The care and feeding of Congress

Matt Bai's long story about the Obama administration's approach to dealing with Congress -- so different from either the Clinton or the Bush II methods -- is interesting enough. Obama seems to see Congress as a co-equal branch of government as opposed to either a constitutional impediment or an assortment of lackeys.

It has been 16 years, in fact, since another young, freshly inaugurated Democratic president with a Democratic Congress tried to remake the architecture of health care, and the catastrophe that followed is generally cited as the main deterrent to thinking big about anything in the capital. The plan Bill Clinton took to Congress then, running to more than 1,000 pages of impenetrable new regulations, wasn’t what you’d call politically savvy, but the strategy used to sell it was even worse. Having been elected as the latest in a series of outsider presidents after Watergate, ex-Governor Clinton seemed to believe he had been sent by the voters to purify the fetid culture of Washington; he installed a boyhood friend as his chief of staff and stocked his White House with loyal Arkansans and campaign aides ready to overrun a fossilized Congress. His wife, the current secretary of state, developed the health care plan largely without taking House and Senate leaders into her confidence, instead dropping it at the doorstep of the Capitol as a fait accompli. Ever jealous of its prerogative, Congress took a long look, yawned and kicked the whole plan to the gutter, where it soon washed away for good — along with much of Clinton’s ambition for his presidency.

The first senator elected directly to the Oval Office since 1960, Obama has an entirely different theory of how to exercise presidential power, and he has consciously designed his administration to avoid Clinton’s fate. After winning the office with the same kind of outsider appeal as his predecessors, he has quietly but methodically assembled the most Congress-centric administration in modern history. Obama’s White House is run by Rahm Emanuel, a former House leader who was generally considered to be on a fast track to the speakership before he resigned to become chief of staff, and it is teeming with aides plucked from the senior ranks of both chambers. Obama seems to think that the dysfunction in Washington isn’t only about the heightened enmity between the parties; it’s also about the longstanding mistrust between the two branches of government that stare each other down from twin peaks on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

And so, from Obama’s perspective, passing a health care plan this fall isn’t primarily a question of whether to include an “individual mandate” requiring every American to have insurance or how fully to regulate providers or even how to hit back against “Harry and Louise”–type attack ads, although his aides spend time contemplating all of those things. It’s more about navigating the dueling personalities and complex agendas within his own party’s Congress. Rather than laying out an intricate plan and then trying to sell it on the Hill, as Clinton did, Obama’s strategy seems to be exactly the opposite — to sell himself to Congress first and worry about the details later. As Emanuel likes to tell his West Wing staff: “The only nonnegotiable principle here is success. Everything else is negotiable.”

[...]

Having served under seven commanders in chief during his time in the Senate, Biden understands as well as anyone the pervasive fear in Congress that presidents are out only for themselves. “I’ve had presidents who say to me, ‘Hey, Joe, get out on that limb for me,’ ” Biden told me. At this, he rose from his chair and began acting out the metaphor, half-crouching as he glanced at the limb behind him. “And I’m out there. I’m out on that limb. And then you hear this shew shew shew” — he nicely approximated the noise of a saw rasping back and forth — “and you look back, and the limb’s being sawed off.

“I’ve been there with these other presidents,” he said, returning to his seat. “I’ve been there when they said later, ‘Well, you know, things change.’ ” He leaned forward and touched my knee, in a way that I imagined he might while making the very same case to one of his former colleagues. “Not this guy,” Biden said, pointing toward the Oval Office. “And they know that not over my dead body would it be that way with me.”

But what I found really innerestin' is that while we do catch glimpses of Rahm's legendary, vocabulastic temper, nowhere in the piece do we hear some random comment from a (likely anonymous) staffer, indicating that they see the approach as stroking the egos of pompous senators and wild-eyed congressmen. Something like that would have been great for Bai -- it would of added some spice to the account and generated more interest -- so evidently it wasn't there. Impressive message discipline?