fungible, that is, that they can be converted into a currency of exchange acceptable to
members of Congress. From this perspective, a popular presidency has surplus cash in the bank with
which to “buy” congressional support. But members of Congress don’t really care what the president’s
national poll numbers are – they are only interested in what their smaller geographic-based constituency in
their state or House district thinks about the president’s stance on any particular issue. And in most cases most
of the time, most of the constituents aren’t paying attention, or have no strong opinion. And when
constituents are paying attention, they are as likely to take their cues from their Representative or
Senator as they are to listen to the President. Keep in mind that members of Congress can “go public” as effectively with their constituents as can the
to see his approval ratings begin to climb. (Interestingly, approval numbers for Congress have also begun to recede – I’ll deal with that in a separate post.) Second,
president. It is small wonder, then, that political scientist Jeff Cohen finds that president’s efforts to “go local” – that is, to target local media outlets as a way of ramping up support – have only
modest effects in terms of improving media coverage of the president, never mind raising his poll numbers. I understand that Friedman is not a political scientist; he is an opinion columnist
whose job is to stake out a position to get people talking. But it is important, given his rather large readership, that someone call him out when his opinion appears to contradict what political
if passing energy and budget legislation were as simple as touring the country giving speeches and “getting in
Republicans’ face” President Obama would already be doing that. As it stands, however, there’s no reason why he
should pay any attention to what Friedman writes on this score.
scientists think they know. I’m sure
1ar pc not key – at: dickinson indict
--Their indict is a straw-person
Dickinson 9—same damn one
(Matthew, professor of political science at Middlebury College. He taught previously at Harvard University, where he also received his Ph.D., working under the
supervision of presidential scholar Richard Neustadt, We All Want a Revolution: Neustadt, New Institutionalism, and the Future of Presidency Research, Presidential
Studies Quarterly 39 no4 736-70 D 2009)
===their evidence ends===
In one of the most concerted efforts to model how bargaining takes place at the individual level, Terry Sullivan examines presidential archives containing administrative headcounts to identify
instances in which members of Congress switched positions during legislative debate, from initially opposing the president to supporting him in the final roll call (Sullivan 1988, 1990, 1991).
Sullivan shows that in a bargaining game with incomplete information regarding the preferences of the president and members of Congress, there are a number of possible bargaining
outcomes for a given distribution of legislative and presidential policy preferences. These outcomes depend in part on legislators' success in bartering their potential support for the president's
policy for additional concessions from the president. In threatening to withhold support, however, members of Congress run the risk that the president will call their bluff and turn elsewhere
for the necessary votes. By capitalizing on members' uncertainty regarding whether their support is necessary to form a winning coalition, Sullivan theorizes that presidents can reduce
members of Congress's penchant for strategic bluffing and increase the likelihood of a legislative outcome closer to the president's preference. “Hence, the skill to bargain successfully
becomes a foundation for presidential power even within the context of electorally determined opportunities,” Sullivan concludes (1991, 1188).
Most of these studies infer presidential influence, rather than measuring it directly (Bond, Fleisher, and Krutz 1996, 12829; see also Edwards 1991). Interestingly, however, although the vote “buying” approach is certainly consistent with Neustadt's
bargaining model, none of his case studies in PP show presidents employing this tactic. The reason may be that
Neustadt concentrates his analysis on the strategic level: “Strategically the question is not how he masters Congress in a peculiar instance, but what he does to boost his mastery in any
instance” (Neustadt 1990, 4). For Neustadt, whether a president's lobbying efforts bear fruit in any particular circumstance depends in large part on the broader pattern created by a
president's prior actions when dealing with members of Congress (and “Washingtonians” more generally). These previous interactions determine a president's professional reputation—the
“residual impressions of [a president's] tenacity and skill” that accumulate in Washingtonians' minds, helping to “heighten or diminish” a president's bargaining advantages. “Reputation, of
itself, does not persuade, but it can make persuasions easier, or harder, or impossible” (Neustadt 1990, 54).
To date, Neustadt's argument regarding the importance of a president's professional reputation has
received very little scholarly analysis (but see Jones 2001). An exception is Charles Cameron's perceptive study of presidential vetoes (Cameron 2000a).
Cameron models the veto bargaining process between the president and Congress as a sequential game with imperfect information. Under these circumstances, he demonstrates that it may
benefit a president to threaten to veto a bill—even if he prefers that bill to the status quo—in the hope that Congress will pass a revised bill closer to the president's preference. The
effectiveness of the president's veto strategy, however, depends on his professional reputation, which influences legislators' judgment regarding the president's “take it or leave it point”—
“the point beyond which he will not go because he would rather veto and retain the status quo” (Cameron 2000b, 110). By using veto threats to manipulate legislators' uncertainty over exactly
where this point lies, presidents can achieve a more favorable legislative outcome. A president's professional reputation, Cameron concludes, is an important part of a president's veto-related
bargaining effectiveness, much as Neustadt surmised.
Cameron's effort notwithstanding, professional reputation remains, as Jones (2001) noted in a perceptive analysis of this topic, an understudied component of Neustadt's bargaining paradigm,
one that is ripe for further analysis. A second line of research Neustadt pioneered has only lately begun to receive the attention it deserves. The vote-switching models described earlier
typically focus on the legislative endgame, when presidents bargain with as many fence-sitting members of Congress as needed to secure a winning coalition. However, Neustadt's own
illustrations in PP, as well as two groundbreaking articles that he wrote documenting the development of a presidential legislative program (Neustadt 1954, 1955), suggest that presidential
power vis-à-vis Congress may better studied “upstream” (Covington, Wrighton, and Kinney 1995, 1023), through a president's choices regarding what initiatives to present to Congress and
when.12 Although scholars were slow to appreciate the significance of Neustadt's research (and none has updated his description of legislative clearance), within the last two decades, scholars
have begun documenting the development and composition of the president's legislative program (Bond and Fleisher 1990, 230; Edwards 1989, 146; Edwards and Barrett 2000, 109-33; Light
1999; Peterson 1990, 218-31; Rudalevige 2002a).
studies make it clear that Congress almost always gives a president's legislative wish list—particularly the most
full consideration. But does this agenda-setting prowess translate into “power” in Neustadtian
terms? Or are presidents simply providing a legislative drafting service for Congress? Cary Covington, Mark Wrighton, and
These
important bills—
Rhonda Kinney show that Congress is more likely to pass the president's legislative initiatives compared to other proposals. This is because, they theorize, the president can shape a bill's
content in ways designed to increase the likelihood of passage (Covington, Wrighton, and Kinney 1995, 1001-24).13 Edwards and Barrett also find a higher success rate for the president's
the president's advantage reflects his status
as party leader responsible for setting the policy agenda, rather than any additional bargaining skill. In their
words, “the president demonstrates no unusual persuasiveness with Congress ” (Edwards and Barrett 2000, 133). Put another way,
initiatives in Congress. But because this success is limited to periods of unified government, they suggest that
it may simply be that during periods of unified government, presidents preempt congressional action by proposing bills that legislators would have introduced in any event. But Beckmann, in
his study of congressional lawmaking during the period 1953-2004, argues that by targeting existing policies that are ripe for change through legislative action, and then manipulating which
proposals surface as alternatives, presidents can use their agenda-setting power to move legislative outcomes closer to their preferred position. A president's “success” in Congress, he argues,
appears partly predicated on his ability to obtain a hearing on his priority items while simultaneously censoring alternatives of which he is less enamored.
Whether or not the ability to set the legislative agenda illustrates presidential power in the immediate context, Neustadt clearly believes that the skill with which presidents take on this task
influences perceptions of their bargaining prowess. In his study of Eisenhower's 1958 budget proposal, Neustadt argues that by sending mixed signals regarding his budgetary goals,
Eisenhower hurt his professional reputation, thus damaging his ability to convince members of Congress to support his legislative program in subsequent years. In this respect, Neustadt
suggests, providing a legislative drafting service can influence a president's broader bargaining interests, even if this may not directly translate into increased legislative persuasiveness.
There is no pretense here that this is an exhaustive review of the literature on presidential–congressional relations. But it does demonstrate that Neustadt's claims in PP helped stimulate,
rather than stymie, research in this area. In Jones's words, Neustadt showed scholars “what to look for, as well as providing conceptual lenses for the viewing” (2001, 295). Although scholars
that presidential “skill”—however defined—is a significant influence on
congressional outcomes, this is consistent with Neustadt's claim that presidents are weak. Neustadt's assertions
found little evidence, based on legislative “box scores,”
regarding the importance of a president's professional reputation have undergone more limited testing, but the results to date are consistent with his premise. And by documenting the
development of a president's legislative program, Neustadt pushed scholars to consider how this agenda-setting power might enhance presidents' bargaining effectiveness. Notably, progress
in these areas came from scholars utilizing a variety of approaches, including deductive and inductive methods, case studies, statistical analysis, and formal modeling.
2ac Obama No Push
They have *0* I/L –Obama’s signature is AFTER the plan – he doesn’t push
Nicholas, ’12 – Peter Nicholas, Washington Bureau, “Obama's resolution? To limit dealings with
Congress,” Jan 1, LA Times, http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-plans20120101,0,2595075.story.
Heading into the new year, President Obama will insist that Congress renew the payroll tax cut through the end of 2012, but will otherwise
limit his dealings with an unpopular Congress , and instead travel the country to deliver his reelection message directly to voters,
a White House aide said. "In terms of the president's relationship with Congress in 2012 — the state of the debate, if you will —
the
president is no longer tied to Washington, D.C. ," spokesman Josh Earnest said in a news briefing in Honolulu. The
assertion is striking given that Obama, as president for nearly three years, is the symbol and personification of the federal government.
It also offers a glimpse into an Obama reelection strategy that will target a "do-nothing'' Congress much in the style of Harry S. Truman's
reelection campaign in 1948. With most legislative cliffhangers behind him, Obama does
not consider the rest of his policy
agenda to be a "must-do" for lawmakers, Earnest said. Rather, the White House believes Obama would be
well-served by continuing to distance himself from a Congress often blamed for Washington's gridlock and infighting.
