January
7, 2015
The
New York Times
We measure our
presidents against not only our hopes for the present, which are sometimes
unreasonable, but also our understanding of the past, which can be just as
flawed.
Has a
misreading of history informed a misappraisal of Barack Obama?
That's a
question raised, not explicitly but implicitly, by a new book by the Princeton
historian Julian Zelizer, ''The Fierce Urgency of Now,'' to be published on
Thursday.
Its setting is
the 1960s, as the title, a phrase uttered by Martin Luther King Jr., suggests.
Its focus is Lyndon Johnson. And one of its conclusions is that despite
Johnson's legend as a peerless legislative tactician, he was largely a hostage
of Congress and of forces beyond the presidency.
Zelizer
reminds us that many of Johnson's signature victories came during a two-year
period when Democrats had two-thirds majorities in both the Senate, where they
held 68 seats, and the House, where they held 295.
Zelizer also
reminds us that Johnson's trouncing of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election
spooked Republicans to a point where many fought progressive legislation less
stridently than before, lest they be portrayed as Goldwater-style extremists.
Those dynamics
and others worked powerfully to Johnson's advantage, and when the climate and
the Congress changed, so did his fortunes. On the domestic front (as well as on
the foreign one), the final two years of his presidency were a bust, at least
in comparison with what preceded them.
Obama's name
appears just twice in Zelizer's book. But it's impossible not to think of him
more often, given how frequently the yardstick of Johnson's presidency has been
applied to his.
If only Obama
were a schmoozer like Johnson. If only he had Johnson's taste for the muck of
lawmaking. If only he had Johnson's patience for minutiae.
Zelizer told
me that when he began work on the book more than five years ago, ''I still had
a kind of view of Johnson, as many do, as someone who really knew how to work
the system. What's surprising to me is that as conditions in Congress change,
he is really shut down. I didn't expect the last part of the book: a president
who's really emasculated and can't get anything done even though he's trying
the same old tricks. It really became crystal clear to me how Congress
determines the fate of the presidency.''
Republicans
currently control both chambers, and have a House majority bigger than before.
That bodes disastrously for Obama's legislative dreams, and it's the point of
reference for his impulse to wield executive authority.
Zelizer said
that instances over the last 50 years of a president truly imposing his will
on a Congress fully or partly controlled by the opposing party are rare.
Ronald Reagan got tax cuts in 1981 despite a Democratic majority in the House,
but he'd just shellacked Jimmy Carter in the 1980 elections and Democrats were
running scared.
Johnson's name
is popping up a lot now. This year is the 50th anniversary of many of the laws
grouped under the Great Society, and the movie ''Selma'' is drawing complaints
for its portrayal of Johnson as resistant to voting rights for blacks and
sharply antagonistic to King.
''It's not
fair to Johnson,'' Zelizer told me.
But in his
view, Johnson has been considered too kindly by writers who attribute the Great
Society to his wizardry.
''He was
cagey, he was smart, he was politically savvy,'' Zelizer said. ''But that
doesn't explain why the bills passed.''
And Obama can
indeed be cold and disengaged. But, Zelizer said, that's not why he hasn't
scaled the legislative heights that Johnson did.
Johnson
benefited from ''a vibrant period for grass-roots mobilization as a result of
the civil rights movement,'' he said, adding that there was pressure for
legislation from the bottom up, which is most effective.
There hasn't
been any commensurate mobilization during Obama's presidency. Zelizer said that
voters frustrated with congressional inertia should examine their own
exertions -- and the ways in which campaign financing, lobbying and
gerrymandering have created a dysfunctional legislative branch -- as much as
any president's character.
Zelizer's read
on things leaves ample room for Obama to be questioned on foreign policy and
for not making more of his first two years, when Democrats controlled Congress.
It's also possible that he should have made less of them, that delaying health
care would have spared Democrats their 2010 drubbing and given him additional
time with a friendly(-ish) Congress.
But it's
undeniable that we treat our presidents as larger than life, simplifying the
stories we tell. They're not always mighty frigates parting the waters. They're
just as much buoys on the tides of history, rising and falling with the swells.
