Can Woodward connect the dots?

Sandy Levinson

In a Washington Post article about Bob Woodward's forthcoming book on the debt limit crisis, Woodward is quoted as writing the following: "It is a fact that President Obama was handed a miserable, faltering economy and faced a recalcitrant Republican opposition. But presidents work their will — or should work their will — on important matters of national
business. . . . Obama has not.”

This is a quite remarkable statement, assuming, among other things, a certain level of presidential omnipotence at least with regard to "important matters of national business." Why would one believe that, particularly in a constitutional system that generates perverse incentives for the congressional opponents--the "recalcitrant Republican opposition"-- of a president to deny him any accomplishments that could prove useful in a re-election bid? Mitch McConnell never dissimulated about his major priority as the leader of Senate Republicans: It was always (and exclusively) to defeat Obama in 2012.

I had the opportunity to appear on a panel with Woodward and Bernstein several years ago at the University of Texas as part of a program celebrating the fact that the "Watergate files" of those two reporters are housed at the remarkable Harry Ransom Center at UT. I suggested that one major explanation for Nixon's impeachment troubles was the simple fact that Democrats controlled Congress (particularly the House of Representatives, which also explains Clinton's impeachment in 1998). I went on to make some of my familiar (to this audience) arguments about the importance (and defects) of our constitutional structure. George W. Bush was basically given a free pass by Congress because, during the crucial years 2003-2007, Republicans controlled Congress, so there was no oversight.

In response to my arguments that we may be drawing some wrong lessons from Watergate with regard to explaining why Nixon suffered his fate and that we should think about constitutional reform, Woodward commented that "We conduct politics under the Constitution we have, not the Constitution we wish we had." That is, of course, absolutely correct. But I wonder if Woodward has forgotten his own insight. That is, Obama was playing the game of politics under a radically dysfunctional Constitution that limited what he could do. He may well not be the world's greatest negotiator; he may well have been too arrogant with regard to his own abilities, both criticisms apparently leveled by Woodward. But why does he think that that more skill and humility would have mattered, given not only the mad-dog character of the Republican leadership, but, more to the point, the structural imperatives generated by our Constitution to destroy, as much as possible, the capacity for achievement by an opposition president?

Madison was right in Federalist 51; it's simply, as Daryl (no relation) Levinson and Balkinization contributor Rick Pildes pointed out several years ago, that "ambition," in the modern American political system, is linked almost infinitely less to institutional loyalties than to partisan ones. The debt ceiling fiasco fits their model perfectly. Alas....


Posted 12:37 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]