Neg Internals
A2 Winners Win
The plan isn’t a win, it’s an ambush---Obama hasn’t been pushing it for a long
time and our link proves it has no supporters
Even legislative victories burn capital and harden opposition to the president
Eberly 1/21 --- coordinator of Public Policy Studies and assistant professor in the Department of
Political Science at St. Mary's College of Maryland (Todd, “The presidential power trap; Barack Obama is
discovering that modern presidents have difficulty amassing political capital, which hinders their ability
to enact a robust agenda,” http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-01-21/news/bs-ed-political-capital20130121_1_political-system-party-support-public-opinion, CR)
Barack Obama's election in 2008 seemed to signal a change. Mr. Obama's popular vote majority was the largest for any president since 1988,
and he was the first Democrat to clear the 50 percent mark since Lyndon Johnson. The president initially
enjoyed strong public
approval and, with a Democratic Congress, was able to produce an impressive string of legislative
accomplishments during his first year and early into his second, capped by enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
But with each legislative battle and success, his political capital waned . His impressive successes with
Congress in 2009 and 2010 were accompanied by a shift in the public mood against him, evident in the rise
of the tea party movement, the collapse in his approval rating, and the large GOP gains in the 2010 elections, which brought a return to divided
government.
Winners-win theory is wrong --- Obama’s first term proves
Calmes 11/13 (Jackie, International Herald Tribune, “Obama looks to budget talks as an opportunity
to take control of agenda; News Analysis,” 11/13/2012, Factiva, CR)
Whether Mr. Obama succeeds will reveal much about what kind of president he intends to be in his second term. Beyond the specifics of any accord, perhaps the
bigger question hanging over the negotiations is whether Mr. Obama will go to his second inaugural in
January with an achievement that starts to rewrite the unflattering leadership narrative that, fairly or not,
came to define his first term for many people.¶ That story line, stoked by Republicans but shared by some
Democrats, holds that Mr. Obama is too passive and deferential to Congress, a legislative naïf who does little to nurture
personal relationships with potential allies — in short, not a particularly strong leader. Even as voters re-elected Mr. Obama, those who said in surveys afterward
that strong leadership was the most important quality for a president overwhelmingly chose Mr. Romney.¶ George C. Edwards
III, a leading
scholar of the presidency at Texas A&M University who is currently teaching at Oxford University, dismissed such criticisms
as shallow and generally wrong. Yet Mr. Edwards, whose book on Mr. Obama’s presidency is titled ‘‘Overreach,’’ said, ‘‘He didn’t
understand the limits of what he could do.’’¶ ‘‘They thought they could continuously create
opportunities and they would succeed, and then there would be more success and more success, and
we’d build this advancing-tide theory of legislation,’’ Mr. Edwards said. ‘‘And that was very naïve, very silly .
Well, they’ve learned a lot, I think.’’¶ ‘‘Effective leaders,’’ he added, ‘‘exploit opportunities rather than
create them.’’
Rebuilding takes too long
Lashof ’10 (Dan Lashof, director of the National Resource Defense Council's climate center, Ph.D.
from the Energy and Resources Group at UC-Berkeley, 7-28-2010, NRDC Switchboard Blog, "Coulda,
Shoulda, Woulda: Lessons from Senate Climate Fail,"
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dlashof/coulda_shoulda_woulda_lessons.html, CR)
Lesson 2: Political
capital is not necessarily a renewable resource. Perhaps the most fateful decision the
Obama administration made early on was to move healthcare reform before energy and climate legislation. I’m sure
this seemed like a good idea at the time. Healthcare reform was popular, was seen as an issue that the public cared about on a
personal level, and was expected to unite Democrats from all regions. White House officials and Congressional
leaders reassured environmentalists with their theory that success breeds success. A quick victory on healthcare reform
would renew Obama’s political capital, some of which had to be spent early on to push the economic stimulus bill through Congress with no
Republican help. Healthcare reform was
public support,
reform is
eventually enacted, but only after an exhausting battle that eroded
drained political capital and created the Tea Party movement. Public support for healthcare
slowly rebounding
as some of the early benefits kick in and people
realize that the forecasted
Armageddon is not happening. But this is occurring too slowly to rebuild Obama’s political capital
to help push climate legislation across the finish line.
in time
A2 Winners Win – Extensions
Legislative wins don’t build capital
Eberly, 1/21 --- coordinator of Public Policy Studies and assistant professor in the Department of
Political Science at St. Mary's College of Maryland (Todd, “The presidential power trap; Barack Obama is
discovering that modern presidents have difficulty amassing political capital, which hinders their ability
to enact a robust agenda,” http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-01-21/news/bs-ed-political-capital20130121_1_political-system-party-support-public-opinion, CR)
However, short-term
legislative strategies may win policy success for a president but do not serve as an
antidote to declining political capital over time, as the difficult final years of both the Bill Clinton and
George W. Bush presidencies demonstrate. None of Barack Obama's recent predecessors solved the political capital problem or avoided
the power trap. It is the central political challenge confronted by modern presidents and one that will likely weigh heavily on the current
president's mind today as he takes his second oath of office.
A2 Winners Win – Extensions – Overreaching
Plan is a strategic blunder – most recent and qualified study proves their argument is a
fundamental misunderstanding of political capital
Edwards 1/17 – University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Jordan Chair in
Presidential Studies at Texas A&M University (George C, Overreach: Leadership in the Obama
Presidency, Book Review, http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9690.html, CR)
When Barack Obama became president, many Americans embraced him as a transformational leader who would fundamentally change the
politics and policy of the country. Yet, two
years into his administration, the public resisted his calls for support and Congress
was deadlocked over many of his major policy proposals. How could this capable new president have difficulty attaining
his goals? Did he lack tactical skills?
In Overreach, respected presidential scholar George Edwards argues that the
problem was strategic , not tactical. He finds that in
President Obama's first two years in office, Obama governed on the premise that he could create opportunities for
change by persuading the public and some congressional Republicans to support his major initiatives. As a
result, he proposed a large, expensive, and polarizing agenda in the middle of a severe economic crisis. The president's
proposals alienated many Americans and led to a severe electoral defeat for the Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections, undermining his
ability to govern in the remainder of his term.
Edwards shows that the
president's frustrations were predictable and the inevitable result of misunderstanding
the nature of presidential power . The author demonstrates that the essence of successful presidential
leadership is recognizing and exploiting existing opportunities , not in creating them through
persuasion . When Obama succeeded in passing important policies, it was by mobilizing Democrats who were already predisposed to back
him. Thus, to avoid overreaching, presidents should be alert to the limitations of their power to persuade
and rigorously assess the possibilities for obtaining public and congressional support in their
environments.
Plan’s overreaching, kills the agenda
Balz 1/21 (Dan, “Obama speech reveals a different leader”,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-speech-reveals-a-differentleader/2013/01/21/273bb698-63d4-11e2-85f5-a8a9228e55e7_print.html, CR)
Opponents will find much to dislike about what Obama said Monday, for this was not a speech aimed at mollifying
those who lost the election. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who lost the presidential race four years ago, expressed disappointment
that Obama was not more explicit about bringing the two sides together. “I would have liked to have seen more
on outreach and working together,” McCain said. But the senator added, “It’s his privilege to say what he wants .”¶ Obama
risks overreaching or over-interpreting his mandate, which can be an affliction of newly reelected presidents. His victory in
November was decisive but not overwhelming . Self-confidence can slip over the line to arrogance or
hubris. Second terms often disappoint. So there are dangers ahead for the president.¶ On Monday, he set
out his ambitions for a second term in clear language. What follows will define how history judges both those
priorities and his ability to turn them into action.
Overreaching – plan goes beyond Obama’s calculated agenda, forcing trade-offs
Baker 12/18 (Peter, “Obama Facing Critical Choice After Shooting”,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/us/politics/president-obama-facing-critical-choice-afternewtown-shooting.html?_r=0, CR)
These decisions
are made on a scale of trade-offs
that may be unique
to the White House. President Bill Clinton
made big pushes in his early days for priorities that did not have the votes, or that helped cost Democrats control of Congress in his first
midterm election, including the assault weapon ban that later expired and left the party feeling burned for nearly two decades. Then Mr.
Clinton adjusted and focused more on making incremental progress toward his goals.¶ President George W. Bush scorned what he considered
Mr. Clinton’s “small ball” approach and prided himself on bold initiatives like cutting taxes, remaking education, expanding Medicare to cover
prescription drugs and combating AIDS in Africa. But by his second
term, he pursued big goals like overhauling Social
Security and immigration only to lose.¶ “There certainly can be a cost to it,” said Peter Wehner, an adviser to Mr.
Bush who worked for Mitt Romney this year. “You can fight for something and lose and be a weakened figure. On the other hand, sometimes
there’s honor in loss. You may lose but in the process you advance a cause in the eyes of history.”¶ Mr. Wehner and other conservatives
consider the groundswell for gun control to be understandable but more a symbolic gesture than an effective response. But he said Mr.
Obama had been smart about picking the terrain he fought on. “He has waited until the stars aligned
before he acted,” he said.¶ In the end, the stars have not aligned before for Obama priorities like legislation on climate change and
immigration. He took office amid the worst economic crisis in generations and pursued a historic health coverage expansion that had eluded his
predecessors. By the time he pushed that through, enacted a stimulus package, toughened Wall Street regulations and lifted limits on gays in
the military, he had lost the House and did not think the new Republican majority would agree to gun legislation. ¶ “The president always had a
personal commitment to the issue,” said Phil Schiliro, who was Mr. Obama’s first legislative affairs director. “But given
the crisis he
faced when he first took office, there’s only so much capacity in the system to move his agenda.”
Obama can’t overreach his 2nd term – kills the agenda
Fournier 11/6 (Ron, “Obama Victory Comes With No Mandate”,
http://www.nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/obama-victory-comes-with-no-mandate20121106, CR)
Mandates are rarely won on election night. They are earned after Inauguration Day by leaders who spend their political capital
wisely , taking advantage of events without overreaching . Obama is capable—as evidenced by his first-term
success with health care reform. But mandate-building requires humility, a trait not easily associated with him.¶ “The mandate is a myth,” said
John Altman, associate professor of political science at York College of Pennsylvania. “But even if there was such a thing as a mandate, this clearly isn’t an election that would produce one.”¶
He pointed to Obama’s small margin of victory and the fact that U.S. voters are divided deeply by race, gender, spirituality, and party affiliation. You can’t claim to be carrying out the will of the
people when the populous has little shared will.¶ Andrew Jackson was the first president to claim that the desires of the public overrode Congress’s constitutional prerogatives. Virtually every
More often than not,
Congress trims the president’s sails, leaving both the leader and his followers disappointed. ¶ “Presidential claims to a mandate, such as President [George] W.
president since Jackson has claimed the mantle, even while lacking two ingredients of an electoral mandate: a landslide victory and a specific agenda.
