THE MADDOW BLOG
In the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in December, President Obama decided to ignore the political risks and long odds of legislative success, and dove into the debate to reduce gun violence. He created a task force, led by Vice President Biden, which helped shape a detailed agenda -- ahead of schedule -- intended to save lives.
Obama proceeded to invest quite a bit of capital into the fight, including the issue in his inaugural address, hosting several public events, taking his message to the public and the media, and reaching out to lawmakers directly, urging them to do the right thing.
In the end, it wasn't enough. As we discussed yesterday, Republicans opposed gun reforms; Republicans lied about gun reforms; Republicans partnered with extremists against gun reforms; Republicans filibustered gun reforms; and last week, Republicans killed gun reforms.
And now the Beltway crowd is expressing its disappointment ... by blaming Obama.
Maureen Dowd offered a high-profile example the over the weekend, but the meme is spreading. The New York Times has an analysis piece today, connecting the defeat of the gun bill with the president's reluctance to "twist arms." John Dickerson has a piece in Slate today on the death of the legislation and Obama's clumsy legislative prowess, though the article neglected to even mention the word "Republican" in passing.
I realize overly simplistic answers to complex questions can be unsatisfying and at times incomplete, but last week's developments were fairly straightforward: Republicans opposed new gun laws, so the legislation died. There wasn't anything the president could do about it.
This wasn't about schmoozing or arm-twisting. It had nothing to do with a movie Maureen Dowd liked or the "tone" of the White House's message. Yes, there were some red-state Democrats who balked, but it wasn't their filibuster, and even if they'd voted with the majority, it wouldn't have been enough to overcome GOP opposition.
There's no denying that the legislative outcome represents a defeat for the president -- he fought for a bill that failed -- but to blame him is to overlook every relevant detail of what actually happened.
think some of the misapplied blame is the result of mistaken institutional assumptions. As we talked about last week, many like to think the president -- any president, really -- is ultimately responsible for all political progress or the lack thereof. Indeed, Americans like to think of their president as the most powerful person on the planet. POTUS is the Leader of the Free World and the Commander in Chief. He's the Top Dog, the Big Cheese, the Head Honcho, the One in Charge, and the one with whom the buck stops.
So when popular legislation the president supports dies, the assumption is that it must be the president's fault -- he's the leader, and if the guy in charge isn't getting what he wants, he must bear responsibility.
Except, the American system of government doesn't work this way. The president is powerful, but the office has limits -- the White House doesn't give dictation to the legislative branch, and a president is not the head of the opposition party that wants to see him fail.
I'd like the folks holding Obama responsible to consider a look at the recent past. In 2009 and 2010, the White House and Congress successfully approved the Recovery Act, a health care reform law 100 years in the making, Wall Street reform, DADT repeal, student loan reform, New START ratification, credit card reforms, and food-safety reforms. Are those inclined to blame Obama for gun reform's failure prepared to argue that the president simply forgot how to twist arms in 2011? That he knew how to persuade lawmakers before, but the skill suddenly vanished?
Or is it more likely that congressional Republicans changed the game after the 2010 midterms? [They changed the game by winning six senate seats. Before the midterm elections, The Democrats controlled the Senate 59--41. Since 2010, The Democratic Senatc majority is 53--47.]
I also believe there's an ongoing reluctance among many to appreciate the scope of Republican radicalization. For many, especially in media, there's an assumption that there are two major, mainstream political parties -- one center-left, the other center-right -- and an effective president can govern through competent bipartisan outreach.
Those assumptions are wrong. As we discussed in January, outreach doesn't work because Republicans have reached an ideological extreme unseen in modern American history. It's a quantifiable observation, not a subjective one. Even if GOP policymakers were inclined to work with Obama, they realize that they'd be punished soon after by a primary challenge -- and they know this to be true because it's happened more than a few times in recent years (look up names like Crist, Specter, Bennett, Lugar, etc.).
Let's return to the thesis presented by Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein: "[W]e have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party."
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.Here's GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST to complete the argument:
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country's challenges.
"Both sides do it" or "There is plenty of blame to go around" are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
The only question, ever, is whether Obama will get two or three Republican votes vs. three or four. If the latter, he has a chance to win. But those two or three extra votes don’t depend on leverage. In fact, Obama’s leverage is negative. The last thing any Republican can afford these days is to be viewed as caving in to Obama. That’s a kiss of death with the party’s base.
One thing that continues to get lost in discussions of the demise of Toomey-Manchin is the degree to which it represented a genuine compromise proposal. Remember, after Newtown, one of the few things that was broadly agreed on by many politicians in both parties was that the background check system needed to be improved. A number of Republican Senators agreed with this, and said so publicly. There were various iterations of this — some said we needed to improve state data sharing on the mentally ill with the feds; others said we needed to take a hard look at how to run checks on private sales — but there was genuine consensus around the basic idea that tightening the background check screen was the appropriate way to deal with gun violence, post-Newtown.
The solution to the problem negotiated by Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey was a real compromise offering. It addressed the problem both parties agreed needed to be solved, but did so while showing extraordinary sensitivity to gun owners and gun culture. Both Senators — one a Republican, and one a red state Democrat — came from states with deep gun cultures, and both had “A” ratings from the NRA. The proposal they negotiated was very responsive to not one, but two major objections from the gun rights crowd. Some worried that the proposal would infringe on certain types of casual gun transfers, such as those among family members, friends, and hunters, so the two Senators exempted all private transfers that don’t go through commercial portals at gun shows or over the Internet. Others worried that the additional record keeping under the proposal would lead to a national gun registry, so the proposal strengthened prohibitions against any such registry.
None of this was enough to win over more than four Republican Senators — less than one tenth of the number of Republican Senators who voted against it. Even if every Democrat in the Senate had voted for it, the proposal would have failed.
There have been certain moments during the last few years that have been widely acknowledged as a sign of the radicalization of the Republican Party. Among them: The debt ceiling fights; the absolute refusal of Republicans to accept any tax hikes on the wealthy until the fiscal cliff showdown forced them to; Jim DeMint’s declaration that defeating Obamacare was crucial because it would be Obama’s “Waterloo”; and Mitch McConnell’s claim that the GOP’s single overriding goal should be to render Obama a one-term president.