Presumably Rahm Emanuel is blackmailing him, or he’s one of those Reid-bots or Pelosi-bots we’re always hearing about:
There seems to be little to endear citizens to their legislature or to the president trying to influence it. It’s too bad, because even with the wrench thrown in by Republican Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts, this Democratic Congress is on a path to become one of the most productive since the Great Society 89th Congress in 1965-66, and Obama already has the most legislative success of any modern president — and that includes Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson. The deep dysfunction of our politics may have produced public disdain, but it has also delivered record accomplishment.
chrome agnomen
the voice of reason at AEI
El Tiburon
To the contrary, I sincerely believe that Norm Ornstein is a straight-shooter, which is amazing since he is employed by AEI.
He is a very astute Congressional historian especially in regards to their arcane rules and procedures.
So I don’t know if your comments were satirical or not, but I think Norm comes by his analysis honestly. Not saying I necessarily agree…
Incertus
Is there a list somewhere of these legislative accomplishments, that one could link to whenever this “getting nothing done” meme pops up? Because while I feel like it’s an accurate statement, I’d like something more tangible to be able to point to.
Ash
It seems that a lot of people have the notion that when congress isn’t working on HUGE landmark type of legislation, then they’re not doing anything at all, just sitting around, playing finger football and taking naps. Which of course I’m sure they do sometimes, but it’s still a full-time job.
El Cid
This is another good argument for why people ought to appreciate Democratic accomplishments and ought to vote to give them stronger electoral victories, or, at least, to hold onto strong majorities.
On the other hand, we live in a country where repeatedly assuming that victory can come by making points about how people ought to view things and how they ought to vote can lead to electoral losses.
Notorious P.A.T.
Well the first thing he mentions is the watered-down stimulus, which he praises for having so many tax cuts. And he praises the House for passing cap and trade which went to the Senate and (cough cough, look a cloud!). Oh and he says Congress passed “stiff oversight” of the billions of dollars we handed to Wall Street on a silver platter.
Great congress, or greatest congress?
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Ash: Right, they are just voting to name post offices and passing proclamations congratulating some sports team(or person) on winning one title or another. That and passing bills of attainder against Democratic leaning organizations.
Dennis G.
But, but, but…
Talk like this flies in the face of the doom and gloom, sky-is-falling stuff I’ve been hearing 24/7.
If one is to accept these facts then one might be forced to conclude that some folks on the TeeVee, in Washington and in the blog-o-sphere have been lying to us. And they would never do that, would they?
Facts just ruin the game every time.
Cheers
dr. bloor
There’s something to what Ornstein says, but when you spend a year not getting your signature issue (health care) done and not hammering on the single-most pressing issue (jobs), you can’t really be surprised about the “optics” that result.
The Grand Panjandrum
I have great respect for Norm Ornstein but this is all hogwash unless he can provide hard data that compares and contrasts previous Presidents legislative records. This is almost as much sophistry as the belief that Obama going before the House GOP and admitting they have good ideas is a big win for him. Sure its nice to hear Obama take on the GOP but come on … he gave them the opening they needed to proclaim that EVEN THE PRESIDENT ADMITS THEY HAVE ideas and they want to be bipartisan, just like Obama. Sorry, but this Obot ain’t buying no fucking woof biscuits.
mellowjohn
any more columns like this and norm’s going to find his wingnut welfare checks cut off.
rootless_e
@Notorious P.A.T.: Actually, the tax cuts in stimulus were a steep towards restoring a progressive tax system as they were targeted towards lower income people – something that seems to not be interesting to our “progressives”. And the “watered down” stimulus has meant, for example, that US green energy industries have grown at record pace in 2009 despite the crash and the total collapse of bank funding. This is also something that “progressives” are in accord with the MSM in finding boring. But for those of us who don’t think wall-street is the center of the universe, these are very interesting indeed.
bob h
I respect Norm Ornstein in spite of his AEI connection (he and Al Franken are close friends) and what he says is backed up by a Congressional Research Office study that showed Obama got more first year legislative accomplishments than any President since Roosevelt, I believe.
J. Michael Neal
I’m going to take the position that the accomplishments of this Congress have been very impressive, and they have still been a bunch of gutless cowards in not passing health care. The latter is fairly obvious, but let’s unpack the former.
Lily Ledbetter. S-CHIP. The stimulus that, even though inadequate, was still just about the largest spending bill ever passed (and certainly the largest that didn’t build off of a previous baseline) *and* one of the biggest tax cuts in history; on just the spending side, realize that the bill added the equivalent of the entire Defense Department budget in one swoop.