Bush in 2004, are misleading to the public and the officeholder,” said Anthony Brunello, professor of political science at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla.¶ Some mandates are easily and
obviously claimed, usually as an extension of calamitous events. Examples: Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression, Lyndon Johnson after the assassination of John Kennedy, and Bush
Clinton overreached on health care reform in his
and Bush misread his reelection as a mandate for Social Security reform in 2005.¶ In a capital as polarized as
Washington, even a landslide victory and detailed campaign platform wouldn’t secure a president’s agenda.¶ “Mandates may not exist in Washington
anymore with the hyper-partisanship we now see associated with every substantive or political move on the
Hill,” said Steve McMahon, strategist for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign.¶ “I’m generally an optimist, but it’s
after 9/11.¶ Claiming a mandate can lead a president down policy paths that are reckless and unpopular. Bill
first term
hard to see how there is a mandate for anything other than more of what we’ve seen the last several years,” said GOP strategist Mark McKinnon, who helped elect and reelect the younger
President Bush. “There’s not a good scenario for how this turns out.”¶ Obama hurt his cause by running a hard-edged and negative campaign against Republican Mitt Romney, hoping to
convince recession-weary voters that his rival was unworthy of the job. He gave lip service to an agenda, publishing scaled-back and repackaged ideas from his first term in a 20-page
pamphlet. Obama’s message was often microtargeted to Democratic coalitions rather than the broad electorate.¶ “To me, as a supporter, it’s been frustrating because President Obama had
the opportunity ... to make his campaign about something larger,” said Democratic consultant Carter Eskew, top strategist to Al Gore in 2000.¶ Mike McCurry, former press secretary for
President Clinton, said it’s easy to criticize candidates for ducking solutions to the nation’s intractable problems such as budget deficits, social mobility, and poverty. But the fact is, any
campaign proposal would have been grounds for attack.¶ “My guess is, neither candidate offered specifics because it would have been politically untenable,” McCurry said.¶ McKinnon said
voters would have rewarded Obama or Romney for addressing hard truths. “People are hungry for an agenda, hungry for specifics, hungry for anything that looks like a solution,” McKinnon
said. “I think there are ways to do it without painting yourself in a corner.”¶ So the vagaries of history, his times, and his message will deny Obama an automatic mandate. He has to earn it.
The question is, how?¶ First, lower expectations. Obama promised voters he would change the nature of politics in his first term. He failed.
Rather than promise the
unattainable , Obama needs to acknowledge the difficulty of tasks ahead, starting with curbing the nation’s debt.¶ Eskew suggested Obama say something like:
“Look, I learned some things in Washington. I thought we could all get along, and I learned that is not the case. I want to do some things for the country but I can’t do them unless people
support me—not just in the election, but also after.”¶ Second, commit to the hard and humbling work of governing. Schmooze with lawmakers, hold regular news conferences, travel the
country to
tout legislation, and dig into the details of bills and regulations.¶ Karen Hughes, an adviser to George W. Bush, had this advice for the famously aloof president:
and get seen working with lawmakers. People will appreciate the effort.Ӧ Third, reach out to Republicans with concrete and symbolic
“Get in the limo and go to the Hill
There is going to have to be compromise to get anything done, especially with big issues,” said Mike Feldman,
another strategist on Gore’s 2000 campaign.¶ Obama may need to bring in new advisors who can work with Republicans. "He needs to ignore the blind
gestures. “
partisans from either party, and find the uniters," said Democratic consultant Chris Kofinis. "If he does he will become an even more historic president."¶ McCurry noted that soon after his
1980 victory, Ronald Reagan reappointed popular former Democratic Sen. Mike Mansfield as ambassador to Japan. “Gestures like that build goodwill,” McCurry said. “It’s increasingly how you
claim the mandate and how you move forward that determines the outcome.Ӧ Altman, the political science professor from Pennsylvania, struggled for the advice he would give no-mandate
Obama. “You are going to govern unsuccessfully. You are going to fail,” he said with a chuckle.¶ But then he hedged. Maybe expectations would be lower for Obama than they were in 2009,
Altman said. “They expect him to just hang on for another four years and hopefully not screw it up too much,” Altman said. “They will take 2016 as a new day.”¶ That’s not much of a mandate.
But it is a second chance.¶ Donna Brazile, campaign manager for Gore in 2000, said Obama should set his sights accordingly. “
clear as daylight,” she said, “is to break the gridlock of Washington.”
The only mandate that will be
A2 Winners Win – Extensions – Finite + Agenda-Setting
Plan drains finite capital and wrecks agenda-setting
Demirjian 11/11 (Karoun, “Will Republicans play ball on Obama’s lofty second-term agenda?”, 2012,
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2012/nov/11/will-republicans-play-ball-obamas-lofty-second-ter/,
CR)
Obama also hinted at what sounded like the framework of an agenda for the next four
I am looking forward to reaching out with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve
As he was thanking the country for re-electing him Tuesday night, President Barack
years.¶ “In the coming weeks and months,
together,” Obama said. “Reducing our deficit. Reforming our tax code. Fixing our immigration system. Freeing ourselves from foreign oil. We’ve got more work to do.”¶ The nods amount to the policy to-do list Obama did not
even after a re-election that gave him some breathing room — Obamacare is safe now — and a new infusion of political capital, Obama
will find himself limited : by the whims of Congress, the urgency of a fiscal crisis and the peculiarities of a calendar that dogs
every president during his second term.¶ “I would say they have to do these things within the first six months,”
UNLV professor David Damore said. “ You lose your window after that . Then everybody starts gearing up for the
tackle during his first term. But
midterms.”¶ That means the president, even coming off a strong win, will have to prioritize .¶ In Obama’s victory speech and through
the election, the
But
unfinished policy items that emerged as paramount are immigration, energy , education and tax reform.¶
his agenda for the first three months of the new term is almost pre-scripted . The country is coming up hard on a double-deadline: Come the end of the year, long-
standing tax cuts expire and deep-tissue cuts are scheduled to go into effect in all agencies of the government, especially the defense department.
A2 Winners Win – Extensions – Bandwidth
Can’t do everything – plan forces tradeoffs
Babington 12/24 (Charles, “Obama Agenda Provides Long Work List To Tackle When He Returns”,
2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/24/obama-agenda_n_2359400.html, CR)
Other
presidential historians, however, think Obama is severely constrained by political realities. They say he will
have to carefully pick and choose which goals to emphasize in his second four years.¶ "I see Obama as almost
uniquely handcuffed by circumstances," said John Baick of Western New England University. The number
of big, unresolved problems facing the nation, coupled with a deeply divided public and Congress, he said, leave Obama
with fewer viable options than most presidents have enjoyed.¶ At best, Baick said, the U.S. government "is a gigantic cruise liner, and the most he can do is keep us from
hitting ice bergs."¶ For instance, Baick said, "if he goes big on gun control, then it's 1994 all over again."¶ Then-President Bill Clinton pushed an assault weapons ban through the Democraticled Congress that year, prompting fierce pushback from gun-rights groups. Clinton later would credit the NRA with shifting the House majority to the GOP for the first time in 40 years.
However, other factors -- including a House bank scandal -- played big roles, too.¶ Paul
Rego, a political scientist at Messiah College in
Grantham, Penn., largely agrees with Baick.¶ "While President Obama does not face the same cataclysmic events that Abraham Lincoln faced, or that FDR encountered in
the form of the Great Depression and World War II, his challenges are many and significant," Rego said in an email.¶ He said Obama "faces a
hurdle that neither Lincoln nor Roosevelt had to overcome during the tumultuous years of their respective presidencies: divided
government." Today's Democrats and Republicans differ so sharply about government's proper role, Rego said. He said that Obama's job "is actually harder than that of his most
illustrious predecessors."
Trying to ram through the plan will spur a backlash that crushes the rest of
Obama’s agenda
Brooks 11/15 (David, “David Brooks: Economy needs deal maker, not war leader,”
http://www.postbulletin.com/news/stories/display.php?id=1514912, 11/15/2012, CR)
During his first term, President Barack Obama faced a wicked problem: How do you govern in a highly polarized, evenly divided country with
House Republicans who seem unwilling to compromise? Obama never really solved that one, and he was forced to pass his agenda on partisan
lines (during the first two years) or not pass it at all (the final two). ¶ Now re-elected with Republicans still in control of the House, Obama faces
the problem again. You might say the success of his second term rests upon his solving it.¶ Some
on the left are suggesting he
adopt a strategy of confrontation and conquest. The president should use the advantages of victory to
crush the spirit of the Republican House majority, they say. Reject the Grand Bargain approach. Instead, take the country over
the fiscal cliff. Blame it on the Republicans who are unwilling even to raise taxes on the rich. Wait until they fold, and then you will have your
way.¶ The first thing to say about this
strategy is that it is irresponsible . The recovery is fragile. Europe may crater. China is
ill. Business is pulling back at the mere anticipation of a fiscal cliff. It's reckless to think you can manufacture an economic
crisis for political leverage and then control the cascading results.¶ Second, it's terrible politics. Obama
probably could triumph in a short-term confrontation, pushing through higher tax rates on the rich that wouldn't even
produce enough revenue to cover a tenth of the deficit. But he'd sow such bitterness it would be the last thing he'd
pass for the rest of his term. The Republican House majority isn't going to magically disappear.¶ Finally, it
misunderstands the state of the GOP. This is not the Republican Party of 2010. Today's Republicans no longer have an incentive
to deny Obama victories. He's never running again. Most of today's Republicans understand they need to decontaminate their brand.
