The least surprising news of the week is that getting dressed down at the White House correspondents dinner did nothing to persuade Maureen Dowd and other opinion makers that their fantastical depictions of presidential power are actually puerile and lazy. Less than a month after Republicans rejected Obama’s budget — Chained CPI and all — gauzy platitudes about leadership are back in vogue.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Jake Sherman reports that the very people Obama’s supposed to “lead” to a budget deal (or a deal on anything) are perhaps more dysfunctional and reactionary than at any point since they came to power.
The House simply isn’t interested in the agendas being pushed by the president and Democratic Senate. Most Republicans aren’t looking for a big legislative push on gun control. GOP leaders are skeptical that they can arrive at a framework to negotiate a budget agreement with Senate Democrats. And tax reform and an immigration overhaul, while broadly supported, are still seen as long shots.
Members of leadership have trouble staying on the same page…. It’s come to the point that top House aides say simply that they’re not taking into consideration Obama’s priorities when they plan their debt ceiling moves.
Internalize that story and you’ll understand why all the noise about leading and “juice” and so on is so misguided.
That’s the House majority. Without at least its implicit assent, Obama really can’t pass anything. And he can’t change these attitudes, or the incentives of the people who hold them, with speeches or dinners or even de facto threats and bribes.
So he has two options: He can do nothing. Or as a long shot he and his allies can create atmospheric and procedural and rhetorical conditions that might allow House Republicans to give Obama something he wants without appearing to have consorted with him in any way. Ideally while retaining a pretense that they’ve somehow dealt him a defeat. To try and find a sort of legislative wormhole connecting the House GOP’s irrational universe and the universe everyone else inhabits.
But that’s precisely what Obama meant at his press conference on Tuesday when he talked about building a “permission structure” upon which Congressional Republicans might engage in some responsible budgeting. We’ll have much more on that shortly, but he was actually describing the very peculiar and contorted community organizing campaign Dowd alluded to when she wrote that “The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It’s called leadership.”
Right. But he called it a “permission structure” which I guess isn’t leadership-y sounding enough or something I don’t know.
