MORE THAN A HALF CENTURY AGO, Richard Neustadt voiced what became the best-known maxim regarding the American presidency, that “presidential power is the power to persuade.”1 He was half right.
One of Neustadt’s primary goals in writing Presidential Power was to show what was not a source of presidential power. Presidents could not command others to support their initiatives. In his words, “ ‘powers’ are no guarantee of power”2 and “[t]he probabilities of power do not derive from the literary theory of the Constitution.”3
Although presidents do have important unilateral powers,4 there is no question that the negative side of Neustadt’s argument—what power is not—made a valuable contribution to understanding presidential leadership. Presidents frequently fail to get their way with the public and Congress, not to speak of other nations and private interests. They cannot command success, and we must look elsewhere to explain the success and failure of leadership in the White House.
In Neustadt’s view, power is a function of personal politics rather than of formal authority or position. The subtitle of Presidential Power is The Politics of Leadership. In essence, Neustadt argued that presidential leadership is the power to persuade. The implication underlying the affirmative side of Neustadt’s argument—that effective presidential leadership requires persuasion—is that presidents can succeed in persuading others if they are skilled enough at recognizing and protecting their interests and exploiting critical resources.
Although Neustadt encouraged the belief that presidential persuasion was possible, he began with the premise that presidents would have to struggle to get their way. As he put it, “The power to persuade is the power to bargain.”5 Indeed, it was the inherent weakness of the presidency that made it necessary for presidents to understand how to use their resources most effectively.
Few are blessed with Neustadt’s penetrating and nuanced understanding of the presidency. Many political commentators suggest that all the president has to do to obtain the support of the public or Congress is to reach into his inventory of leadership skills and employ the appropriate means of persuasion. Such a view is naïve, however. There is no silver bullet. We now know that even the most skilled presidents have great difficulty in persuading others to support them and that they typically bring about change by exploiting existing opportunities rather than creating them.6
Successful leadership is not the result of the dominant chief executive of political folklore who reshapes the contours of the political landscape, altering his strategic position to pave the way for change. Rather than creating the conditions for important shifts in public policy, such as attracting bipartisan support or moving public opinion in their direction, effective leaders are facilitators who work at the margins of coalition building to recognize and exploit opportunities in their environments. Barack Obama is no exception.
Strategies for governing based on the premise of creating opportunities for change are prone to failure. Moreover, they often lead to overreach and wasting the opportunities that do exist. The Obama administration overestimated the opportunities for change in its environment and the president’s ability to create new opportunities. As a result, it advanced a large, liberal agenda. Yet the White House could not obtain public support for many of its most visible proposals, nor could it attract Republican votes in Congress. These failures were inevitable, and demonstrate the importance of making clear-eyed strategic assessments of the opportunity structure of a new administration.
Failure is one thing, overreach is much more serious. The Obama administration’s advocacy of unpopular policies alienated much of the public, especially those in the middle of the ideological and partisan spectrums. The large Democratic losses in the 2010 midterm elections cost Obama the opportunity to exploit his party’s majority in the House and the Democrat’s near filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, undermining his ability to govern for the rest of his term. Moreover, the Republican gains in state legislatures, where in 2011 they held the most seats since the Great Depression, increased the probability of redistricting that would favor the GOP and thus increase the probability of Republican majorities in Congress for the next decade.
The view that effective leadership involves exploiting rather than creating opportunities is consistent with recent work on the private sector. New studies are challenging conventional views of the nature of successful entrepreneurship. They find that rather than being visionaries and catalysts for change who sell their ideas and reshape their organizations, successful entrepreneurs are typically not great risk takers who stand ahead of the pack and convince others to follow their visions. Instead, they are insightful analysts who have unique perspectives on particular markets and thus identify existing opportunities. They then strike repeatedly to exploit the opportunities until others catch on and the window of opportunity closes. All the while, they incur the least possible risk, often little risk at all. It is failed entrepreneurs who take risks.7
Given the high stakes for understanding the possibilities for change, it is ironic that presidents, all of them successful politicians, so often fail at the task. We have seen that it is natural, and thus common, for presidents, basking in the glow of their electoral successes, to focus on creating, rather than evaluating and exploiting, opportunities for change. They are accustomed to making their cases—they have been doing it for years—and their victories reinforce their proclivities for believing in their persuasiveness. Presidents want to believe the people have chosen them, not that the public rejected the other contenders or simply voted a party line.