They're more open to compromise, more likely to be won over with deal-making than browbeating.¶ The
liberal left wing, such as the Tea Party types, has an incentive to build television ratings by fulminating against its foes. But Obama and John
Boehner have an incentive to create a low-decibel businesslike atmosphere. The opinion-entertainment complex longs for the war track. The
practitioners should long for the dealmaking track.¶ Before he gets lost in the mire of negotiations, the president could step back and practically
describe the task ahead. Between 1947 and 2007, the U.S. economy grew an average of 3.3 percent a year. But over the next few decades,
according to forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office, it's projected to grow only at 2.3 percent per year. The task ahead is to make the
sort of structural changes that will get America back on its old growth trajectory.¶ Then the president could remind everyone that there's lots to
do. Some of the things on the to-do list are things Democrats relish doing: investing in infrastructure and basic research; reforming immigration
to attract global talent; investing in student loans and community colleges; trimming the annual $1.1 trillion in tax loopholes, many of which go
to corporations and the rich.¶ Other things the Republicans surely will relish doing: simplifying a tax code that has bloated to 74,000 pages;
streamlining the Code of Federal Regulation that has metastasized to 165,000 pages; slowing entitlement spending.¶ But the point is the only
way to get things done in a divided polarized country is side by side — an acceptable Democratic project paired with an acceptable Republican
one.¶ The
fiscal-cliff talks are just the first chapter in this long process. In this first episode, the Democrats
should get higher revenues from the rich (elections have consequences), and the Republicans should get some
entitlement reform. But the main point is to lay the predicate for the bigger deals to come.¶ This is about
horse-trading . It's about conducting meetings in which people don't lecture each other; they deal. It's about
isolating those who want an economic culture war. It's about making clear offers and counteroffers.¶ If you want a great example of how these
deals might work, check out a new paper at Third Way (thirdway.org/publications/613) called "The Bargain." It offers a perfect model of how
you might structure a series of big trades to move the country back on the growth path — on innovation policy, tax policy, spending policy and
so on.¶ The more you put on the table, the more trading is possible, the better the atmosphere and the more you might get done. If you only
put one idea on the table at a time, then everybody gets gridlocked and nothing gets done.¶ The economic crisis interrupted him last time, but
Obama still has a chance to build a great middle-class economy. It'll take a dealmaker , not a warrior.
A2 Winners Win – Extensions – Crowd-Out
Political capital is key and zero-sum– plan crowds-out fiscal cliff [also a2 pc not
k/Dickinson]
Rottinghaus ’10 – Assistant Professor of Political Science at U of H [Brandon, Assistant Professor,
Department of Political Science, U of H-Town, “The Provisional Pulpit: Modern Presidential Leadership of
Public Opinion”, page number below, CR]
Similarly, other
issues (countervailing elements) may crowd out the president's agenda and complicate his ability
to focus the media and public on an issue. An administration may miscalculate the ability of the political system
(especially Congress) to deal with multiple issues simultaneously, as in the case of the Kennedy administration and their
pursuit of several policies at once in Congress in addition to Medicare. This phenomenon may reflect a lack of planning but also may reflect
economic or electoral needs to rush passage of several pieces of legislation. The opposition (or support) from interest groups also plays
a
role, one that is important to evaluating the limits to presidential leadership, especially in modern presidential
policymaking. More issues on the agenda mean more voices to compete with the president’s message . As a
result, especially in foreign policy cases, the president has less success when the issue has high salience, since more
political activity is generated by more visible issues. The "size" of the presidents agenda (or the number of
issues concomitantly pursued) clearly has an effect on his ability to lead public opinion, especially related to his ability to sustain
public attention to that agenda. A White Houses agenda is inherently limited, and, according to Paul Light, "the
President's domestic agenda also reflects the allocation of resources, which often are fixed and limited . As
the President moves through the term, each agenda choice commits some White House resources—time, energy, information,
expertise, political capital"'' The restrictions that emerge in the modern presidency limit the resources presidents
can devote to too many subjects— focusing on one single issue (at a time) is critical . This slow, "spoon feeding"
approach is important because it allows for a timely digestion by the public and the media (and eventually
Congress) rather than a rapid-fire, adversarial approach that may sour stomachs. The reality of limited
resources directly connects to the conditional theory of presidential leadership that requires presidents to focus on single issues with intense
focus. Indeed, there
are several examples of how presidents fail to lead public opinion when too many issues are
pursued at once or when a White House's laserlike focus on an issue enabled successful leadership. For
instance, President Kennedys rush to pursue several major pieces of legislation in 1961 and 1962 crowded the
political agenda and complicated his ability to put the force of the White Houses popularity behind his Medicare legislation. President
Ford's inability to secure passage of his anti-inflation proposals was not aided by his own reluctance
about the proposals (in that the proposal was eventually withdrawn), the White Houses loose commitment to solving the inflation
problem over the un-employment problem, and the rush of the plan to the media. On the other hand, President Reagan focused
exclusively on tax and budget proposals in his first months in office and secured congressional passage of both
pieces of legislation. Likewise, President Clinton's intense focus on the issue of the budget late in his first term allowed him to focus public
attention early, commit the information resources of the White House, and effectively organize his troops for battle against an averse Congress.
[page 193-195]
PC Finite
PC is finite
Schultz 1/22 – professor at Hamline University School of Business (David, “Obama's dwindling
prospects in a second term”, 2013, http://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2013/01/obamasdwindling-prospects-second-term, CR)
Presidential power is the power to persuade , as Richard Neustadt famously stated. Many factors determine
presidential power and the ability to influence including personality (as James David Barber argued), attitude toward
power, margin of victory, public support, support in Congress , and one’s sense of narrative or purpose. ¶ Additionally, presidential
power is temporal, often greatest when one is first elected, and it is contextual, affected by competing items on an agenda. All of these
factors affect the political power or capital of a president.¶ Presidential power also is a finite and generally
decreasing product. The first hundred days in office – so marked forever by FDR’s first 100 in 1933 – are usually a honeymoon period,
during which presidents often get what they want. FDR gets the first New Deal, Ronald Reagan gets Kemp-Roth, George Bush in 2001 gets his
tax cuts.¶ Presidents lose political capital, support¶ But, over
time, presidents lose political capital. Presidents get
distracted by world and domestic events, they lose support in Congress or among the American public, or they turn into
lame ducks. This is the problem Obama now faces.¶ Obama had a lot of political capital when sworn in as president in 2009. He won a
decisive victory for change with strong approval ratings and had majorities in Congress — with eventually a filibuster margin in the Senate,
when Al Franken finally took office in July. Obama used his political capital to secure a stimulus bill and then pass the Affordable Care Act. He
eventually got rid of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and secured many other victories. But Obama was a lousy salesman, and he lost what little control of
Congress that he had in the 2010 elections.¶ Since then, Obama has be stymied in securing his agenda. Moreover, it is really unclear what his
agenda for a second term is. Mitt Romney was essentially right on when arguing that Obama had not offered a plan for four more years beyond
what we saw in the first term.¶ A replay wouldn't work¶ Whatever successes Obama had in the first term, simply doing a replay in the next four
years will not work.¶ First, Obama
faces roughly the same hostile Congress going forward that he did for the last two years. Do
not expect to see the Republicans making it easy for him.¶
Minimalist approach is key – plans overreaching kills the agenda
Schultz 1/22 – professor at Hamline University School of Business (David, “Obama's dwindling
prospects in a second term”, 2013, http://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2013/01/obamasdwindling-prospects-second-term, CR)
One could go on, but the point should be clear: Obama
has diminishing time, resources, support and opportunity to
accomplish anything. His political capital and presidential influence is waning, challenging him to adopt a
minimalist agenda for the future.¶ What should Obama do? Among the weaknesses of his first term were inattention to filling federal
judicial vacancies. Judges will survive beyond him and this should be a priority for a second term, as well as preparing for Supreme Court
vacancies. He needs also to think about broader structural reform issues that will outlive his presidency, those especially that he can do with an
executive order.¶ Overall, Obama
has some small opportunities to do things in the next four years – but the
window is small and will rapidly close .
PC finite – Bush’s second term proves
Makovsky 11/8 – Ziegler distinguished fellow and director of the Project on the
Middle East Peace Process at The Washington Institute (David, “Relationship Advice”, 2012, Foreign
Policy, CR)
Moreover, those who are playing up the possibility of an Obama-Netanyahu feud believe¶ that the laws of political gravity are suspended for a
second-term president. In fact, while¶ reelection can revitalize a president's mandate, political
commodity
capital remains a finite
-¶ - even for a second-term U.S. president. Just ask President George W. Bush, who saw
his¶ clout diminished in
his second term by Hurricane Katrina, a failed attempt to privatize¶ Social
Security, and a debilitating war in Iraq. Bush allocated all
much political capital was left over¶ for
his efforts to the 2007 Iraq¶ surge, and administration officials at the time said not
anything else. As it is, Obama is facing a divided Congress that he will need to win over¶ for a grand budget deal in 2013,
which will be central to resolving the country's economic¶ crisis.