All of this was done needing 60 votes to pass anything. This is where the comparisons to FDR fall short. In 1933, the Democrats had almost exactly the same number of seats as they have now, and a party that was just as fractured as it is now. Most of the major pieces of the New Deal passed with fewer than 60 votes. Had FDR faced the same obstruction, he wouldn’t have accomplished a damned thing.
mcd410x
The progs are just words. The liberals aren’t gonna put government in my healthcare.
Dannie22
I’ve seen Norman Ornstein on c span a few times. He seems to have a historical perspective, that is not rooted in partisan bs, or bloviating talking points. He is the kind of guest I’d like to see more of on these cable talk shows. How he can work for AEI is beyond me. Those checks must be phat.
Mr. Nobody
A lot of this article looks like Ornstein is grasping for straws. Among the accomplishments he lists in his article are: Cap & Trade, Financial Regulations and Health Care. Yeah, its nice these bills were passed in one chamber or another, but as far as I know none of these were signed into law. Right now all of these accomplishments are just words on paper. Nothing more.
Once these are signed into law I will start giving some credit.
bemused
Ornstein has been a friend of Al Franken’s for years. They both have Minnesota roots.
Ornstein was a frequent guest on Al Franken’s Air America radio show & he is also quite funny. On occasion he would do a parody of polling american views on a topic that was hysterical.
Bill H
I realize that this kind of statement is pretty radical, but maybe the reality is somewhere in between? Congress is neither useless, nor is it the greatest thing since the automatic bead slicer. It has passed some decent bills, it has passed some crappy bills, it has failed on some monstrously horrible bills, and it has fallen short on some hugely good bills. Some of the bills have not been as good as they could have been, but they’ve been pretty decent.
nepat
It’s a sad day when it takes conservatives to trumpet Democratic legislative successes and says a whole hell of a lot about a critical Democratic vulnerability: messaging!
At the White House, this ought to be Axelrod’s job. He’s the “narrative” guy, but he’s a campaign consultant and seems distracted and unsure of himself in a non-campaign context. He really ought to just adopt the whole perpetual campaign MO and have at it. Pretend you’ve got a primary coming up in two weeks, Dave!
In the House, Pelosi’s office also doesn’t appear to see it as their job to communicate their successes. And she’s no communicator herself. Nor is Reid in the senate. So we’re stuck with a trifecta of mealy-mouthed mumblers where we need aggressive pitchmen. Plouffe? Plouffe?
lawguy
It is the “It Could Have Been a Disaster Congress” but it turns out to be the “It’s Just Not Very Good” Congress. Yep that makes my heart go pity pat.
In other words we are not in the worst depression ever, just the worst since the 1930s. Congratulations to us.
BTD
@Dennis G.:
Perhaps a more nuanced view would require looking at the quality of the accomplishments and deciding whether they have done the job.
For example, unemployment is over 10%. The financial sector stands unreformed. The economy is, at best, fragile.
The approach you seem to adopt strikes me as contempt for the electorate. Now, you may see that as good politics.
I would disagree.
rootless_e
@BTD:
For example, unemployment is over 10%. The financial sector stands unreformed. The economy is, at best, fragile.
50 years of the costs of empire, 30 years of trickle down. This is not going to fix easily or fast.
mcd410x
When are the progs going to stop giving tax cuts to the rich? Don’t the libs know that tax cuts won’t jump start the economy?
BTD
@rootless_e:
I think you make my point there. Touting “accomplishments” when what had been done has not really accomplished what needs to be done is not effective politics.
Sell it as a first step, or the beginning of the process, or what have you, but accomplishments implies a certain finality.
With the situation in the country not good it is unproductive to whine about people not giving you credit for what you have accomplished.
Look, when there is 10% unemployment, fair or not, it is not smart to run out there whining that people are not having a parade for you.
rootless_e
@BTD:
There are two separate issues: one is whether anything good got done and the second is what to say about it.
On the first, really important things have been done that are well outside the range of the MSM considers to be important.
On the second, I fail to understand what positive outcome one can expect from a steady drumbeat of doom and depression. It would be dishonest and pointless to claim that things are great, but if your message is always that the goodguys always lose, that nothing good happens, that things suck – even though some good things have happened – I don’t see what you can expect other than that the public will look for solutions elsewhere.
