If you follow politics somewhat impressionistically, you’d probably think that Barack Obama has had a terrible time getting anything through Congress. After all, Republicans hate him, “centrist” Democrats are perpetually off the reservation, it takes 60 votes to get anything through the Senate, and the President’s too genteel to crack heads.
That’s why it’s of interest that Rachel Bloom and John Cranford have published a study showing that Obama’s early success rate with legislative positions he has taken is the highest of any president since CQ started measuring this in 1953.
Specifically, the White House has taken a clear position on 26 votes in the House and 37 in the Senate (the higher Senate number mainly being the product of 20 confirmation votes). The House has voted with him 24 times and the Senate 36 times, for a combined success rate of 95%.
LBJ’s success rate (albeit over his first full year) was 93% in what is generally considered one of the most productive congressional sessions in history, and Eisenhower came in at 89%.
Obama’s lost one meaningless symbolic vote two days after he took office, so he’s really lost two: the famous Senate vote on Gitmo in May, and the House defense authorization vote in June.
Sure, there’s a long time to go this year, with Senate action on climate change and House-Senate action on health care still to happen. But the picture so often painted of Obama as the helpless victim of a fractious Congress is not really accurate so far.
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.