Campaigning is not governing, however. To win an election requires beating one (or perhaps two) alternatives at a specific time in a contest in which there will be a positive decision—one of the options must win. It usually does not require focusing attention on the details of a specific policy initiative, easing the path to attracting a majority. Enacting policy changes requires many victories over a sustained period of time in a context in which no action may be the preferred option and gridlock the common result. Moreover, policy debates, unlike elections, focus on the specifics of proposals, making it more difficult to garner majority support.
Other politicians, who also obtain their jobs by campaigning, reinforce the tendency of presidents to believe in the power of persuasion. One of the most common criticisms of Barack Obama in his first two years in office, including among Democrats, was for failing to offer a convincing narrative of his administration.8 These critics often referred wistfully to the success of Ronald Reagan in doing so and thus weathering the recession at the beginning of his tenure.
Misremembering the past is a common malady for politicians, especially those who see themselves in electoral trouble and are eager for a political lifeline. In fact, Reagan did not fare well with the public during the recession. He first fell below 50 percent approval in mid-November 1981, his first year in office. Except for a late-November 1981 poll, he remained below 50 percent for the next two years, until November 1983. His approval reached a nadir of 35 percent in January 1983.9
Similarly, when legislation stalled in the 111th Congress, there were frequent calls for Obama to be more aggressive in his attempts to persuade Congress to support his proposals. Evocations of the last great Democratic legislative leader, Lyndon Johnson, and the famous Johnson Treatment implied that a president who pressured members of Congress could convince them to support the White House’s initiatives.
Once again, such a view represents a myopic image of history. Interviews with the former Speaker of the House Carl Albert are instructive regarding the nature of LBJ’s influence in Congress. Albert argued that Johnson’s tenaciousness and intensity in pushing legislation were his great talents. Although pressed by the interviewer for specifics on Johnson’s legislative skills, Albert responded only that the president just kept pushing.10 The White House did not even red-flag signature Great Society legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, or the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 for special presidential efforts as they came to the House floor. The president’s intervention was not needed.11 It is revealing that the tape recordings of his White House conversations show Johnson pleading, thanking, complimenting, and consulting but rarely trying directly to persuade a legislator. Even when he did, he employed a light touch.12
Presidents may overreach for other reasons, of course. They are in office for such a short time that it is difficult to think about husbanding resources or sequencing proposals. There may be no tomorrow. Moreover, they have campaigned promising action, and their supporters expect them to keep their promises.
Exploiting opportunities requires that the president possess the analytical insight necessary to identify opportunities for change and the skills necessary to take advantage of them. As Edgar declared in King Lear, “Ripeness is all.”13
Some in the Obama White House came to understand the limitations of persuasive leadership. One presidential advisor complained, “There is this sense on Capitol Hill that somehow the president can go out and make a speech and everything just magically becomes better.”14 David Axelrod added, “I would love to live in a world where the president could snap his fingers or even twist arms and make change happen, but in this great democracy of ours, that’s not the way it is.”15
If exploiting opportunities to steer true believers is more critical to engendering change than persuading the skeptical, much less converting the opposition, it follows that they should focus more on maintaining and managing coalitions and less on the verbal dexterity or interpersonal persuasiveness that is hypothetically necessary to expand coalitions and thus transform the political landscape. The president focused on exploiting the advantage provided by the large Democratic majorities in Congress in 2009 and 2010 to enact a number of major changes in public policy. Working closely with congressional leaders, he probably squeezed as much as possible out of the 111th Congress. Moreover, he kept up the pressure in the lame-duck session at the end of 2010, pushing through the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” ratification of the New START treaty, and a compromise on taxes and unemployment insurance. Obama helped to transform policy without performing transformational leadership.
Not all of the White House’s public relations efforts are designed to alter opinions. Instead, the audience for much of presidential rhetoric is those who already agree with the White House. Preaching to the converted by definition does not change opinions and is not what most political commentators have in mind when they advocate that the White House employ the bully pulpit. Yet perhaps the most important function of a coalition builder, in an election or in dealing with a legislature, is consolidating one’s core supporters. This may require reassuring them as to one’s fundamental principles, strengthening their resolve to persist in a political battle, or encouraging them to become more active on behalf of a candidacy or policy proposal.