BTD
@rootless_e:
On point 2, if the Democrats in Congress and the White House talked about MORE essential action to buttress already taken action, then I doubt there would be much daylight among Democrats.
The insistence to focus on touting what has been done to the exclusion of talking about what more must be done is a mistake.
I think that is the mistake Dennis G. makes, and it is why I addressed his comment.
rootless_e
@BTD: Ok, but to me
The stimulus saved us from depression and is helping create a green energy manufacturing base, we now need to double down and create 10x more jobs
is a good message – and a factually correct one while
stimulus sucked because democrats cowardly roll-over to republicans and failure to show any spine was a monumental fuck up
is a bad message.
BTD
@rootless_e:
Recognizing that it was not enough is not the same thing as saying it was a failure.
Saying it was enough in the face of 10% unemployment seems foolhardy to me.
CalD
But Obama’s presidency is still over; nothing left but a heap of smoking wreckage, right? And Democrats in congress are all still spineless, corporatist whores and sell-outs, right? Right? Right?
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Ornstein’s list basically consists of
1. the stimulus,
2. a couple of things that passed the House but not the Senate,
3. a few other things that most would consider relatively minor legislation.
I appreciate that the Stimulus, inadequate as it was, was quite a big accomplishment for our government, seeing as it was a complicated and expensive bill passed in short order. Problem for the Dems is that this happened a year ago, leaving plenty of time for it to be demagogued in the interim.
And good on the House for passing a couple of other big initiatives, though in the collective mind of the electorate they will amount to nothing unless they eventually get signed. It does tell us, though, that the most effective person in our current government is the one most vilified by the right, Nancy Pelosi. Go figure.
And I wish the Credit Card Bill would just never get mentioned again. Credit card companies can still pin us to the ground, stick a fist down our throats, and repeatedly rape us with a rusty machete, they just have to tell us they’re doing it now. It was so easy to pass this toothless thing that even most Repubs supported it.
So no, I don’t think Ornstein’s piece will move the narrative.
mai naem
Ornstein’s not a conservative, He is what in the early eighties and before would have been called a centrist.
kay
@mai naem:
Sure he is. It’s just that he’s a congressional historian rather than a hack, and he wants to correct the record, which has been distorted.
He wrote a column in 2005 where he laid out the argument that the 2005 GOP Congress was the most corrupt, ever.
Ever. In our history. That’s not the work of an ideologue.
I will never, for the life of me, understand why progressives joined with conservatives to trash and discredit the stimulus.
2/3 of the thing was composed of progressive policy and economic theory, it shaved 2 points off the unemployment rate, there are visible stimulus infrastructure projects all over the country for progressives to point to, and all progressives could do is scream “not big enough!”
Because it was 800 billion rather than a trillion.
It didn’t even make sense as a tactic. The thing was passed. Over. They weren’t going to “fix” the stimulus, so what in the hell was the point? If the intent was to get them to pass a second stimulus, it seems stupid to constantly trash “the stimulus” but that’s exactly what they did.
Huge lost opportunity. I’ll never get it.
kay
@BTD:
Every liberal member of Congress should have been traveling to their district and pointing to stimulus infrastructure projects and service retention (police, teachers).
The way to sell it was not nationally, but district by district, because that’s where the measurable, tangible results are.
Instead, they allowed conservatives to co-opt the whole conversation, make it national, and focus on the unemployment rate that is 10% rather than 8%.
Conservatives who voted against it promoted it in their districts.
Liberals went on television nationally to say it wasn’t big enough.
I don’t want to hear any whining from Congressional Democrats about how they can’t run on the stimulus. The time to run on it was when the when the money was coming in, to their districts.
I can’t tell you how frustrating it is for me to have my wingnut House member celebrating “his” stimulus projects, while the liberal in the next district over appeared on national television to complain. I mean, that’s just stupid.
kay
@BTD:
And, BTD, how the “tax cuts” were presented borders on dishonest.
Since when do liberals oppose a refundable tax credit on payroll that went to 95% of workers, and benefited the lowest paid worker the most.
That’s a progressive tax policy. We should have been celebrating it.
The middle class tax credit phased out at 75k and 150k, respectively. That’s not a “conservative” idea. It’s a mainstream Democratic idea.
These and other progressive or mainstream Democratic ideas were all shunted into the rubric of “conservative tax cuts” that “we” oppose, and dismissed as unhelpful to “the middle class” and that just isn’t true, let alone politically smart.