As the debt limit battle drags on, my mind has gone back to the two previous instances in the postwar era when a Republican Congress was forced to square off against a Democratic president. The first was in 1947-1948, when Harry Truman was pitted against the 80th Congress. The second was 1995-1996 when Bill Clinton battled the 104th Congress.
Looking carefully at these two periods, I think there are four lessons that House Republicans need to bear in mind as we enter the final phase of negotiations on the debt ceiling.
1. Midterm mandates are provisional.
The title of this lesson is a bit misleading, as all mandates are provisional. A vast literature has been produced over the years about what elections can mean and do mean, but nobody has captured the truth better than E. E. Schattschneider, who once wrote:
What this means for our context here is that election results do not necessarily mean anything, considering the limited role the public plays. Factor in relatively low levels of information on the part of voters, as well as the systematic efforts of both parties to obfuscate and misrepresent, and it is difficult – impossible, really – to conclude that the public elected any president or any Congress with a specific policy mandate.
Instead, the best approach to viewing elections is that of an opportunity to build a mandate over time. Policies and programs should be implemented with a view toward growing and sustaining popular support, with the hope that at the next election the public will give you a vote of confidence for what you have done.
This is where both the 80th Congress and the 104th Congress went astray. Both assumed incorrectly that their mandates were a signal of substantial sea changes in the body politic, and this misinterpretation induced the GOP in both instances to extend itself beyond the limits of public approval, ultimately giving the opposition an electoral advantage.
2. Beware of the bully pulpit.
The conventional wisdom about the 1948 election is that Harry Truman ran against the “Do-Nothing” Republican Congress. While this was a famous turn-of-phrase Truman used, his actual rhetorical approach was much more cunning. Consider this Truman speech from his 1948 whistlestop campaign in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania:
I have been telling your neighbors over in Scranton what the Republican 80th Congress has done to labor and what the Republican Party plans to do to labor, if it gets control of the 81st Congress and puts a Republican president in the White House.
You know, I exercised my power of veto oftener than any other president of the United States in the time limit, except Grover Cleveland, and each of those vetoes I felt was in the public interest. Suppose I hadn’t been there! The 80th Congress would have certainly fixed you sure enough, but they didn’t have a chance to do all the things they wanted to do. All you have to do to avoid a mistake like the 80th Congress is to come out and vote on November 2.
Truman had a message like this for all sorts of factions throughout the country. He told farmers in the Midwest that the GOP had savaged farm subsidies. Out West he warned about GOP cuts in public works funding. He told African Americans that Republicans were just posturing in their support of a Fair Employment Practices Commission. And, of course, in the cities he did what he did in Wilkes-Barre: rail against the Taft-Hartley Act’s assault on organized labor.
Bill Clinton was able to pull off a similar rhetorical coup in 1995/1996. His strategy was essentially to embrace much of the Republican policy agenda (on crime, welfare reform, taxes, and a balanced budget) while simultaneously blasting the GOP as a bunch of extremists.
The lesson from both instances is that there is little, if anything, a Republican Congress can do to counter such messages. The power of the bully pulpit is so great that even presidents with relatively poor approval ratings can get politically smart message across.
3. The minutiae of policy can be lost in the messaging.
One of the maddening things for congressional Republicans during much of the 1995/1996 budget battle was Clinton’s claim that his plan balanced the budget. Clinton could point to data from the OMB suggesting that his program did indeed balance the budget in 10 years, but the OMB’s economic projections were much more optimistic than the CBO’s. While the economy ultimately grew much better than expected, most serious analysts thought that the OMB numbers were too rosy.
This level of nuance was simply lost on the public writ large, and indeed much of the punditocracy of the day, which was a major reason Clinton was able to “win” the budget battle. He claimed that his budget produced balance without painful cuts to popular social programs. (And, of course, “cuts” means something different in the baseline budgeting world of Washington than they do in the real world.)
Harry Truman had a similar advantage in 1948. Thomas Dewey was a very moderate GOP nominee, having been positioned for a long time to the left of the more conservative Republicans in the House. Yet that level of nuance was lost on the broader public, which was persuaded by Truman’s persistent linkage of Dewey to the 80th Congress.
The implication of both anecdotes is that even if a claim is an exaggeration, or indeed a flat-out falsehood, it is not necessarily the case that the president is going to be called on it. This is relevant to the debt ceiling negotiations, especially Obama’s claim to want a “balanced approach,” one in which Democrats and Republicans give something substantial. This has broad, intuitive appeal, but what has been lost – even among Beltway pundits – is the fact that Obama’s concessions on entitlement reform are quite puny (and conveniently not written down anywhere with his signature under them). As Keith Hennessey notes:
But the effects on beneficiaries of the Medicare eligibility increase, and the budget savings that would result from such a policy change, are significantly mitigated by the existence of ObamaCare subsidies for near retirees. This is nowhere nearly as big of a “give” as it would have been before the new health laws. A CPI change would both reduce entitlement spending and raise tax revenues, so the political pain is bipartisan.
More broadly, these changes would only temporarily slow spending growth. While they are politically significant, they fall far short of the size and type of changes that you need to make to solve our entitlement spending growth problem. At best they kick the can down the road several years.
There are few people in the world as well-versed in the arcane details of budget policy as Hennessey. The rarity of such specialized knowledge helps Obama.
4. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Article II of the Constitution spells out the powers of the president, which when it comes to advancing a domestic agenda, are really quite pathetic. The only power given the president on that front is an annual opportunity to shape the domestic agenda with the State of the Union. However, when it comes to stopping an agenda, nobody has as much power as the president, in the form of the veto.
In the history of the presidency, there have been 2,564 vetoes but only 111 congressional overrides. In other words, to change the policy against the preferences of the president, you almost always have to have the change the president.
This means, in turn, that Republicans should view midterm victories of the kind in 1946, 1994, and 2010 as steps along the path to change. They are not change in themselves, except insofar as they stop the Democrats from enacting their agenda. But to make positive changes, that virtually requires victory in the presidential election. Unfortunately, Republicans in the 80th and 104th Congress often forgot this, and believed incorrectly that they could get the president to buckle. With an institutional power as mighty as the veto pen, that was easier said than done.
A good example of a congressional majority understanding this principle actually comes from the Democrats of the 110th Congress, elected in 2006. They ran and won on an anti-war platform, and passed bills to that effect. But when President Bush vetoed them, they did not force a constitutional confrontation, and instead teed up the issue of the war for the Democratic nominee in 2008.
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The conclusion I draw from all of this is the following: Republicans in the House should not get carried away when interpreting the 2010 election result. They should be wary of the still potent weapons at Obama’s disposal: the veto pen is the mightiest of them all, and the power of the bully pulpit can never be underestimated, especially when the policy in question is complex.
Thus, the GOP approach to the current debt ceiling debate should be to get the best deal they can get from Obama without major disruptions to the American economy, and then count on the GOP presidential nominee taking this issue to the voters next year.
