As Barack Obama’s presidency is buffeted by the crosswinds of both Syria and ongoing congressional fights over the budget and the debt ceiling, a strange and seemingly paradoxical pattern has emerged: The more power the president asserts, the less credible his exercise of it becomes.
Consider the ongoing embarrassment of Syria. After making a forceful pledge that the United States would intervene if Bashar al-Assad’s regime used chemical weapons – a pledge, it should be noted, that never received the assent of Congress – the president got backed into a corner when a sarin gas attack in the Damascus suburbs last month proved too large to ignore.
Not wanting to bare sole responsibility for the consequences – and hoping for a buffer against overwhelming public opposition to the idea of American involvement – the president shifted the decision-making process over to Capitol Hill, but with a provocative caveat: that he still retained the freedom to do whatever he wanted, regardless of how Congress voted on whether to take action.
The upshot of this exercise in presidential chest-thumping: Obama knuckling under to a Russian-backed plan under which Syria would supposedly surrender its chemical stockpiles, a proposal that even normally optimistic foreign policy observers expect will come to naught. In the end, Obama put the full authority of his office on the line in order to score a cheaply won victory for Assad and Vladimir Putin.
The pattern is remarkably similar on the domestic front. During a White House event Monday aimed at laying out the administration’s economic goals, the president once again announced that he will refuse to negotiate with congressional Republicans on the upcoming effort to increase the debt ceiling.
Obama’s rationale here is respectable in the abstract: Because the debt ceiling doesn’t actually restrain how much money Congress can appropriate, failing to increase the limit would be tantamount to ignoring bills the nation has already accumulated.
The abstract, however, is not where American politics take place. In the gritty reality of governance, congressional Republicans have something the president wants (the power to approve his debt limit increase), and they expect some concessions in exchange. That’s simply the way that business is done in divided government. If the president doesn’t like it, he signed up for the wrong job. The White House doesn’t get to impose terms on co-equal branches of government.
Congressional Republicans have calculated that Obama will eventually make a deal, and there’s at least one good reason to suppose that assessment is accurate: it’s exactly what happened during the previous debt-ceiling showdown, in 2011. Add to that the fact that the president’s ability to endure a game of chicken looks substantially worse in the wake of the Syrian confusion, and the GOP’s posture begins to look crazy like a fox.
The problem bedeviling the president – which is likely to last for the duration of his presidency – is that he’s repeatedly shown himself either unwilling or unable to follow through on a threat. In the past, he rarely had to turn to such methods. As a man whose political ascent owed almost entirely to the power of rhetoric, he has always placed a premium on exercising presidential power via the bully pulpit, winning over the public with the force of his words and the firmness of his arguments. In the modern era, however, when presidential overexposure is a virtual certainty within a few years in the Oval Office, the shelf life of the rhetorical presidency is rapidly declining.
When that magic dies, all that’s left for a president is good old-fashioned bare-knuckle governing – knocking heads together, whipping votes and utilizing every instrument of presidential power in order to get your way. If this sounds strikingly like the kind of “old politics” that Barack Obama went to Washington promising to chase out of town, that’s because it is. The verdict is in: The old politics won.