During second terms, the Washington press corps gets bored. There’s usually not much going on! As a result, reporters hype scandals and speculate about the next election. They exaggerate the president’s influence and then condemn him for failing to live up to their magical-realist visions of executive power. As we’ve seen in the months since President Obama’s re-election, these tedious exercises may fill time and column inches, but they do little to enlighten or engage.
The New Republic’s “Second Term Recovery Guide” is an impressive break from the tedium. The left-of-center magazine’s contributors recognize the institutional and political constraints Obama faces and propose novel approaches to overcoming those obstacles.
Consider, for instance, Noam Scheiber’s lead essay, which foreswears Green Lantern-style appeals to presidential superpowers in favor of a tougher bargaining strategy on budget issues:
Fortunately, the Oval Office arms its occupants with a variety of tools for besting political opponents, even if one of them isn’t the Tolkien-esque magic ring you would imagine from the Sunday morning chatter. Obama has plenty of opportunities to salvage his second term and build on his legacy. He just has to commit to playing the hard-ass.
As Scheiber correctly recognizes, Republicans are unlikely to be talked out of their opposition to the president’s proposals, especially at this point in Obama’s term. That’s why he proposes allowing a government shutdown if Republicans don’t agree to eliminate some of the budget cuts imposed by the sequester, abolishing the filibuster on presidential nominees if the GOP doesn’t approve more of his choices, and using impending climate regulations as leverage to cut a deal on a carbon tax. In each case, these strategies would change the status quo, making opposition more costly and strengthening GOP incentives to compromise.
Likewise, TNR’s Alec MacGillis, Jonathan Cohn, and Nate Cohn explicitly recognize the need for Obama to develop legislative proposals that can attract Republican support in Congress and propose strategies to help him do so: revenue-neutral tax reform (MacGillis); port infrastructure spending (J. Cohn), and targeting of potential allies among swing-state Republican senators (N. Cohn).
Will these approaches succeed? Probably not, but the authors are appropriately realistic and the solutions they recommend are far more creative and reality-based than the fiction-inspired fantasies that infect so much coverage of the White House.
Unfortunately, the old pathologies continue in the establishment press, which has continued to push the narrative that President Obama’s political difficulties are the result of his failure to effectively use the bully pulpit. The most recent example came in a “win the morning”-style news analysis June 24 by Politico’s John F. Harris, Jake Sherman, and Elizabeth Titus which claimed Obama is “in the doldrums” and “in a dead zone” in part due to his failure to influence public opinion. “Obama is standing in a presidential pulpit that recently has proved to be the opposite of bully,” they write. “So far in 2013, he has tried to harness public opinion to bring Congress to heel on both the budget sequestration and gun control debates. In both cases, Republicans—and in key instances, moderate Democrats—shrugged it off with apparent impunity.”
The same fallacy underpinned Chris Cillizza’s June 24 analysis on his Washington Post blog The Fix, which was titled, “Is the presidential bully pulpit dead?” In it, Cillizza points to the “inability of even the President of the United States to push his preferred message on a given day/week/month,” which he claims reflects “a fundamental new reality of politics: fundamental new reality of politics: The bully pulpit just ain’t what it used to be.” Implicit in this argument is a romantic view of a recent past in which presidents like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton commanded the news agenda and shaped public opinion.
If today's Washington press corps is bored, it's because they're not doing enough to cover the real news that's all around them. E.g., Health Care Reform could and should be an enormous story. Here are some story lines that merit substantial coverage:
a. How will the law work with a big part of it delayed for a year?
b. Legality and Constitutionality of the President unilaterally modifying a law. (This same point deserved more coverage when the President began unilaterally handing out waivers to businesses of his choice.)
c. Impact of the modified law on individuals who won't be getting health coverage from their employers.
d. What are all the details of the law? IMHO the media ought to have covered this point when the law was being debated and they ought to have covered it when the law was enacted, but they didn't. We're still seeing new provisions come to light.
e. Should the entire law be delayed, given that a major section was delayed?
f. How will happen the cost of the law be affected by the one year delay in the employer mandate. Presumably a lot more individuals will go into the Exchanges, which will cost the federal government a substantial amount.
The media could spend a month covering aspects of this law. And, such coverage would be useful to us Americans who have to obey it. Instead the Times, e.g., merely has a headline "Postponing Health Rules Emboldens Republicans." It seems that their Washington Press Corps is only able to cope with the political contest. They should move their Washington reporters to the Sports Page and get some reporters who can explain policy implications to their readers.
#1 Posted by David in Cal, CJR on Thu 4 Jul 2013 at 12:41 PM
Sorry, item (f) has an extra word. It should begin:
f. How will the cost of the law be affected
#2 Posted by David in Cal, CJR on Thu 4 Jul 2013 at 12:58 PM