PC is limited – Obama has to pick his battles to forge compromise
LA Times 11/7 (“The tough road ahead”, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/07/opinion/laed-president-election-20121107, CR)
As hard fought as the campaign was, the
task of governing this divided country will be even more difficult . The
immediate challenge facing Obama is to help defuse a fiscal time bomb that's set to go off at the end of the year, before the next presidential
term begins. That's when more than $570 billion worth of tax increases and spending cuts are scheduled to kick in automatically, potentially
sending the economy back into recession. This "fiscal cliff" is the product of Washington's repeated failure to come up with a credible long-term
plan for closing the enormous federal budget gap caused by the recession, two wars and the Bush tax cuts. Avoiding disaster will require
Republicans and Democrats to compromise over issues that have tied this Congress in knots.¶ The longer-term problem for the president will
be coping with the dueling pressures of an economy that's growing too slowly and a federal debt that's growing too fast, largely because of the
rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid. The economy-spurring solutions traditionally favored by each party -- Democrats want to spend more on
jobs programs, Republicans favor cutting taxes to put more money back into private hands -- exacerbate the deficit. Meanwhile, the parties are
at loggerheads over how to put Washington's fiscal house in order.¶ Had
the election produced a sweeping victory for one
winner might have claimed a mandate for his party's approach to these issues. It didn't; in fact,
Obama became the first president reelected with fewer electoral votes than he won the first time.¶ Not
side as in 2008 or 2010, the
that Republicans would have recognized any mandate for Obama, any more than Democrats would have for Romney. That's because too many
lawmakers seem to be focused less on governing than on avoiding primary challenges. Such challenges have culled the already small herd of
moderate lawmakers, yielding a Congress heavy at the extremes and light in the middle. There are still occasional displays of bipartisan comity,
but they don't translate into sustainable working relationships. The House Republican rank and file has proved particularly difficult to corral,
with dozens of members aligned with the "tea party" refusing to be bound by the deals their leaders strike. The result has been a breathtakingly
inept Congress, one that flirted repeatedly with shutting down the government and even with stiffing the country's creditors.¶ Rep. Adam Schiff
(D-Burbank) said recently that the disinterest in compromise reflects a hardening of wills at the grass roots. Yes, people say they are eager for
the parties to work together -- that's why Obama ran in 2008 as a "post-partisan" candidate, and why Romney touted his ability as a Republican
governor to work with a predominantly Democratic legislature. But as
much as people embrace the idea of compromise,
Schiff said, "they want the other side to do the compromising."¶ The current paralysis in Washington
demands the kind of leadership that brings lawmakers out of their foxholes. Obama needs to find a way
to convince highly polarized lawmakers that both sides can and should shape major pieces of
legislation. That would be a departure from the last four years, when Republicans felt they had no stake in the 2009 economic stimulus
package, the healthcare reform legislation or the new financial industry regulations -- even when their ideas were incorporated into the bills, as
was the case in healthcare.¶ The task is complicated by the distance between the two sides on so many crucial issues. On immigration, there's a
seemingly unbridgeable divide over what to do about the millions of people who live here illegally. On climate change, there's no agreement on
the existence of a problem, let alone how to solve it. On Social Security, there's a bitter split over whether workers should invest all or part of
their contributions privately. On environmental regulation, the parties disagree over how to weigh the costs against the benefits. The list goes
on and on.¶ These divisions reflect a fundamental disagreement over what's holding back the country: Is it government spending and
regulation, or is it just the lingering effects of the 2008-09 recession combined with the continuing economic problems around the globe? But
there's also the tension caused by demographic changes. Republicans want to cap federal spending at a "traditional" percentage of the
economy, despite the fact that retirees collecting government benefits are making up a steadily growing share of the population. And
Democrats are adamant that the government maintain its promise of healthcare and Social Security benefits for those retirees.¶ Pulling
the
factions together is a daunting task, but Obama has no alternative. The relentlessly negative campaign, conducted at
shocking expense, won't make that job easier. But even a narrow win gives Obama some political capital; he should
spend it now building bridges to the other side.
PC is finite
Dobrer 12/3 (Jonathon, “Obama & Rice in an Age of Fiscal Limits”, 2012,
http://blogs.dailynews.com/friendlyfire/2012/12/03/obama-rice-age-fiscal-limits/, CR)
While the attacks on her are unwarranted, I don’t believe that this is a fight worth having.
Obama has a finite amount of political
capital, and in this age of fiscal responsibility capital preservation is important, and he has other, and in my view, more
important fights . I would urge him to save his chits, markers and muscle for the next Supreme Court nominee, the “fiscal cliff” and saving ObamaCare.
Fighting for Rice might be the gallant thing to do. It might be a principled reaction to impure politics from the right or even racism and sexism, but this is
neither the time nor the issue for the expenditure of so much p olitical c apital.
A2 Hirsh evidence (Winners Win)
UQ controls the direction of the link – he concedes reform will pass in the squo
Hirsh 2/7 (Michael, “There’s No Such Thing as Political Capital”,
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/there-s-no-such-thing-as-political-capital-20130207, CMR)
Consider this: Three months ago, just before the November election, if someone had talked seriously about Obama having enough political
capital to oversee passage of both immigration reform and gun-control legislation at the beginning of his second term—even after
winning the election by 4 percentage points and 5 million votes (the actual final tally)—this person would have been called crazy and stripped
of his pundit’s license. (It doesn’t exist, but it ought to.) In his first term, in a starkly polarized country, the president had been so frustrated by
GOP resistance that he finally issued a limited executive order last August permitting immigrants who entered the country illegally as children
to work without fear of deportation for at least two years. Obama didn’t dare to even bring up gun control, a Democratic “third rail” that has
cost the party elections and that actually might have been even less popular on the right than the president’s health care law. And yet, for
reasons that have very little to do with Obama’s personal prestige or popularity—variously put in terms of a “mandate” or “political capital”—
chances are fair that both will now happen .¶
BUT, unpopular policies ruin the agenda – Obama’s entire first term proves
Hirsh 2/7 (Michael, “There’s No Such Thing as Political Capital”,
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/there-s-no-such-thing-as-political-capital-20130207, CMR)
.¶ THE REAL LIMITS ON POWER¶ Presidents are limited in what they can do by time and attention span, of course,
just as much as they are by electoral balances in the House and Senate. But this, too, has nothing to do with political capital. Another well-worn
meme of recent years was that Obama used up too much political capital passing the health
care law in his first term. But the real
problem was that the plan was unpopular , the economy was bad, and the president didn’t realize that the national mood
(yes, again, the national mood) was at a tipping point against big-government intervention, with the tea-party revolt about to burst on the
scene. For Americans in 2009 and 2010—haunted by too many rounds of layoffs, appalled by the Wall Street bailout, aghast at the amount of
federal spending that never seemed to find its way into their pockets—government-imposed health care coverage was simply an intervention
too far. So
was the idea of another economic stimulus. Cue the tea party and what ensued: two titanic
fights over the debt ceiling. Obama, like Bush, had settled on pushing an issue that was out of sync with
the country’s mood .¶ Unlike Bush, Obama did ultimately get his idea passed. But the bigger political problem with health care
reform was that it
distracted the government’s attention from other issues
that people cared about more urgently,
such as the need to jump-start the economy and financial reform. Various congressional staffers told me at the time that their bosses didn’t
really have the time to understand how the Wall Street lobby was riddling the Dodd-Frank financial-reform legislation with loopholes.
Health care was sucking all the oxygen out of the room,
the aides said.
“Wins” can’t be forced – immigration is unique
Hirsh 2/7 (Michael, “There’s No Such Thing as Political Capital”,
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/there-s-no-such-thing-as-political-capital-20130207, CMR)
In terms of Obama’s second-term agenda, what all these shifting tides of momentum and political calculation mean is this: Anything goes.
Obama has no more elections to win, and he needs to worry only about the support he will have in the House and Senate after 2014. But if
he
picks issues that the country’s mood will support —such as, perhaps, immigration reform and gun control—
there is no reason to think he can’t win far more victories than any of the careful calculators of political capital now
believe is possible, including battles over tax reform and deficit reduction.¶ Amid today’s atmosphere of Republican self-doubt, a new, more
mature Obama seems to be emerging, one who has his agenda clearly in mind and will ride the mood of the country more adroitly. If he can get
some early wins—as he already has, apparently, on the fiscal cliff and the upper-income tax increase—that will create momentum, and one win
may well lead to others. “Winning wins.”
A2 Dickerson Evidence (GOP Unity Turn)
UQ controls the direction of the link – Obama’s push already securing broad GOP
support - only a risk the plan ruins compromise
Balance key – Obama is using is capital to propel passage but is not taking an
overbroad role that will deter GOP support
Goldfarb 1/29 (Zachary A. Goldfarb and Rosalind Helderman, “Obama makes his immigration push,”
1/29/2013, “http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-unveils-his-own-proposal-forimmigration-reform/2013/01/29/b27dcb78-6a47-11e2-95b3-272d604a10a3_story.html, CMR)
LAS VEGAS — President Obama on Tuesday
put the weight of his administration behind efforts to pass legislation
allowing many of the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants to earn citizenship, seeking to build on a
rapidly shifting political consensus around the issue .¶ Obama dedicated the first trip of his second term to calling for an overhaul of
immigration laws, making clear that it is one of his top domestic priorities. The president — who has said that not passing an overhaul in his first term was his
biggest failure — also suggested he has little patience for Congress and would demand that lawmakers vote on his more permissive plan if they do not swiftly pass
their own.¶ “Now is the time,” Obama said, eliciting chants of “Si, se puede” — roughly translated as “Yes, it’s possible” — from the crowd at a majority Hispanic
high school here. “We can’t allow immigration reform to get bogged down in an endless debate.” ¶ Fresh
off a decisive reelection, Obama is
seizing this moment as one in which both sides could come together to address widespread anxieties
within rising demographic groups, particularly Hispanics and Asian Americans.¶ But obstacles still loomed large Tuesday on Capitol Hill, fueled
by continued unease among conservative Republicans over going too far to loosen immigration restrictions. One of the biggest disputes centers on whether illegal
immigrants would have to wait to seek a green card — the first step to full citizenship — until the U.S. border with Mexico is secure and other enforcement
measures are in place.¶ A bipartisan Senate plan released Monday would tie the possibility of citizenship to several such enforcement measures, including a system
to verify the immigration status of employees. The president did not comment explicitly on that proposal in his speech, but the administration suggested in its own
guidelines released Tuesday that it does not want to link the citizenship process to other goals. ¶ “It must be clear from the outset that there is a pathway to
citizenship,” Obama said, adding that the administration has made great strides in an effort to toughen enforcement.¶ Some key Republicans expressed concern
with any approach that does not link border security with the proposal to offer illegal immigrants a way to become citizens. ¶ “Without such triggers in place,
enforcement systems will never be implemented and we will be back in just a few years dealing with millions of new undocumented people in our country,” said
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a potential 2016 presidential candidate and one of eight senators who signed on to the bipartisan framework. ¶ Another set of pitfalls
awaits in the House, where many Republicans are deeply skeptical of any legislation that they believe might be overly generous to illegal immigrants.¶ “There are a
lot of ideas about how best to fix our broken immigration system,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “We hope the
president is careful not to drag the debate to the left and ultimately disrupt the difficult work that is ahead in the House and Senate.Ӧ No
White House
bill yet¶ The White House had considered releasing its own legislation to overhaul the immigration system, but Obama said it would not immediately do so.
