Barack Obama Is Not George W. Bush

By Jonathan Chait

Has Barack Obama turned into George W. Bush? This terrible fate, desperately hoped for since the outset of Obama’s presidency by the Bush administration veterans as a kind of vindication fantasy, has become a new conventional wisdom. It has been floated, with varying levels of certainty, by Chuck Todd, Chris Cillizza, Bill McInturff, Ron Fournier, and Politico.

It is certainly true that Obama’s approval ratings have fallen to Bush-2005 levels. It’s also entirely possible they’ll fall further still: The administration’s panicky preparations for January suggest the first month of actual Obamacare coverage may be just as chaotic and unpopular as the onset of Medicare Part D. Yet the Bush comparisons state, or imply, broader forces at work than mere sagging approval ratings. They suggest a presidency that has hit a new inflection point beyond which its credibility is severed and its agenda broken. And that conclusion falls apart because it completely misses how power works in the Obama era.

If you measure the power of Obama’s presidency as the ability to move his agenda through Congress, his presidency has been dead since Republicans took control of the House in January 2011. If you measure it by his ability to use his popularity to force the opposing party to cooperate, it has literally been dead from the outset. In Obama’s first few weeks, with approval ratings in the seventies, he could not persuade a single House Republican to support a fiscal response to the most dire economic emergency in 80 years.

Bush’s power worked very differently. He enjoyed control of Congress for most of his first term and the first two years of his second. What’s more, his opposition party genuinely feared being seen as obstructionist. Substantial minorities of Democrats decided to vote for elements of Bush’s agenda on the calculation that being seen as bipartisan, and winning narrow concessions, made more political sense than opposing Bush. A dozen Democratic senators voted for the Bush tax cuts, and another seven abstained. Democrats supported the porky energy bill, and could have blocked Medicare Part D through a filibuster but decided not to.

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