USA: Obama and the US Congress...

No Back to the Future for Ex-Senator Obama

 John Steele Gordon 06.02.2011 - 12:06 PM

Joseph Califano, who was a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, has a plan in today’s New York Times for how Obama can get the Congressional Republicans to bend to his will: maneuver them the way Lyndon Johnson maneuvered Congress when he needed the debt ceiling raised in 1968.

It’s not a bad plan except for one thing. President Obama is no Lyndon Johnson. Obama was in Congress for a mere four years (and had an out-to-lunch sign on his desk for the last two years while he ran for president). He played no part in the Senate leadership and has no significant legislative accomplishments to his credit. Johnson, by contrast, was in the House of Representatives for 12 years (from 1937 to 1949) and in the Senate for 12 years (from 1949 to 1961). He was majority whip in the Senate for two years, minority leader for two, and majority leader for six years. So there’s a reason Robert Caro entitled the third volume of his massive biography of Johnson  Master of the Senate. Johnson knew the workings of Congress intimately and knew exactly how to push the various buttons to get what he wanted. He relished doing so.

(One of my favorite Johnson stories is when he invited a group of freshmen Congressmen to the Oval Office to lobby them on some piece of legislation. Most had never been to the White House, let alone the Oval Office, so they were gawking like tourists as they filed in. “Take a good look around,” Johnson told them. “Because if you aren’t with me on this bill, you’ll never see this place again.”)

Obama has shown no capacity or, indeed, inclination to manipulate Congress in this way. He’s been anything but a hands-on president when it came to legislation, with unfortunate results for both the stimulus package and Obamacare.

Califano notes that Johnson “even got the last laugh, as the year [1969] ended with a $3.2 billion surplus, the first in decades, and the Great Society survived.” It was, in fact, the first budget surplus in nine years, not decades. And it was achieved mainly by putting Social Security “on budget” so that its surplus that year could be counted among general government revenues. Since then there has never been a budget surplus without cooking the books via Social Security.

In 1968, Lyndon Johnson enjoyed  a 64-to-36 Democratic edge in the Senate and a 248-to-187 edge in the House. Many of those Democrats, to be sure, were conservative Southerners, but it’s a lot easier to twist the arms in your own party. Today’s large Republican majority in the House and the Republican gains in the Senate are there precisely because they were sent to Washington to fix the budget mess.

Assembly of traitors