Cuomo, Obama and the Realm of the Possible

As long time readers know, I am less than enamored with Barack Obama who, in my opinion, sold many of us a very false bill of goods in 2008. His campaign in 2008 promised bold change and leadership. Instead, we have received piss poor change and no leadership. Indeed, when Obama goes to negotiate with GOP opponents in Congress, he gives away half of the store before the first words are spoken. With the recent victory for marriage equality and Andrew Cuomo's leadership role the inadequacy of Obama has been made all the more apparent. Yes, he's less of an enemy to LGBT Americans than what the GOP has to offer, but it's getting old having to choose between the lesser of evils. In a column in the New York Times Nate Silver looks at the contrast and takes on Obama apologists. Here are some highlights:
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Matt Yglesias, the blogger for Think Progress, and others have been critical of my article from Saturday contrasting the leadership approaches taken by New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and President Obama.
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It’s unlikely, certainly, that Mr. Cuomo would have persuaded the New York Senate to adopt a same-sex marriage bill if a 60 percent supermajority had been required. (That would have necessitated 38 votes rather than the 33 the bill actually received.) But I’m not sure that really gets to the heart of my argument.
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My point, rather, is that Mr. Cuomo achieved a significant and perhaps improbable victory even relative to the more modest constraints that he actually faced. How do we “know” this? There are two pretty obvious reasons. First, a highly similar bill failed badly in the New York Senate just 18 months ago, receiving only 24 votes. And during the interim period, Republicans won control of the body from Democrats.
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That Mr. Cuomo was able to pass a bill while, for example, the governors of Rhode Island and Washington and Hawaii and Illinois and Maryland have not been able to pass one — that’s another sign that he’s achieved something significant.
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Neither of these comparisons are perfect — but they’re much closer than you’re usually going to get in the real world to a controlled scientific experiment. We don’t need to delve too deeply into the netherworld of counter-factuals to conclude that Mr. Cuomo’s leadership likely made some difference.
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Suppose that Mr. Cuomo had expressed his desire to pass a marriage bill on the campaign trail, as he in fact did last year. But when he got to Albany, he decided to punt on the issue. What would Mr. Cuomo have said? He would have mentioned that Republicans had taken over control of the Senate, something he had not necessarily anticipated. He would have reminded voters that the bill had been well short of passage the last time around.
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The point is that it isn’t always such a simple matter to know exactly what is possible and what isn’t. Passing a same-sex marriage through the New York Senate might have seemed impossible this year — until Mr. Cuomo actually did it. This is something we ought to keep in mind when we consider the case of Mr. Obama. We might say, for example, that Mr. Obama didn’t pass the DREAM Act because he didn’t have the votes for it in an environment where a Republican filibuster was likely.
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The question, rather, is why Mr. Obama didn’t have the votes for something like the DREAM Act. Or more to the point: are there alternate strategies that Mr. Obama might have pursued under which he would have had the votes?
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Mr. Yglesias’ argument implicitly suffers from the same fault: it takes for granted that the constraints Mr. Obama apparently faced (like the lack of Republican support for many of his bills) were not in some way of his own making.
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There are essentially two ways that a president can fail when he needs the cooperation of Congress, one being that an issue fails to pass despite the president investing a significant amount of political capital in it, and the second being that he punts on the issue and doesn’t devote much time to it at all. Mr. Obama has had very few failures of the first kind
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On the other hand, there are a lot of fights that Mr. Obama has avoided. At least insofar as is evident from his public statements, he didn’t make a major push for climate change legislation, or for an immigration bill like the DREAM Act, or for a second stimulus. He hasn’t taken as confrontational a posture as he might have with Republicans on the debt ceiling.
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I do think it’s fair to characterize it as a risk-averse strategy. And that, at the core, is what bothers some liberals about Mr. Obama’s approach to the presidency. Fairly or not, they want him to push the envelope more than he has and to take a few more chances — to expand the realm of the possible, as Mr. Cuomo seems to have done in New York.
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Count me among those who want a president with a spine and who will not look - even create - excuses for punting. I continue to believe that if Obama is defeated in 2012, he will have largely created the stage himself through his timidity and refusal to speak forcefully on issues. People want a LEADER and not a follower.