The president and his aides have long worried that by simply endorsing a position, Obama could turn
Republicans against a proposal they otherwise might support.¶ Obama said the Senate framework is “very much in line with
the principles I’ve proposed and campaigned on for the last few years.” But — in keeping with the more muscular approach he has taken in other recent debates —
Obama also made clear he would not wait long. ¶ “If Congress is unable to move forward in a timely fashion, I will send up a bill based on my proposal and insist that
they vote on it right away,” he said.¶ Just a year ago, during a Republican presidential primary season dominated by tough talk on immigration, it seemed
implausible that legislation to address the issue could muster support. But many Republicans have shifted rapidly on the issue since the November election, when
Obama won more than 70 percent of votes from Latinos and Asian Americans. ¶ Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Obama’s 2008 opponent, said he was “cautiously
optimistic” that the two sides could reach a deal. ¶ “While there are some differences in our approaches to this issue, we share the belief that any reform must
recognize America as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants,” said McCain, who spearheaded a failed 2007 immigration overhaul effort before emphasizing
tough border positions during his 2010 reelection. ¶ The senators have said they want to draft a bill by the end of March and pass it through the Senate by the
summer, striking quickly while there is momentum on the issue. ¶ But aides acknowledge there are dozens of questions they must answer before they can come
forward with legislation. For example, what measurements will be used to determine if border security has been improved sufficiently to allow illegal immigrants to
pursue full citizenship? How large a fine would be required to get probationary legal residency? How would a temporary-worker program operate?¶ Under Obama’s
plan, illegal immigrants seeking citizenship would register, submit biometric data, pass background checks and pay fees before gaining provisional legal status,
according to a White House summary. After taking those steps and learning English, the immigrants would wait in line for existing immigration backlogs to clear
before being allowed to apply for permanent resident status, which immigrants must hold before they can apply for citizenship.¶ Children brought to the United
States illegally would be eligible for an expedited process if they go to college or serve in the military for at least two years. The plan would also allow citizens and
permanent residents to seek a visa for a same-sex partner — an idea opposed by many religious groups and one that went unmentioned by Obama in his Tuesday
speech.¶ “It won’t be a quick process, but it will be a fair process,” Obama said Tuesday in Nevada, which is 27 percent Hispanic. ¶ ‘Us versus them’ dynamic¶ The
president, the son of a Kenyan man and an American woman, also sought to remind the audience of immigration’s central role in the nation’s history.¶ “When we
talk about that in the abstract, it’s easy sometimes for the discussion to take on a feeling of ‘us versus them,’ ” Obama said. “And when that happens, a lot of folks
forget that most of ‘us’ used to be ‘them.’ ”¶ Obama, who will take his case to the Spanish-language Univision and Telemundo networks on Wednesday, said his
principles for immigration reform also include strengthening border security and cracking down more forcefully on businesses that knowingly hire illegal workers.¶
Immigration advocates reacted enthusiastically. ¶ “The
president faced a tough situation on how to encourage the
bipartisan process without becoming hostage to it ,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s
Voice, an advocacy group. “As someone who has been concerned and hoping he would be aggressive,
I thought he did strike the right tone .”
Dickerson wrong
a) Cooperation key
Jackson 1/27 (David Jackson, USA Today, “Obama aide: No desire to destroy Republicans”,
http://www.freep.com/usatoday/article/1867911?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|s, CMR)
There's an unusual amount of talk in Washington these days about destroying the Republican Party.¶ House Speaker
John Boehner, R-Ohio, raised the issue in recent days, saying Obama's inaugural speech told him "he knows he can't do any of that as long as
the House is controlled by Republicans. So we're expecting over the next 22 months to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to
annihilate the Republican Party."¶ In his speech to the Ripon Society, Boehner added that he believes the Obama administration's goal is "to
just shove us into the dustbin of history."¶ In a political analysis for Slate magazine, John Dickerson
frustrations at getting bipartisanship through a Republican House, the
wrote that, given Obama's
president's "only remaining option is to pulverize"
the Republicans by isolating them on a series of issues.¶ "By exploiting the weaknesses of today's Republican Party, Obama has an
opportunity to hasten the demise of the old order by increasing the political cost of having the GOP coalition defined by Second Amendment
absolutists, climate science deniers, supporters of 'self-deportation' and the pure no-tax wing," Dickerson wrote.¶ At
the White House,
officials said Obama wants to work with the Republicans , not destroy them .¶ The president wants to
cooperate "with members of both parties to achieve progress on behalf of the American people," said White House
spokesman Jay Carney.¶ Obama "believes that the two-party system is part of the foundation of our democracy,"
Carney added, "and that it is a healthy aspect of our democracy even if it's contentious."
b) His strategy would backfire – immigration-specific
Shappard 2/10 (Noel, Associate Editor of NewsBusters, “WaPo's David Ignatius Implores Obama To
Do Immigration Reform Without Destroying Rubio”, http://newsbusters.org/bios/noelsheppard#ixzz2KWbFNHaO, CMR)
As NewsBusters reported, CBS News political director John Dickerson a few days before Barack Obama's second inaugural advised
the
President to destroy the Republican Party.¶ On the syndicated Chris Matthews Show Sunday, Washington Post columnist David
Ignatius went in a completely different direction imploring Obama to " get out of the zero sum
game
Washington where to
do something good on immigration reform he's got to destroy Marco Rubio" (video follows with
transcript and commentary):¶ CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Marco Rubio has been designated as the Republican respondent, right, which is pretty
smart I guess because he's the hot hand. Immigration jumps right out at that guy when you see him. He's Cuban-American, he’s talked on the
issue. Will the president stick it to him and say, “I'm going to be good on immigration, you guys are going to have to handle the issue?”¶ DAVID
IGNATIUS, WASHINGTON POST: Well, I think he's
going to make immigration one of the issues he talks about in the
State of the Union. The State of the Union is good, but here are the things we need to do. He’s going to talk about immigration reform,
he's going to talk about climate change. He's going to certainly talk about bringing the troops home from the wars. I think he'll announce a
number of troops that will be withdrawn.¶ But, you know, the Marco Rubio question gets to whether Obama can get out of the zero sum game
Washington where to do something good on immigration reform, he's got to, you know, destroy Marco Rubio who is the Republican symbol of
progress on that. And I'm
looking to see whether he can lift his game beyond where he was in his inaugural
address and really speak to the country, speak to the people who didn't vote for him as well as the people who did, and
have a platform for really do ing something .¶ Story Continues Below Ad ↓¶ Rather surprising, wouldn't you say?¶ Since
Election Day, much of Obama's media have been advising him to completely ignore Republicans and instead ram legislation down their throats
without their involvement.¶ Some - like CBS's Dickerson
- have advised him to destroy the GOP in his second term.¶
Yet Ignatius wants a kinder, gentler President to work with Republicans in order to solve the problems
facing the nation.¶ It's
sad that this has become such a rarity in the media that I would even need to bring it to people's
attention.
Obama has to be cautious, not ambitious
Bruni 11 Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, “Pass, Fail and Politics”, 9-3-11,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/bruni-pass-fail-and-politics.html?_r=1, CMR
That many Republicans will viciously seize any opportunity to defy and undercut Obama is a lesson
he should have learned by now. Regardless of who was being unreasonable, it was he who actually ended up sending an e-mail to
supporters with the one-word subject line “frustrated.” The president of the United States is supposed to salve our frustrations, not meekly
bemoan his own. Shouldn’t he or someone in his inner circle have foreseen the potential for events unfolding in such a humiliating fashion and
made sure to avoid it? Apparently no one did, and that suggests a deficit of smarts by almost any definition of that ludicrously imprecise term.
Worse yet, this
was only the latest in a long series of questionable calculations. Was it smart/prudent/pick-
your-adjective to lavish all that precious post-election political capital on health care reform rather than
economic revitalization and jobs creation, especially if it winds up being the first in a chain of dominoes that leads to defeat in 2012 and the
repeal of that precise legislation? Was
it smart/prudent/pick-your-adjective not to head off a debt-ceiling showdown by
settling the matter during last year’s lame-duck session of Congress, before Republicans took the reins in the House?
And, during the showdown, didn’t Obama and his advisers misjudge both the zeal of some House Republicans
and the magnitude of his own powers of persuasion? Time and again, Obama hasn’t been a prescient
or brutal enough tactician and hasn’t adjusted his high-minded ways to the low-minded sport of
Congressional politics. That’s a failure of
some kind, and
intelligence
may be one word for it.
And, GOP coming together over immigration now – will pass now
US News 12-27, p. www.usnews.com/news/blogs/Ken-Walshs-Washington/2012/12/27/republicansreconsidering-immigration-reform
It's becoming increasingly clear that immigration will be a breakthrough issue next year. President Obama
has been in favor of what he calls comprehensive immigration reform for a long time, which would include creating a
"path" to citizenship or legal residency for millions of illegal immigrants. Republicans have resisted for years, arguing that what
Obama wants would be a form of amnesty for unlawful entry into the United States. But the November election showed that this
position has alienated many Hispanic voters, who believe the GOP is against them. One result was that Republican presidential
nominee Mitt Romney, who called for "self-deportation" of illegal immigrants, lost the Latino vote to Obama by more than 40 percentage
Now, Republicans are rethinking the whole issue. Among those
expected to take the lead are Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising star in the GOP, and Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman
points, a major reason for Romney's defeat.
of the House Budget Committee and the Republican vice-presidential nominee this year. It's interesting and significant that both Rubio and
Ryan are considered possible presidential candidates in 2016. They seem to realize
that the GOP needs to make inroads
with Hispanic voters in order to recapture the White House in four years. Former governor Jeb Bush of Florida, another possible
presidential contender in 2016, also wants Republicans to move quickly on immigration reform by proposing their own
overhaul of immigration laws that Hispanics might support. It was Bush's brother, President George W. Bush, who attempted to get such a bill
through Congress several years ago, but he failed because of conservative objections. There is still strong sentiment in the Republican Party to
resist comprehensive reform that is seen to reward people who entered the country illegally by giving them a chance to gain citizenship before
those who followed the rules. "The smart Republicans know they can't leave this hanging out there," says Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. "But
the Republicans are still very divided against themselves." For their part, White House officials think there
has been enough of a
shift on the GOP side that, despite the polarization on other issues, prospects for passage of an
immigration bill are brightening. Adding to the pressure for reform, Latino activists promise to hold
politicians in Washington strictly accountable over the immigration issue, and leaders of several Latino organizations and
unions have served notice that they will push hard for "comprehensive reform" next year. The groups include the National Council of La Raza,
Members of Congress are
very aware of the surge in the Latino population that makes alienating this segment of voters close to
the Service Employees International Union, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and Voto Latino.
political suicide. The Hispanic population is projected to increase from 17 percent of the total in the United States today to 31 percent in
2060, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Dickerson bias and wrong
Welch 1/24 – editor in chief of Reason magazine and co-author with Nick Gillespie of The Declaration
of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America, now out in paperback
with a new foreword (Matt, http://reason.com/blog/2013/01/24/the-phrase-obama-must-declare-onthe-rep, CMR)
In my editor's note in the February issue on how the "fact-checking" press gives the president a pass, I discussed how the
go-to pose by
partisan cheerleading in the holy
lefty opinion journalists in the Obama era is to cloak their essentially
glow of "facts," "science," and "math." Dickerson deploys all three words in the main section of his non-apology:¶ I was using a very
specific definition of transformational presidencies based on my reading of a theory of political science and the president's own words about
transformational presidencies from the 2008 campaign. It was also based on these givens: The president is ambitious, has picked politically
controversial goals, has little time to operate before he is dubbed a lame-duck president, and has written off working with Republicans.