Maintaining preexisting support or activating those predisposed to back him can be crucial to a president’s success. Important policies usually face substantial opposition. Often opponents are virulent in their criticism. No president will unilaterally disarm and remain quiet in the face of such antagonism. They feel they must engage in a permanent campaign just to maintain the status quo. When offered competing views, people are likely to respond according to their predispositions. Thus, the White House must act to reinforce the predispositions of its supporters.
Presidents also go public to demonstrate preexisting public support when that support lies in the constituencies of members of Congress who are potential swing votes. George W. Bush’s travels early in his tenure seemed motivated more by demonstrating his support in states where he ran well in the election than in convincing more skeptical voters of the soundness of his proposals.
Preaching to the converted may have an additional advantage. Sometimes new policies arise on which there is little or no existing opinion. President Reagan’s proposal for a defensive missile shield is an example. If the president is able to activate latent policy views by linking his initiative to existing views, such as support for a strong national defense, he may be able to obtain rapidly a sizable core of supporters for his program.
More broadly, public opinion about matters of politics and policy is often amorphous. It lacks articulation and structure. It requires leadership to tap into it effectively, give it direction, and use it to bring about policy change. The president must sense the nature of the opportunity at hand, clearly associate himself and his policies with favorable public opinion in the minds of political elites, and approach Congress when conditions are most favorable for passing legislation. As Richard Hofstadter said of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was not able to move the public, but “he was able to give it that necessary additional impetus of leadership which can translate desires into policies.”16
Successful leadership also requires that the president have the commitment, resolution, and adaptability to take full advantage of opportunities that arise. Obama had the energy, perseverance, and resiliency to make the most of the Democrats’ majorities. Early on, he told a journalist, “That whole philosophy of persistence is one that I’m going to be emphasizing again and again as long as I’m in office. I’m a big believer in persistence.”17
He was true to his word. When all seemed lost on health care reform, the president made a strategic decision to persist in trying to pass it. According to David Axelrod, “If the president weren’t tough, if the president weren’t committed, if the president didn’t believe that this was an imperative for the future of American families, businesses and the sustainability of our budget, this thing would have been dead six months ago.”18 At the end of the lame-duck congressional session in 2010, the president reflected, “One thing I hope people have seen during this lame-duck—I am persistent. If I believe in something strongly, I stay on it.”19
To complicate matters, however, fully exploiting short-term opportunities may undermine an administration in the longer run. When the president thought he could create opportunities for change by expanding his supportive coalition, promoting a large agenda appeared, at least to the White House, to pose little political risk. As one White House official put it, the administration would use 2009 to restructure the nation’s health care system, energy industry, and financial-regulatory regime “and then use 2010 to explain what we did.”20
The rub came when, as another presidential aide declared about the strategy, “it didn’t work.”21 When he could not create opportunities for change, Obama faced a dilemma. If he pushed hard to exploit existing opportunities, he would win important victories. Yet he could also lose the war by winning these battles. The midterm elections showed just how ephemeral the large Democratic majorities were. Would it have been prudent to have moved more slowly and with a narrower focus, nurtured his electoral majority, built greater public confidence around his leadership, and emerged with a stronger mandate to pursue his postponed campaign agenda?
