Much hullabaloo has been made in the last two weeks over the state of the 112th Congress and how it can possibly operate without political gridlock. By popular media’s account, a three-way Western-style showdown between Speaker Boehner, Leader Reid, and President Obama is all but imminent. In the words of William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute,
The polarization of American politics will make a tough job even harder. The two parties disagree on economic fundamentals, and because each now enjoys a share of real power, nothing will get done unless they manage to agree…Flash-points will occur early and often in 2012…Many analysts are predicting two years of gridlock, and it’s easy to see why.
Indeed, as the 112th Congress kicks off, our President and the Democratic Party he leads is headed down a grim road for passing any major legislation on its short-term and long-term policy agenda. The pause in harsh rhetoric and fierce contention borne of the tragic, horrifying events of Tucson is unfortunately going to be short-lived, by many accounts. Even as legislators’ efforts for unification might bring together the parties for symbolic purposes such as the State of the Union address, House and Senate Republicans are largely seeking to exercise their mandate to check the perceived Democratic excesses of the last two years. The President of Change is going to have to grapple with the ways of the past, if the House GOP intends to keep its promise to implement the Pledge to America. Inherent in all of these impending political firefights is the realization that President Obama’s intelligent utilization of his quickly diminishing political capital is going to play a larger role than ever in our national political process over the next two years, and may very well determine the outcome of the 2012 presidential race.
Every move our president takes with respect to advancing his domestic and foreign policy agenda in the halls of the 112th Congress will be heavily scrutinized – even more so than is normally the case – by virtue of the fact that the GOP controls the United States House of Representatives. Given this new status quo, will Obama pass any major Democratic legislation by the end of his first term? The chances are zero to none, even with calculated political moves on the part of the Administration such as the appointment of experienced outsider Bill Daley as the new White House Chief of Staff. In fact, it is apparent that many in the Administration implicitly acknowledge the quickly diminishing political capital Mr. Obama has; after all, campaign promises and pledges have been neglected in the name of political capital stinginess. For instance, as Bernard Aronson of the Washington Post points out today: Latin American free trade agreement advocacy, which President Obama undertook in last year’s State of the Union address, was quickly forgotten by the legislative pragmatists, those political capital Scrooges working in the White House’s West Wing – all in an ostensible effort to preserve what is left of Obama’s waning political capital.
In a post 2010-midterm election world, Republicans not only functionally have the numbers to kill President Obama’s policymaking agenda, but American public support for the President and his party continues to diminish each day. Distress and discontent with a stagnant economy, flip-flops on campaign promises, uncontrollable and excessive spending, and incoherent foreign policy decisions have decimated Obama’s political capital amongst the American populace and especially amongst policymakers. With Republican congressmen vowing to obstruct at great cost, the GOP’s confidence and momentum following the midterms, and the surprisingly productive but ultimately ideologically unsatisfactory lame-duck session of Congress have made the situation impossible for President Obama to gain any meaningful political capital through bipartisanship. Quite frankly, through a pragmatic lens, Obama will undoubtedly be unable to yield or generate sufficient political capital to pass his agenda items at least in the next year.
As one prominent liberal critic of the President, Roger Hodge, puts it,
[President Obama] spent the last two years squandering his political capital on initiatives that did not put Americans back to work.
With this waste of his 2008 mandate, and the elimination of said mandate in the 2010 midterms, Mr. Obama’s political capital account is running dangerously close to being overdrawn. Let us wish for the general success of our President, because with his success rests that of our nation. Without a quick, miraculous infusion of political capital, though, it is difficult to see where the specific Democratic policy agenda can possibly succeed in the 112th Congress. And, with the voters having spoken, maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.
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