Rarely does a Congressional Quarterly (who? what?) study light up the boards like yesterday’s annual report on “Presidential Success” in Congress. But for CQ junkies like myself and many many colleagues, CQ’s presidential support study is a welcome distraction. This year’s was no exception, as President Obama racked up the highest presidential support score since CQ inaugurated the stat in 1953. In the Senate, legislators agreed with the president 96.7 percent of the time Obama took a position; in the House, 94.4 percent of the time.
Wait a minute. A success rate in the high 90s when key pieces of Obama’s health reform (e.g. the public option) were tossed aside, when the Senate failed to act on his climate change and financial regulatory reform proposals, when his own Democratic senators challenged him on defense weapons and Guantanamo Bay, and when the GOP availed themselves of every potential opportunity to filibuster?
As it turns out, Obama (and his legislative team) picked their battles carefully. Although senators cast 397 roll call votes in 2009, the president (or his top staff) took a clear position on only 79 Senate roll call votes. Victorious on 78 of them, Obama achieved a success rate of 98.7% in the Senate. His House average (winning on 68 of the 72 votes he took a position on) reached 94.4%, leveling off to the reported 96.7% overall success rate.
So how did Obama score so high, especially in light of the prevailing news coverage depicting numerous hard fought legislative battles?
First, the obvious, Obama benefited from large Democratic majorities, including the decisive 60th Senate vote secured when Al Franken was declared the winner of the Minnesota Senate race and Arlen Specter switched parties. Given historic levels of party unity (even Joe Lieberman voted with the president over 90 percent of the time), Obama had a natural base of support—even if Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi often had to cajole support in high profile ways over the course of the year.
Second, and more interesting, a quick glance of the 79 Senate votes suggests that Obama’s record breaking success rate was due in large part to his strategic selection of votes on which to take a public position. Right off the bat, it’s obvious that Obama choose relatively few votes on which to take a position (though generally speaking recent presidents have similarly avoided taking positions). Assuming the president’s staff limited those votes to those on which he had the best chances of winning, it’s not surprising that Obama fared so well. By and large, most of the domestic and defense votes in both chambers scored by CQ were on appropriations bills—typically votes on final passage of spending bills or on GOP efforts to impose across-the-board cuts on spending. No mean feat to get majority members to cast their lot with the president on these votes, I’d say. Finally, 32 of Obama’s 78 Senate victories took place on confirmation votes (from the well-known Hillary Clinton to the unknown Andre Davis)—little reason to think Democrats would desert Obama on those appointees.
Obama’s record-breaking first year—even in light of declining overall approval ratings—seems a little less impressive once you take a look at the underbelly of the scoring system. Still, large Democratic majorities—and a dose of partisan team play—certainly set the context for what Obama achieved this past year.
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Interesting.
This tells me that:
1. Obama picks and chooses his fights well.
2. Obama is overly cautious OR Congress is very partisan (or both).
What would have happened for instance if Obama had come out for (say) single payer health care?
Well obviously he wouldn’t have got it. The votes aren’t there. So in that sense he picked his fight well. If he’d come out in favour of things like that, his batting average would be more comparable with previous Presidents. But I don’t see Obama as a master tactician compared to (say) others like Johnson. Other Presidents took risks with what they stood up for, so why isn’t Obama? He could stand up for single payer, knowing he’ll lose, but keep the public on his side (a hefty portion of those opposed to the health care reform were because it didn’t go far enough). So why doesn’t he? It seems he’s either overly cautious about what political capital he has, or he is right in how little he has, and that the US is more partisan than before, so he can’t afford to have a mediocre batting average in the current political climate. Which I guess is sad really. Particularly with all there is to be done.
For many of the reasons noted already, the presidency literature is very cautious in using roll call “win” scores as presented by CQ. Presidents game their position-taking; not everything important comes to a roll call vote; and the substance of any given roll call can vary widely. Sometimes this is dealt with by using a subset of “key votes” or highly-contested votes; sometimes, by the average of the presidential support shown by individual legislators (which CQ also calculates); and sometimes by the more difficult expedient of trying to calculate what proportion of the substantive program proposed by the president makes it into statute. For a table of alternate measures, and how they apply to recent presidents, I’ve pasted at the bottom of this comment a long, ugly link to a table presented in Peterson & Aberbach’s edited volume The Executive Branch (Oxford, 2005). (It’s on page 431, if the link doesn’t work.)
The best measure of “success”, as ever, depends on the question being asked – but on the whole these sorts of scores are best used in triangulated fashion with other measures, to see what each is hiding or exaggerating.
http://books.google.com/books?id=xmGwdc4732kC&lpg=PP1&dq=peterson%20aberbach%20executive%20branch&pg=PA431#v=onepage&q=&f=false
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