We may never have a definitive answer. Much depends on the success of the Republicans’ efforts to undo the initiatives passed in the 111th Congress, especially health care reform. It is possible that Democrats could not have passed an overhaul of health care at any other time, but in any case, the White House’s pursuit of health care reform may have undermined its ability to govern in the remainder of the president’s term. The protracted focus on this unpopular legislation helped energize the right and kept the administration from focusing on the economy, the public’s highest priority.22 As one freshman Democrat who captured a Republican seat in 2008 put it, “if I had known that it [health care reform] was going to take up all the oxygen, then I’m not sure whether we should have done exactly as we did. The economy is the most important thing.”23
In a nationally televised interview shortly after the 2010 midterm elections, the president acknowledged that one major contributor to the “big government Obama” narrative was the health care reform law. “At the time, we knew that it probably wasn’t great politics,” Obama reflected, “I made the decision to go ahead and do it. And it proved as costly politically, as we expected. Probably actually a little more costly than we expected, politically.” The president added, “We thought that if we shaped a bill that wasn’t that different from bills that had previously been introduced by Republicans, including a Republican Governor in Massachusetts who’s now running for president, we would be able to find some common ground there. And we just couldn’t.” In addition, the debate over health care “created the kind of partisanship and bickering that really turn people off. Partly because the economy was still on the mend. And the entire focus on health care for so many months meant that people thought we were distracted and weren’t paying attention to . . . the key thing that was on their minds.” In the end, the president concluded that, “There’s no doubt that it hurt us politically.”24
The president was correct. There was an extraordinarily strong cross-sectional relationship between opinions of Obama’s job performance and his health care reforms. On average during 2010, 88 percent of respondents offered consistent opinions of Obama and the legislation, approving of both or disapproving of both. Opinions on Obama’s handling of the issue were also more closely related to his overall job performance rating than were his ratings on the handling of any other issue. Although there is causation in both directions, we can see that health care was a source of the highly polarized response to the Obama presidency.25
In an Election Day survey by Republican pollster Bill McInturff among respondents in the one hundred most targeted House districts, 51 percent called their vote a message of opposition to the health care reform law, while just one in five said it was a sign of support for it. A majority of Independent voters also said that their vote was in opposition to the law. A senior Democratic strategist who worked closely with the White House and congressional races agreed that although health care reform was not the entire electoral puzzle, it clearly was a piece. “The successful Republican national narrative was one of overspending, overreaching Democrats. The election wasn’t a referendum on health care reform, per se. But there is no question it played a role in the overarching narrative.”26
It is not surprising, then, that a poll of one thousand Obama voters from 2008 who abandoned Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections, either by staying home (“droppers”) or by voting Republican (“switchers”), found the health care bill to be a major catalyst for not supporting Democrats. Sixty-six percent of the switchers said President Obama and Democrats in Congress “tried to have government do too much,” and the same percentage said “too much government spending” was a major reason for their decision not to vote Democratic. Fifty-two percent said a lack of focus on jobs was a major reason for their defections, and 51 percent said the same thing about the health care reform bill.27 Another poll found that 57 percent of Independent voters said they favored repealing the new health care law, while only 31 percent said they opposed repeal.28 A post-election poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 56 percent of midterm voters said they wanted to see some or all of the of the health care law repealed, including eight in ten people who voted for Republican candidates. Those for whom health care mattered were more likely to vote Republican.29
Analyst Nate Silver concluded that Democrats performed somewhat worse than might be expected based on the performance of the economy alone and that their losses were higher than would be expected based on President Obama’s approval ratings. The most reasonable explanation for the Democrats losing additional seats, he argued, was that voters punished Democrats for their votes for extending the TARP bailout and health care reform. Individual Democrats who voted against the health care bill and the bailout extension overperformed those who did in otherwise similar districts who voted for them, and it seems probable that these votes also damaged the electoral standing of Democrats overall.30
Brady, Fiorina, and Wilkins concluded that Democratic votes for health care and the economic stimulus cost the Democrats between twenty-two and forty seats in the House.31 Similarly, Gary Jacobson found that, controlling for district presidential and congressional votes in 2008, a vote for health care reform cost a House Democrat about 5 percentage points in the 2010 midterm elections. (Some of the electoral effect worked through their impact on campaign fund-raising, stimulating contributions to Democrats’ opponents.)32
There were fourteen Democratic incumbents who voted for health care reform and lost by less than 10 percentage points in the 2010 midterm elections. (A five-percentage point increase for the Democrat typically translates into a five-percentage point decrease for the Republican candidate, closing a ten-percentage point gap.) Thus, the five-percentage point decline in the vote resulting from supporting health care translates into a loss of fourteen seats for the Democrats. Winning these seats would have taken the Democrats more than halfway toward retaining their House majority.
Losing the seats, on the other hand, put the president on the defensive. The new House Republican majority took the lead opposing the White House and displayed impressive unity on the big issues, including blocking implementation of the health care reform law, prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions linked to global climate change, cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood, and supporting final passage of the continuing resolution to fund the government, which imposed the largest one-year cuts in domestic discretionary spending in recent times. In April, just four House Republicans (three for idiosyncratic reasons) voted against Paul Ryan’s ambitious budget plan.
