Obama’s Bipartisan Mentors: F.D.R. and Reagan
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By Lou Cannon
The New York Times
February 24, 2009, 10:00 pm
President Barack Obama, the toast of the world before he took the oath of office, is off to a better start than either his detractors or his supporters seem to realize. He’s getting a particularly bad rap on his commitment to bipartisanship — while 74 percent of respondents to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll said he was “trying to work with Republicans,” only 37 percent felt bipartisanship was the right approach, while 56 percent said he should “stick to the policies” he promised in the campaign.
However, it was President Obama’s efforts to reach out to Republican moderates that enabled him to win a crucial victory in the Senate on the most gigantic financial stimulus in the nation’s history. In fact, in terms of what he has accomplished in a short time, Mr. Obama is ahead of two other presidential over-achievers: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.
F.D.R. was not inaugurated until March 3, 1933, and the impressive legislative achievements of his “hundred days” — actually, 103 days — were not completed until mid-June. Reagan, shot by a would-be assassin 70 days into his presidency, did not get the second leg of his tax cut and budget plan through Congress until July 1981. Other presidents have fared worse. President Bill Clinton, for example, could not obtain a relatively paltry $16 billion stimulus and barely won approval of his budget during the first year of his presidency in 1993 when the Democrats, as now, controlled both houses of Congress.
During his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama promised to do away with “business as usual” in Washington and govern in a bipartisan fashion. He has been as good as his word in reaching out to the opposition, but many have deemed his efforts unproductive because no Republican voted for his stimulus bill in the House and only three Republicans did so in the Senate. Some of the president’s liberal supporters, never that keen about bipartisanship in the first place, have urged him to discard an approach that they feel the Republicans in Congress aren’t buying. The political scientist James Morone, writing last week for The Times’s Op-Ed page, called bipartisanship a “popular myth” and declared that “kind words and good intentions cannot build a bridge between competing political philosophies.”
This view of bipartisanship misreads both politics and history. Mr. Obama has yet to unlock the key to the banking crisis, but he understands the rules of the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to proceed expeditiously. This means gaining the support of a few Republicans, especially with the Minnesota Senate race up in the air and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy too ill to attend every session. By making relatively small concessions to win the votes of three Republican senators for his $787 billion stimulus, the president dodged a potentially paralyzing filibuster.
On the surface Mr. Obama’s support from the opposition is paltry in comparison to, say, the bipartisan support obtained by F.D.R. for Social Security or Reagan for his tax-cut and budget bills. But recorded votes on final passage of popular measures can be deceptive. Eighty Republicans in the House voted for the Social Security Act in 1935, but most of them had earlier voted to kill it by recommitting the bill to the House Ways and Means committee. The first time the measure cleared the committee, only one Republican supported it. In 1981, Reagan obtained the support of more than a score of House Democrats for his tax-cut and budget bills, a considerable achievement. But his margin of victory was narrow in the key committee votes, where he worked hard to get the backing of seven Democrats for one of his bills and six for the other.
The political value of bipartisanship for F.D.R. and Reagan, as it has been so far for Obama, is that it enabled them to obtain crucial support from a handful of opponents who, for one reason or another, were at odds with the dominant impulse of their parties. Outside of Washington, bipartisanship has broader reach. Richard Wirthlin, Reagan’s pollster, told me that Reagan went up in his surveys whenever there was any evidence of cooperation between the president and Congress.
Republican governors provide a better measure of Mr. Obama’s appeal than the Republican congressional delegation. At last count, the 22 G.O.P. governors were divided on the stimulus, with nine opposed, seven neutral and six supportive of the White House plan. But the supporters include the governors of populous California and Florida, both of whom have a record of reaching out to the opposition. Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida campaigned with Mr. Obama in support of the stimulus bill. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California just pushed a contentious budget through the Legislature with unanimous Democratic support and, in an echo of Mr. Obama, the backing of only three Republican state senators.
Bipartisanship has honorable antecedents. Its American roots can be traced to Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third president, who famously declared in his inaugural address, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Jefferson was trying, with modest success, to bind the wounds from his disputed election. His words have ever since been invoked by other presidents, among them F.D.R and his successor, Harry Truman. As the biographer Alonzo Hamby observed, Truman was a fierce partisan but his “most important substantive achievements,” the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, were bipartisan. So was Lyndon Johnson’s cooperation with Republicans to win passage of civil rights legislation. Even less successful presidents have had their bipartisan moments. The welfare reform signed into law by Bill Clinton was passed by a Republican Congress. Senator Kennedy deserves much of the credit for passage of President George W. Bush’s most notable domestic achievement — the No Child Left Behind Act.
Barack Obama recognizes that bipartisanship must be more than a tactic. In “The Audacity of Hope,” he wrote that “genuine bipartisanship assumes an honest process of give-and-take,” and that the result must be measured by “some agreed-upon goal, whether better schools or lower deficits.” This is an eyes-wide-open bipartisanship. It has served Obama well in the opening weeks of his presidency, and will be much needed by him in the substantive battles that lie ahead. |