"Bloodier-minded when it comes to beating Republicans," is how Jodi Kantor put it in the New York Times. Given these facts, there is only one
logical conclusion for a president who wants to transform American politics: He must take on Republicans—aggressively. ¶ For me, this was a
math problem with an unmistakable conclusion. Some people thought I was giving the president my personal advice. No. My goal was to make
a compelling argument based on the facts.¶ Dickerson also insisted that he has "close relations" who are conservatives, so obviously he doesn't
"hate Republicans." Fascinating, I'm sure.¶ I've always found the enthusiasm among opinion journalists for helping build a permanent governing
majority to be as creepy as it is futile. But different strokes, etc. What interests me here is how the
Cloak of Empricisim is
beginning to blind wearers to the plain meaning of their own words. That, and I think Dickerson was on to
something in his description of Obama's divide-and-conquer strategy. As he put it in the original column, "The president already appears to be
headed down this path."¶ Obama's refusal to countenance spending or entitlement cuts in the fiscal cliff talks deepened divisions between true
fiscal conservatives and John Boehner-style pragmatists. His nomination of Republican realist Chuck Hagel for defense secretary deepened
divisions between neo-conservatives and GOP non-hawks. You could read his choice of issues to focus on–gun control, gay marriage,
immigration–as variations on a theme of bringing the most politically unpalatable corners of the Republican tent to the surface. As the
president said in his Second Inaugural (engaging in some at least quasi-Dickersonian rhetoric), "We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or
substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate."¶ It's a neat trick, using spectacle to denounce spectacle, denouncing
"name-calling" 10 words after calling your political opponents absolutists, and bathing your own bare-knuckle politics in the warm glow of
"reasoned debate." The
bad news for Obama (and Dickerson), is that these tactics will slowly leak potency
over the next 1,400-plus days.
Trying to ram through the plan will spur a backlash that crushes the rest of
Obama’s agenda
Brooks 11/15 (David, “David Brooks: Economy needs deal maker, not war leader,”
http://www.postbulletin.com/news/stories/display.php?id=1514912, 11/15/2012, CR)
During his first term, President Barack Obama faced a wicked problem: How do you govern in a highly polarized, evenly divided country with
House Republicans who seem unwilling to compromise? Obama never really solved that one, and he was forced to pass his agenda on partisan
lines (during the first two years) or not pass it at all (the final two).¶ Now re-elected with Republicans still in control of the House, Obama faces
the problem again. You might say the success of his second term rests upon his solving it.¶ Some
on the left are suggesting he
adopt a strategy of confrontation and conquest. The president should use the advantages of victory to
crush the spirit of the Republican House majority, they say. Reject the Grand Bargain approach. Instead, take the country over
the fiscal cliff. Blame it on the Republicans who are unwilling even to raise taxes on the rich. Wait until they fold, and then you will have your
way.¶ The first thing to say about this
strategy is that it is irresponsible . The recovery is fragile. Europe may crater. China is
ill. Business is pulling back at the mere anticipation of a fiscal cliff. It's reckless to think you can manufacture an economic
crisis for political leverage and then control the cascading results.¶ Second, it's terrible politics. Obama
probably could triumph in a short-term confrontation, pushing through higher tax rates on the rich that wouldn't even
produce enough revenue to cover a tenth of the deficit. But he'd sow such bitterness it would be the last thing he'd
pass for the rest of his term. The Republican House majority isn't going to magically disappear.¶ Finally, it
misunderstands the state of the GOP. This is not the Republican Party of 2010. Today's Republicans no longer have an incentive
to deny Obama victories. He's never running again. Most of today's Republicans understand they need to decontaminate their brand.
They're more open to compromise, more likely to be won over with deal-making than browbeating.¶ The
liberal left wing, such as the Tea Party types, has an incentive to build television ratings by fulminating against its foes. But Obama and John
Boehner have an incentive to create a low-decibel businesslike atmosphere. The opinion-entertainment complex longs for the war track. The
practitioners should long for the dealmaking track.¶ Before he gets lost in the mire of negotiations, the president could step back and practically
describe the task ahead. Between 1947 and 2007, the U.S. economy grew an average of 3.3 percent a year. But over the next few decades,
according to forecasts from the Congressional Budget Office, it's projected to grow only at 2.3 percent per year. The task ahead is to make the
sort of structural changes that will get America back on its old growth trajectory.¶ Then the president could remind everyone that there's lots to
do. Some of the things on the to-do list are things Democrats relish doing: investing in infrastructure and basic research; reforming immigration
to attract global talent; investing in student loans and community colleges; trimming the annual $1.1 trillion in tax loopholes, many of which go
to corporations and the rich.¶ Other things the Republicans surely will relish doing: simplifying a tax code that has bloated to 74,000 pages;
streamlining the Code of Federal Regulation that has metastasized to 165,000 pages; slowing entitlement spending.¶ But the point is the only
way to get things done in a divided polarized country is side by side — an acceptable Democratic project paired with an acceptable Republican
one.¶ The
fiscal-cliff talks are just the first chapter in this long process. In this first episode, the Democrats
should get higher revenues from the rich (elections have consequences), and the Republicans should get some
entitlement reform. But the main point is to lay the predicate for the bigger deals to come.¶ This is about
horse-trading . It's about conducting meetings in which people don't lecture each other; they deal. It's about
isolating those who want an economic culture war. It's about making clear offers and counteroffers.¶ If you want a great example of how these
deals might work, check out a new paper at Third Way (thirdway.org/publications/613) called "The Bargain." It offers a perfect model of how
you might structure a series of big trades to move the country back on the growth path — on innovation policy, tax policy, spending policy and
so on.¶ The more you put on the table, the more trading is possible, the better the atmosphere and the more you might get done. If you only
put one idea on the table at a time, then everybody gets gridlocked and nothing gets done.¶ The economic crisis interrupted him last time, but
Obama still has a chance to build a great middle-class economy. It'll take a dealmaker , not a warrior.
A2 Klein Evidence (PC Fails)
Isn’t unique --- Obama is already pushing __________ --- only a chance that
capital can swing those on the margins.
History proves that capital is effective --- backroom negotiations can produce
agreements
Mandel, 12 --- Assistant Editor of Commentary magazine (Seth, 3/23/2012, “Contentions Lessons of
Presidential Persuasion: Be the Commander-In-Chief,”
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/03/23/presidential-persuasion-commander-in-chiefobama-reagan-clinton/)
I want to offer Klein one more note of optimism. He writes:¶ Back-room bargains and quiet negotiations do not, however,
present an inspiring vision of the Presidency. And they fail, too. Boehner and Obama spent much of last summer sitting in a room together, but,
ultimately, the Speaker didn’t make a private deal with the President for the same reason that Republican legislators don’t swoon over a public speech by him: he is the leader of the
Democratic Party, and if he wins they lose. This suggests that, as the two parties become more sharply divided, it may become increasingly difficult for a President to govern—and
I disagree. The details of the deal matter, not just the party lines about the dispute. There is no way the
backroom negotiations Clinton conducted with Gingrich over social security reform could have
been possible if we had prime ministers, instead of presidents. Thepresident possesses political
capital Congress doesn’t. History tells us there are effective ways to use that capital. One lesson:
quiet action on domestic policy, visible and audible leadership on national security.
there’s little that he can do about it.¶
Irrelevant since plan injects massive controversy that wrecks bipartisan
consensus
Obama’s leadership and prioritization of immigration reform key to passage
Castro, 11/13 (Tony, 11/13/2012, “What Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln’ tells Obama about immigration reform,” http://www.voxxi.com/lincoln-obamaimmigration-reform/)
Lincoln, as the film portrays him, was not a political saint but a masterful politician, something that cannot fully be
said of Obama, at least on negotiating passage of any significant legislation other than Affordable
Health Care.¶ Comprehensive immigration reform may prove to be an even greater test for Obama.¶ The
challenge will be whether Obama is willing to undertake immigration reform legislation as the first
¶ For
priority of his second term —the way Lincoln chose to push for the 13th Amendment as soon as he
was re-elected—and whether he is skillful enough on using all the spoils of office at his disposal to
win over the necessary votes .
Active leadership by Obama is key to passage
Heavey and Cowan, 11/25 (Susan Heavey and Richard Cowan, 11/25/2012, “Analysis: Fiscal battles could sideline U.S. immigration reform,”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/25/us-usa-congress-immigration-idUSBRE8AO01I20121125)
In his first term, Obama disappointed many Hispanics and Democrats with his aggressive deportation policy and failure to seek broad immigration reforms, opting
for a policy decision that defers deportation for some younger illegal immigrants who are enrolled in school.
A House Democratic aide, who asked not to be identified, complained that Obama, when it came to immigration
reform, "for the most part sat back and told Congress to work it out and 'I'll give a speech.' He's going
to have to be more hands-on" this time around .
PC is key and effective—Klein ignores historical examples
Drum 12 (Kevin, political blogger for Mother Jones, “Presidents and the Bully Pulpit”, http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/03/presidents-and-bully-pulpit, CR)
Ezra doesn't really grapple with the strongest arguments on the other side. For one thing, although
there are examples of presidential offensives that failed (George Bush on Social Security privatization), there are also
example of presidential offensives that succeeded(George Bush ongoing to war with Iraq). The same is true for broader
I also think that
themes. For example, Edwards found that "surveys of public opinion have found that support for regulatory programs and spending on health care, welfare, urban problems,
tax cuts are good for
Reagan did a lot to cement public
education, environmental protection and aid to minorities increased rather than decreased during Reagan’s tenure." OK. But what about the notion that
the economy? The public may have already been primed to believe this by the tax revolts of the late '70s, but I'll bet
opinion on the subject. And the Republican tax jihad has been one of the most influential political movements of the past three decades.¶ More generally, I think
it's a mistake to focus narrowly on presidential speeches about specific pieces of legislation. Maybe those really don't do any good. But presidents do have the
ability to rally their own troops, and that matters. That's largely what Obama has done in the contraception debate. Presidents also
have the ability to set agendas. Nobody was talking about invading Iraq until George Bush revved up his
marketing campaign in 2002, and after that it suddenly seemed like the most natural thing in the world to a lot of people.¶ Beyond that, it's too cramped to think of
the bully pulpit as just the president, just giving a few speeches. It's more than that. It's a president mobilizing his party and his supporters and doing it over the course of years. That's
harder to measure, and I can't prove that presidents have as much influence there as I think they do. But I confess that I think they do.
