Many Days in a Term
New York Times: “At the same time, [Obama's] team is tamping down expectations of instant action by discouraging talk of a 100-day program.”
This seems sensible. Sometimes talk of a new takeover seems to forget that you actually get to stay in office for all 1,460 days of your term. Clearly, I think there’s reason to believe that the odd-numbered years are more conducive to legislating than are the election years so there’s some reason to act quickly. But a lot of the stimulus/budget talk, for example, seems not to notice that you can do a stimulus/recovery initiative in the fourteenth day of your administration and then if it works shift to addressing longer-term budget issues in month fourteen. You don’t need to arrive in January of 2009 with full-formed solutions to every problem. FDR’s first 100 days was an unusual, dare we say unique, situation and it would be unwise to expect its replication.
24 Responses to “Many Days in a Term”
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November 9th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
It would be useful for your readers if you could put together something of a running tally of the proposals Obama has made clear he’ll pursue once he’s in office, with emphasis on his first 100 days. I’m thinking of things like lifting the bans on federal money for stem cell research, the global gag rule, and California’s enforcement of clean air standards.
November 9th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Clearly, I think there’s reason to believe that the odd-numbered years are more conducive to legislating than are the election years so there’s some reason to act quickly
I’ve never understood this. It seems to me that election years are when you can hold your opponent’s feet the to fire by proposing popular measures and then walloping him when he doesn’t get on board. The productivity of odd-numbered years is precisely based on the mutual agreement to legislate without input from the voters.
November 9th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Isn’t the real lesson of the Bush Administration that if you just ignore all of the conventional wisdom about “mandates,” “bipartisanship,” and in general, what is “possible” in politics, you can with enough chutzpah do whatever you damn well please?
Suddenly everyone in the media is so concerned that the president not “over-reach.” I’m sure Obama will be savvy in how he governs, as he was in his campaign, but I really hope he doesn’t let people convince him he can’t pass his agenda with a purely partisan vote if he has to.
The point is not to be bipartisan but to enact legislation that creates positive results for people. Then they will vote for you.
Doesn’t anybody here know how to play this game?
November 9th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
The productivity of odd-numbered years is precisely based on the mutual agreement to legislate without input from the voters.
Which is hardly an unmitigated bad thing. Take, for instance, immigration reform: immigrant-bashing and dumb, Dobbs-fellating legislative stunts work well in election years, because the electoral upside is almost always on the side of xenophobic grandstanding, regardless of party.
There is a lot of unglamorous meat-on-bones legislative work that can only happen outside election season. Of course, it doesn’t help that most House members spend the odd-number years raising money for the campaigns in the even ones.
November 9th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
But the things that a President addresses upfront can give a really good clue as to the values and priorities of the in-coming Administation.
Anyone remember how one of the absolutely very first things that Bush did on January 20, 2001 was to suspend the rules regarding release of Presidential papers? Government secrecy – one of the highest priorities of Bush43 and the government that he has headed for the past 8 years.
Obama could send an extremely important signal by reversing the Bush secrecy rules right up front. It wouldn’t take much, but it would change an awful lot.
November 9th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
1,461. But who’s counting?
November 9th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Take, for instance, immigration reform: immigrant-bashing and dumb, Dobbs-fellating legislative stunts work well in election years, because the electoral upside is almost always on the side of xenophobic grandstanding, regardless of party.
As a Democrat who favors legislation that benefits regular people at the expense of powerful interests, I think that on the whole, a less insulated system would serve my agenda better.
There is a lot of unglamorous meat-on-bones legislative work that can only happen outside election season.
Ha. Unglamorous meat-on-bones legislative work is just another term for corruption. When Congress says that something “has to get done,” what it’s talking about is that some special interest needs to be served post-haste.
November 9th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Unglamorous meat-on-bones legislative work is just another term for corruption.
Really? Your thesaurus is pretty fucked up.
