Posted on 05/03/2010 6:39:25 PM PDT by Second Amendment First
A day after highlighting the need for immigration reform at an Iowa town hall meeting, President Barack Obama last week raised doubts about whether Congress really had “an appetite immediately to dive into another controversial issue.”
Immigration activists were shocked, to say the least — “pissed” is how Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, described his reaction — and the remarks undercut the next day’s unveiling of an immigration reform framework, while providing Republicans more leeway to accuse Democrats of demagoguing on the issue.
Clarissa Martinez, the National Council of La Raza’s immigration and national campaign director, put the onus squarely on the president. “To me, what was an opportunity for his leadership to emerge strongly ... well, it’s not quite there yet,” she said.
For veterans of the health care debate who had championed the doomed public option, it was a déjà vu moment. For more than a year, the president flirted with their cause, alternating between endorsing it and diminishing its viability. MoveOn Executive Director Justin Ruben reflected on the campaign and concluded: “The president consistently left wiggle room and never went to the mat.”
“He loves me, he loves me not” — liberal activists feel such an acute sense of seduction and abandonment on a wide swath of issues that Obama has championed.
Gay rights activists seeking the immediate repeal of the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy have become so frustrated that they paid the price of admission to a fundraiser for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) so they could heckle the president.
Environmentalists who had eagerly anticipated the unveiling of a climate and energy reform bill were forced to the sidelines after their big event was canceled when it seemed the White House and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had suddenly put immigration before them.
In fairness to Obama, all presidents must learn to juggle the passions of party and issue activists with the practicalities and pacing of governing.
Some do it with tough love. President George W. Bush abandoned the home-schooling movement’s wish list after concluding it lacked a big enough constituency to move legislation through Congress. Others, such as President Bill Clinton, do it by deftly playing activists against each other.
Obama’s challenge is compounded by nearly a decade of pent-up frustration among progressives and two seemingly contradictory leadership traits: an ardent commitment to issues expressed in soaring, expectation-raising rhetoric and an aloof approach to legislating that gives others more say about substance and timing.
“Most presidents like to lead from upfront. When you lead from behind, as [Obama] frequently does on domestic issues, many people are unhappy because they don’t know where things are going. There is constant jockeying that takes place,” said David Gergen, an adviser to four White Houses.
The jockeying among Democratic activists is made all the more intense by Obama’s unwillingness in most cases to make the choices that will determine winners and losers.
Environmentalists were gnashing their teeth last week when the White House refused to say whether Obama wanted energy or immigration on the Senate floor first. Instead, it issued statements saying both issues were important.
The same lack of direction from the White House has cropped up in the debate over financial reform.
While Obama has kept up the heat for passage of financial regulatory reform, he’s been mum on some of the most intense fights. “Should a consumer agency be independent of the Fed or not? It’s not clear where he stands,” noted Gergen.
Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University, said the Obama administration has “a tendency to say to Democratic interest groups: ‘You have all won, and you shall all have prizes.’ Now, work it out amongst yourselves.”
The institution to which many of those tougher decisions have fallen is the Senate, which is being pressed into an unusually large role by the high efficiency of the House and the extraordinary deference of the White House. “He’s given us a heavy load here,” Reid acknowledged recently.
Senators have reacted to their role with mixed emotions.
During the final, marathon days of the health care debate, many spoke openly of their exhaustion and that of their staffs. Twice, Reid mistakenly voted no on final passage, in part because of the grueling hours he’d put in working out the Senate bill and the reconciliation package that created the final language.
Some senior aides complain that their bosses have been forced to play the bad cop with activist groups, a posture that is all the more precarious for them, since many are up for reelection this fall.
On the other hand, Senate Democrats have enormous liberty to engage and lead in the legislative process. And the passage of health care appears to have emboldened them.
By August, it’s conceivable that the Senate will have passed health care reform, financial regulatory reform and at least held a debate on a major overhaul of immigration law or the energy sector — any one of which would have been considered a major achievement in a normal year.
“This Senate has done more than recent Senates have done,” said Gergen. “The Senate feels like a more co-equal branch.”
But the shift in power also has turned the chamber into a constant battleground, with an unrelenting stream of lobbying, grass-roots pressure and direct personal appeals. (“It’s good for fundraising,” Gergen observed.)
According to Ruben, activist groups routinely are told by the Senate — and often, the White House — that they need to scale back because their goals are impossible to achieve. “Our job is to change that calculus,” he said.
After the Supreme Court overturned a ban on corporate political activity, activists with MoveOn and other organizations pressed lawmakers to introduce a tough new law that would reinstitute the ban.
“They said they couldn’t do it because they don’t have Republican votes now. We said that they had to make Republicans make that choice,” said Ruben. Legislation prohibiting corporate political activity was introduced last week — with two Republican co-sponsors in the House.
Senate Democrats were also reluctant to introduce an immigration reform bill without a Republican sponsor after Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina backed off the bill last week. They did it anyway, in the hope that a more detailed outline of a potential bill would reassure Republicans and encourage them to get on board.
Now, it’s up to immigration activists to build support among Republicans for the legislation, which is one reason the president’s remarks were so devastating.
Once Sharry got over the shock, he read through Obama’s full statement and discovered it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. “If you look closely at what he said, he was being analytical. But if you are the president, you don’t get to be the pundit.”
What others heard, Sharry said, was: “I guess the president said it’s not happening.”
Present!!
What leadership? Obama has spent the last 15 months standing on the sidelines while Congress wrote all his legislation. From the second TARP installment to S-CHIP expansion to the so-called "stimulus" bill to the second half of the 2009 fiscal budget to the 2010 budget to the health care (i.e. insurance) bill, Obama has allowed Congress to do all the work while he played golf and went to the gym.
BS, they know the pubbies have made their choice, the problem for them is it makes the rats have to choose.
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