The 112th Congress was deeply polarized. In mid-April, Congressional Quarterly reported that almost 80 percent of House roll call votes in 2011—by far the highest percentage on record and double the figure from 2010—pitted the parties against each other. Moreover, representatives supported their party’s majority position on average at least 90 percent of the time. The Senate was relying upon a “gentlemen’s agreement” to avoid filibusters and contentious cloture fights and waiting for a “Gang of Six” to write a bipartisan debt-control bill. Nevertheless, on votes on which the parties split, members voted with their party’s majority at least 90 percent of the time.33 The president could succeed in passing policy changes in a context of polarization when he had the votes in the 111th Congress, but there was little probability of success when the opposition was large and disdainful of compromise.
The issue of raising the debt ceiling was a prime example of the challenge facing the president. Republicans recognized that the need to raise the debt ceiling offered them leverage to reduce the size of government, and many of them were willing to let the nation default on its obligations rather than increase federal revenues. These views placed severe constraints on the negotiations of their own leaders.
President Obama, Vice President Biden, and other White House officials believed that it would be easier to sell a big deal than to try to persuade members of Congress to vote for spending cuts that were both politically painful and too modest to solve the problem. Many in the administration concluded that it would be possible to strike a bipartisan grand bargain that raised tax revenues and cut Medicare costs. Nevertheless, when Democrats raised the matter of new tax revenue, the Republicans kept backing away. A spokesman for Speaker John Boehner reported that the Republican leadership drove a hard bargain out of necessity, knowing that anything less would not stand a chance of passing the House.34 It is not surprising that to obtain final passage, Boehner had to delay the vote for two days and add provisions to appease Tea Party lawmakers.
In the end, Republicans won most of what they wanted and gave little ground. The White House backed off its demand for new tax revenue, despite the president’s months-long insistence on a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, and agreed to a multiphase deal that may produce only spending cuts. In return, Congress gave the Treasury sufficient borrowing power to pay the government’s bills through the 2012 election.
For Democrats, the deal’s lack of new tax revenue was hard to swallow, leading half the House Democrats to oppose the bill. Moreover, even as the president attempted to pivot to a focus on job creation, he was presiding over a series of cuts to federal agencies that limited his ability to pursue his “win the future” agenda. One possible upside for Democrats was the inclusion of a trigger that will force Congress to pass another $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction or face serious automatic cuts to domestic and defense programs alike, providing an opportunity to force Republicans to accept tax increases lest they be charged with ignoring the needs of the military.
Politically, no one came out ahead on the debt-ceiling showdown. The public was split on approving the ultimate deal,35 with most polls finding at least pluralities opposing it. The public reported it was more likely to feel more negative than positive about Obama as a result of the debt agreement,36 and pluralities disapproved of the president’s handling of the debt ceiling issue.37 The only good news for the White House was that the public evaluated congressional Republicans even more negatively than it evaluated the president.
Such findings were of little comfort to a White House that once again tried and failed to rally the public to its side and to obtain bipartisan support in Congress. With Republicans in control of the House and a narrow Democratic majority in the Senate, the president faced continued frustration as he sought to pass legislation focused on job creation.
At the midpoint of the president’s term, White House advisors conceded that their greatest miscalculation was the assumption that the president could bridge a polarized capital and forge genuinely bipartisan coalitions. “Perhaps we were naïve,” senior aide David Axelrod reflected, but Obama “believed that in the midst of a crisis you could find partners on the other side of the aisle to help deal with it. I don’t think anyone here expected the degree of partisanship that we confronted.” Another aide added, “It’s not that we believed our own press or press releases, but there was definitely a sense at the beginning that we could really change Washington. ‘Arrogance’ isn’t the right word, but we were overconfident.”38
Obama recognized that “this is a big country . . . and . . . there are conservatives . . . that I’m never gonna persuade on some issues.”39 Nevertheless, the president persisted in the belief that leadership was “a matter of persuading people.”40 The conventional wisdom regarding the nature of presidential leadership is difficult to change. It is very difficult for presidents to reexamine their premises, even in the face of sustained failure. If they do not reevaluate the power of persuasion and ask the right questions about their opportunities, however, they are unlikely to arrive at the right answers.