What’s your idea of a ‘less insulated system’? A weekly American Idol-style elimination where any legislator who pisses off a sufficient number of the uninformed masses gets voted off?
The kind of vulgar populism that celebrates the soundbite politics of election season just leads to lowest-common-denominator governance.
November 9th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
No, a less insulated system is one where major bills like minimum wage increases and bailouts for actual people get passed shortly before election day because aggressive liberal congresspeople use them to bludgeon recalcitrants. I would say lowest-common-denominator governance, where only the wealthy and powerful have their interests served, is what we have now.
November 9th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
FDR’s first 100 days was an unusual, dare we say unique, situation and it would be unwise to expect its replication.
You really don’t get it, do you, Matt?
By January, the economic situation will be as “unique” as 1933. If Obama doesn’t have another 100 Days, he’ll be crushed, and we’ll end up with a mess in 2010.
Not to mention, thinking a little bigger than our silly games with the Republicans, the fact that the country will be a depression.
November 9th, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Not to mention that Israel and the neocons are moaning that Iran will “have enough nuclear material for a bomb early in the next Administration” (which is totally false, of course, none of the existing material is weapons grade or can be enriched to be so).
So Obama will be pushed by Israel and its agents in the US Congress – like Rahm Emanual, his frickin’ Chief of Staff! – in the first six months to blockade Iran.
And if Obama doesn’t move fast enough, Israel will bomb Iran itself, forcing Obama to go to war with Iran. Do you think Obama has the balls to go public and tell Israel it can’t attack Iran at all? After both Obama and Biden have explicitly said Israel gets to decide that for itself?
November 9th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
You’re comparing apples and oranges, Marshall. Increasing the minimum wage is an issue that takes five words and a number to explain to the voting public. Reducing something like immigration reform or Farm Bill reform to five words and a number — the campaign season approach — is dumb. Not least because that reductive treatment appeals to precisely the people who don’t know a thing about the underlying issues.
Can insulation play into the hands of lobbyists right now? Well, duh. But that’s as much a consequence of stupidly large House districts and stupidly-frequent elections that require a stupid amount of money to compete.
There is plenty of legislation that involves people on both sides of the aisle eating a shit sandwich to get to a decent solution. If you look at parliamentary systems with three- or four-year terms, there’s generally more room in the first year to do things that don’t have a quick payoff but have better long-term prospects.
So there’s a difference between ‘input from the general public’ and ‘input from the voters’. Transparency is obviously a good thing; for a lot of issues that can’t be summed up on a beer-mat, election season brings the opposite of transparency.
November 9th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
It seems to me that election years are when you can hold your opponent’s feet the to fire
The problem is that election years are also when all of your allies have their feet held to the fire by their opponents.
Most “good” legislation makes enemies. Doing something that helps most people incrementally but “betrays” some specific group means that every member of that group will work for your opponent.
Election season is when every legislator has to face voters. In a circumstance like that, it doesn’t matter if the congressman’s vote will help the country. If that vote will hurt the congressman’s chance for reelection because of the composition of his district, you won’t get his vote.
Election season == every politician for himself.
Not conducive to governing.
November 9th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
FDR’s 100 days
Yah. Obama seems not to put a lot of reliance on “stunts”, whether they’re harmless or bad. “100 days” is an arbitrary value. I could see him saying he wants such-and-such legislation “by March 1″ or so on, but cramming everything he wants to do into three months and ten days could lead to poorly implemented legislation.
At least to the degree I can discern his priorities from his campaign and his books, that’s what I think.
November 10th, 2008 at 5:33 am
I want a “first 100 days” strategy specifically because I recall Clinton’s first term. He walked in with a lot of good will and then spent his first few months spinning his wheels, and ended up using all his political capital on gays in the military… and then he didn’t even *win* that.
I think Obama will execute better in the first few days, but I want any little things he does to be done quickly and without fuss and for him to be using the bully pulpit immediately for things like health care, financial reform, etc.
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