Today is the 37th anniversary of Proclamation 4311, better known as Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. But is it also Turnip Day?
Well, not on the calendar – that’s July 26, the proper day to plant turnips in Missouri (“On the twenty-sixth of July / Sow turnips, wet or dry.”)
But of course in political lore, Turnip Day has a more symbolic cast. It is the date President Harry Truman called the “do-nothing” 80th Congress back into special summer session in 1948, demanding that they pass his legislative program.
These days, despite how little time members of Congress actually spend lawmaking, they rarely recess formally – so they cannot be called back into session in Truman-esque fashion. (Since technically, they are already in session.) And President Obama didn’t quite manage to pull lawmakers away from, well, anything they thought might be better to do, including watching TV later on tonight. Nonetheless, this evening the president will address a joint session of another “do-nothing” Congress (28 enactments through 8 months), seeking to re-frame the national debate around his ideas for a new package of economic recovery measures.
So is it Turnip Day? Will Obama put forth a blazing manifesto of base-galvanizing ideas, and dare Congress to defeat them?
Or is it Triangulation Day? Will Obama instead put forth a package of smaller proposals that might win bipartisan support, and work with Congress to pass them?
Truman or Clinton, that is the question. One might argue that Obama’s third, and preferred, analogue was actually President Reagan. That glide-path to a second term involves (1) big programs passed before the midterm – check; (2) calibration of those programs (in Reagan’s case, tax increases) afterwards – check; but also (3) economic improvement, at least relative to the last election, so that morning in America can at least plausibly be dawning by next November. No check there, at least not yet. So given that both Truman and Clinton also won re-election, one suspects the Obama team would be happy enough replicating their records, if it meant getting to gleefully brandish the “Perry beats Obama” front page of the Wall Street Journal.
In a way the choice depends on calculating the political interpretation of legislative defeat.
The joy of Turnip Day was in losing the battle(s) but winning the war. Truman knew that Congress wouldn’t pass the program he demanded – legislation, by the way, that was well left of today’s mainstream. (Think actual socialized medicine.) Yet Truman’s White House aide Charlie Murphy later noted that “we wanted to have a special message ready to go to Congress every Monday morning.”
On the other hand, President Clinton argued in his memoirs that triangulation was not “compromise without conviction” but a way to “change government policies as conditions changed” and a means of “trying of build a new consensus.” (See My Life, p660). Losing did not bode well for leadership, so he found things on which he could win.
Obviously Obama’s approach so far has been closer to Clinton’s than to Truman’s. And we can be pretty sure that, if Obama proposes anything commentators on the left will see as worth staging a good fight over, he will lose. The fact is, American political institutions privilege the status quo. The fact that they must work in tandem empowers inaction, especially when one of those institutions, in this case the House, affirmatively wants nothing to happen. Already revisionist history suggests all the great things Obama could have achieved, had he only been smarter/stronger/more principled/a better communicator. Surely there are paths not taken, and regretted — but Obama, unlike the blogosphere, is constrained by legislative pivot points.
Urged by an advisor to “fight the good fight” over a bill he knew could not pass, John F. Kennedy is said to have responded: “That’s vanity… not politics.” On the other hand, compromise has not seemed to gain Obama much political traction so far; and Clinton, in retrospect, had an opposition party far more open to (at least legislative) bargaining. Will tonight be the occasion to change course, then? You can make a pretty good argument that vanity is politics, in 2011. So is today Turnip Day?