Think of this as Volume 12, Number 37 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
The most important job of a President is to set boundaries for political debate.
No President can succeed unless they are able to do this. The President is our only nationally-elected political official. If he (or she) can't set boundaries they will be run over.
By that standard, George W. Bush began as a very successful President, undone only by events. The fact he set those events in motion — Iraq, Katrina, the financial casino, the politicization of everything — damns him before history. But at this first task, he succeeded.
Tonight, Barack Obama has to do this in the generations' old debate over health care. Success depends first on answering the question — why did his predecessors fail?
Except for Lyndon Johnson, under whom we got Medicare and Medicaid, past Democratic Presidents were unable to turn their successful outside games — their rhetoric and personal political success — into a winning inside game in the form of legislation.
So two types of boundaries must be set.
- The outside boundaries define the ideas the media will hold to be legitimate, and those that will be illegitimate.
- The inside boundaries define the Congressional debate, and lead to a bill's passage.
The President's problem is that he has, so far, failed at defining outside boundaries. His opponents appear free to call him any names they wish, and those in Congress never pay a political price for repeating the slander.
Setting those boundaries is his primary task tonight.
As I've said here before, the model needs to be President Nixon's speech on Vietnam and Vice President Agnew's follow-up. That's where sit on the generational wheel. Now is the time when this generation's thesis will be made or unmade. What is inside the consensus, what is outside. Nixon succeeded at that, just as Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson did before them. The old ways are dead, show us the new ones and we will follow, or the majority will, until my contemporaries and I are mere shades of memory and my children are in ruddy middle age.
George W. Bush left America and the world broken. In the end he was Lyndon Johnson, Herbert Hoover, Grover Cleveland, and James Buchanan.
Either Barack Obama remakes it, pushing through this Internet Thesis of Consensus, or we go back to conflicts that lead nowhere, and America disappears under Chinese imports and the climate shocks that are surely coming. Those are the stakes. They make what John F. Kennedy, Obama's reported role model, faced appear to be molehills. Kennedy presided over established prosperity and an established international order called the Cold War. Today new balances must be made from whole cloth.
So some statements, some claims, must become out of bounds. Repeating these things must result in your being deemed un-serious, nothing but a rabble-rouser, someone outside government, exiled to howl at the moon with Ramsey Clark (right), with the Wall Street tycoons of the 1930s, the Populists and Confederates and Whigs.
Where are the boundaries?
Barack Obama is not a Socialist. He's not a Communist. He's not Hitler. He's not proposing Death Panels, he's not out to kill your grandma, he's not trying to nationalize health care. Say these things after tonight and you are un-serious, you are exiled, you are Ramsey Clark, and there is no way back.
The fact that media figures repeated these lies without penalty, that politicians and established interests were allowed to spread them, is the first problem the President must address. Unless he succeeds at putting down this nonsense he can't govern. His Administration will be like that of Jimmy Carter — dead on arrival, time out of mind. Our governing Thesis will become whatever Rush Limbaugh decides it is.
The keys to success from here are self-discipline and party discipline. President Obama must unite Democrats tonight. That means speaking to his base, but also reminding those on the edge of his base — business interests — of why they joined his coalition and left the other side. Then he must send his lieutenants out to mark the boundaries clearly. Here are the objections we will listen to, here are the people you must not listen to.
Now, the inside game.
The President must emphasize the costs businesses now pay for health care, costs their overseas competitors (and some domestic ones) don't pay, and the economic price society pays for making health care optional. Higher rates of sickness, more preventable disease, no ounce of prevention meaning pounds for cure. Without a solution to this business problem — constantly rising prices, constantly falling productivity — America can't be competitive.
You make this palatable by throwing a lot of red meat to your base. Every President who succeeds in maintaining a governing coalition does this, and every President who fails to maintain such a coalition fails at this task.
This must be repeated. Politically George W. Bush was a great success, even though his policies led us to hell in a hand-basket. George H.W. Bush, on the other hand, was a great failure, because he could not or would not point a true course.
The second task is always harder for Democrats. Always. Until 2008 Democrats were not really a national party. They were a collection of state parties and regional groupings. Thanks in part to George W. Bush (who moved the last of the conservative base to the GOP), and in part to Obama's own coalition-building, Congressional Democrats are more united than they have been in 150 years.
This is another reason why the President must give a partisan speech tonight. So-called conservative Democrats (who are no longer conservative compared with liberal Republicans) need to be reminded that they hang together or they will surely hang separately. The only path open to Democrats like Max Baucus, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, and Travis Childers is to stay loyal, unless they want to run in Republican primaries next year. (Note that when Bill Clinton offered this chance, many took it. That's a risk that must be run to get things done.)
Once the President's speech is done, of course, the real work begins. There are only two Democrats whom this President can emulate and succeed — Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. It's time for President Obama to realize that John F. Kennedy was a failure as a President. His agenda passed because he was shot. Popularity and political success are not the same thing.
That's going to mean horse trading and arm twisting. Stand with me and I'll take care of you, regardless. Defy me and you will be cut off at the knees. Democrats don't like doing it, and they don't like having it done to them. But this President has bet the house on getting something passed, it has to pass now, so that's what has to be done.
Again, this is all going to be hard. LBJ worked under a set of myths and assumptions, a governing Thesis, that was already 30 years old when he became President. Barack Obama is building a new Thesis. FDR or bust. Those are history's stakes. He will succeed or fail on that basis.
The hard work starts now.