Truman made
containment national policy for 40 years, JFK made the moon program a bipartisan national aspiration, Nixon made working-class resentment the driving
spirit of the Republican Party, Reagan channeled the rising tide of the Christian right and turned that resentment into the modern-day culture wars, andGeorge Bush
forged a bipartisan consensus that the threat of terrorism justifies nearly any defense. It's true that in all of
these cases presidents were working with public opinion, not against it, but I think it's also true that different presidents might have shaped different consensuses.
A2 Compartmentalization
Prefer issue spec ev – he needs to exert capital to ________ done, our whole
argument proves Obama can convince people to trade in their ideology – this
also assumes everyone’s made up their minds, capital is key to get undecided on
board before the actual votes comes down
Presidential leadership shapes the agenda
Kuttner 11 (Robert, Senior Fellow – Demos and Co-editor – American Prospect, “Barack Obama's
Theory of Power,” The American Prospect, 5-16,
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=barack_obamas_theory_of_power)
As the political scientist Richard Neustadt observed in his classic work, Presidential Power, a book that had great influence on President
John F. Kennedy, the essence of a president's power is "the power to persuade." Because our divided constitutional system does
not allow the president to lead by commanding, presidents amass power by making strategic choices about when to use
the latent authority of the presidency to move public and elite opinion and then use that added prestige
as clout to move Congress. In one of Neustadt's classic case studies, Harry Truman, a president widely considered a lame duck, nonetheless
persuaded the broad public and a Republican Congress in 1947-1948 that the Marshall Plan was a worthy idea. As Neustadt and Burns both observed, though
an American chief executive is weak by constitutional design, a president possesses several points of
leverage. He can play an effective outside game, motivating and shaping public sentiment, making clear
the differences between his values and those of his opposition, and using popular support to box in his
opponents and move them in his direction . He can complement the outside bully pulpit with a nimble
inside game, unit ing his legislative party, bestowing or withholding benefits on opposition legislators,
forcing them to take awkward votes, and using the veto. He can also enlist the support of interest
groups to pressure Congress , and use media to validate his framing of choices. Done well, all of this
signals leadership that often moves the public agenda .
PC is key and finite—Congress will link unrelated issues
Haftel ’11 (Yoram Z, Assist Prof, PhD @ Ohio State, “Delayed Ratification: The Domestic Fate of
Bilateral Investment Treaties”, December,
http://polisci.osu.edu/faculty/athompson/pdf/Delayed_Ratification_Dec2011.pdf, CR)
Of course, leaders face many political obstacles that are not captured in the formal process of treaty ratification, and it is important to consider
such constraints in addition to the specific hurdles governing treaty ratification. As one U.S. BIT negotiator explained, it is not just the
ratification institutions that Washington takes into account in a partner, “it’s how freely the government functions.”34 Like legislation
and
other policy initiatives, treaty ratification is subject to issue-linkage at the domestic level and often requires
the expenditure of finite political capital , thus the executive must take into account these broader
political dynamics
when advocating for a treaty. For
the new START treaty with Russia were held
not for reasons related to
example, President Obama’s efforts to secure Senate ratification of
up by Republicans in Congress as part of a broad political strategy,
proliferation or
national security.
Partly for these reasons, and because executives may depend
on legislatures and local governments to implement a treaty’s provisions, the preferences of other domestic actors matter even when they do
not play a formal role in ratification. In Canada, for example, the prime minister often seeks to “build a broad base of support for international
treaties”35—even though no such legal requirement exists.
Political capital is key and zero-sum– plan crowds-out ________ [also an a2
winners win]
Rottinghaus ’10 – Assistant Professor of Political Science at U of H [Brandon, Assistant Professor,
Department of Political Science, U of H-Town, “The Provisional Pulpit: Modern Presidential Leadership of
Public Opinion”, page number below, CR]
Similarly, other
issues (countervailing elements) may crowd out the president's agenda and complicate his ability
to focus the media and public on an issue. An administration may miscalculate the ability of the political system
(especially Congress) to deal with multiple issues simultaneously, as in the case of the Kennedy administration and their
pursuit of several policies at once in Congress in addition to Medicare. This phenomenon may reflect a lack of planning but also may reflect
economic or electoral needs to rush passage of several pieces of legislation. The opposition (or support) from interest groups also plays
a
role, one that is important to evaluating the limits to presidential leadership, especially in modern presidential
policymaking. More issues on the agenda mean more voices to compete with the president’s message . As a
result, especially in foreign policy cases, the president has less success when the issue has high salience, since more
political activity is generated by more visible issues. The "size" of the presidents agenda (or the number of
issues concomitantly pursued) clearly has an effect on his ability to lead public opinion, especially related to his ability to sustain
public attention to that agenda. A White Houses agenda is inherently limited, and, according to Paul Light, "the
President's domestic agenda also reflects the allocation of resources, which often are fixed and limited. As
the President moves through the term, each agenda choice commits some White House resources—time, energy, information,
expertise, political capital"'' The restrictions that emerge in the modern presidency limit the resources presidents
can devote to too many subjects— focusing on one single issue (at a time) is critical . This slow, "spoon feeding"
approach is important because it allows for a timely digestion by the public and the media (and eventually
Congress) rather than a rapid-fire, adversarial approach that may sour stomachs . The reality of limited
resources directly connects to the conditional theory of presidential leadership that requires presidents to focus on single issues with intense
focus. Indeed, there
are several examples of how presidents fail to lead public opinion when too many issues are
pursued at once or when a White House's laserlike focus on an issue enabled successful leadership. For
instance, President Kennedys rush to pursue several major pieces of legislation in 1961 and 1962 crowded the
political agenda and complicated his ability to put the force of the White Houses popularity behind his Medicare legislation. President
Ford's inability to secure passage of his anti-inflation proposals was not aided by his own reluctance
about the proposals (in that the proposal was eventually withdrawn), the White Houses loose commitment to solving the inflation
problem over the un-employment problem, and the rush of the plan to the media. On the other hand, President Reagan focused
exclusively on tax and budget proposals in his first months in office and secured congressional passage of both
pieces of legislation. Likewise, President Clinton's intense focus on the issue of the budget late in his first term allowed him to focus public
attention early, commit the information resources of the White House, and effectively organize his troops for battle against an averse Congress.
[page 193-195]
A2 Compartmentalization – Yes Vote Switching
Yes vote switching—even due to unrelated legislation
Simes ‘10 – *publisher of the National Interest, Executive Director of The Nixon Center and Associate
Publisher of The National Interest, served in the State Department from 2003 to 2005 [12/23, Dimitri
and Paul Saunders, National Interest, “START of a Pyrrhic Victory?”,
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/start-pyrrhic-victory-4626, CR]
Had the lame-duck session not already been so contentious, this need not have been a particular problem. Several Senate Republicans
indicated openness to supporting the treaty earlier in the session, including Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator John
McCain. Senator Jon Kyl—seen by many as leading Republican opposition to the agreement—was actually quite careful to avoid saying that he
opposed New START until almost immediately prior to the vote. Our
own conversations with Republican Senate sources
that several additional Republicans could have voted to ratify New START
under other circumstances; Senator Lamar Alexander is quoted in the press as saying that Republican anger over
unrelated legislation cost five to ten votes. By the time the Senate reached New START, earlier conduct by Senate Democrats
and the White House had alienated many Republicans who could have voted for the treaty. That the
administration secured thirteen Republican votes (including some from retiring Senators) for the treaty now—and had many more
potentially within its grasp—makes clear what many had believed all along: it would not have been so
difficult for President Obama to win the fourteen Republican votes needed for ratification in the new Senate, if
he had been prepared to wait and to work more cooperatively with Senate Republicans. Senator Kerry’s comment that
during the lame duck session suggested
“70 votes is yesterday’s 95” ignores the reality that he and the White House could have secured many more than 70 votes had they handled the
process differently and attempts to shift the blame for the low vote count onto Republicans.
A2 Compartmentalization – Dickinson Specific
Dickinson votes neg
Dickinson 09 (Matthew, professor of political science at Middlebury College. He taught previously at
Harvard University, where he also received his Ph.D., working under the supervision of presidential
scholar Richard Neustadt, We All Want a Revolution: Neustadt, New Institutionalism, and the Future of
Presidency Research, Presidential Studies Quarterly 39 no4 736-70 D 2009)
Nonetheless, if Neustadt clearly recognizes that a president's influence in Congress is
exercised mostly, as George Edwards (1989) puts it, "at the margins," his case studies in PP also suggest
that, within this limited bound, presidents do strive to influence legislative outcomes. But how? Scholars
often argue that a president's most direct means of influence is to directly lobby certain
members of Congress, often through quid pro quo exchanges, at critical junctures during the
lawmaking sequence. Spatial models of legislative voting suggest that these lobbying efforts are
when presidents target the median, veto, and filibuster " pivots" within Congress .
This logic finds empirical support in vote-switching studies that indicate that presidents
do direct lobbying efforts at these pivotal voters, and with positive legislative results. Keith
Krehbiel analyzes successive votes by legislators in the context of a presidential veto and finds
"modest support for the sometimes doubted stylized fact of presidential power as
persuasion" (1998, 153-54). Similarly, David Brady and Craig Volden look at vote switching by
most effective
members of Congress in successive Congresses on nearly identical legislation and also conclude that
presidents do influence the votes of at least some legislators (1998, 125-36). In his study of presidential
lobbying on key votes on important domestic legislation during the 83rd (1953-54) through 108th (200304) Congresses, Matthew Beckman shows that in addition to these pivotal voters, presidents also lobby
leaders in both congressional parties in order to control what legislative alternatives make it onto the
congressional agenda (more on this later). These lobbying efforts are correlated with a greater likelihood
that a president's legislative preferences will come to a vote (Beckmann 2008, n.d.).