Of disabled anatidae
By qlangley Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
It seems to have been accepted without challenge that the President is now a lame duck because his party no longer controls Congress. In reality, of course, this merely restores post-war normality to Washington.
If Presidents who do not control Congress are lame ducks, then Truman, Eisenhower and Clinton were reduced to that status only two years in to their presidencies, and yet managed to achieve re-election nonetheless. Poor Presidents Nixon and Reagan were never able to get their presidencies off the ground, and began as lame ducks from day one.
Perhaps this is why those presidents are universally regarded as being without consequence, especially when compared with the genius of Jimmy Carter, the only President in the past 30 years whose party controlled Congress thoughout his term of office.
Quentin Langley is editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net an academic at the University of Cardiff and is a columnist with Campaigns & Elections.
>>President Bush still has the veto pen
And I think we can assume it is in good condition, since it has hardly been used.
Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net
He'd essentially promised not to veto anything Tom Delay pushed through, and in exchange Delay pushed through the things he wanted.
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.
After the losses in the 2006 congressional elections, President Bush can no longer carry out the ambitious agenda he campaigned on in 2004, since he faces hostile majorities in Congress.
But he also has nothing to fear from the voters: he will not be running for the White House in 2008, and his worst fears have already been realized in Congress. If he plays it smart (a big "if"), he can watch what the Democrats do, and do whatever is necessary to make them look bad and Republicans look good.
The Democrat majority in Congress is a crazy-quilt hodgepodge that is hardly united on the issues. Committee chairs, especially in the House, are based on seniority, and most of the longest-serving Democrats are hard-left 1970's-style liberals from deep-blue districts, who are out of touch with Middle America. The new freshman Democrats, to whom the chairs owe their majority, have won squeakers in formerly Republican districts by running as moderates. They know that if they embrace a hard-left agenda, they will break campaign promises, and voters will punish them in 2008.
Lame duck or not, President Bush still has the veto pen, and more than enough Republicans in Congress to sustain vetoes. If the hard-left Dem leaders try to publicly push a hard-left agenda, President Bush can veto their bills, send them back to conference committee, where compromises will have to be worked out with Senate Republicans threatening to filibuster. He can also work with the new freshman Democrats in forging a GOP + moderate-Dem majority against the far left, and also show the voters how out-of-touch the far left is.
If the Dem leaders are forced to back off from their far-left agenda, their far-left base might abandon them, possibly provoking a split between the far-left Democrats and moderate Democrats, and bitter Democrat primaries in 2008. Republicans may be able to exploit these divisions to win back Congress and the White House in 2008.
The bad news: Conservatism is hard to sell. The good news is that it works.