The View From the White House After a Shellacking

I think I have a sense of how some in the White House are feeling today. I remember well what it was like to be working for an administration that had just received a thumping in a midterm election. Moreover, I well remember staffing the somewhat ritualized meetings with the newly empowered opposition leaders, the ones the White House staff are preparing for right now and that will take place later this week. The Democrats had spent the previous couple of years telling everyone they could that President George W. Bush was a liar and an incompetent fool served by even more incompetent fools and now we were about to welcome them at the West Wing to serve them a bonus dessert of watching all of us, but especially the president, eat some humble pie. One of my favorite anecdotes from those times involves trying to explain a particularly warm embrace I received from Speaker-to-be-Nancy-Pelosi (who had worked on a project with my wife a decade earlier) under the increasingly disgruntled and incredulous gaze of the White House political team.

At that same time as the midterm elections, President Bush made a gutsy decision that proved pivotal for his legacy: in replacing Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and publicly revealing and expanding the work of a then-secret Iraq strategy review, the president conceded one of the most bitterly contested issues of the 2006 campaign — whether or not the existing Iraq strategy was on a trajectory to success. Having argued it was in the face of a relentless critique from Democrats, President Bush’s earliest post-election moves were tantamount to agreeing with his opponents. At that point, the president had not made the decision to replace the strategy with the surge — that would come later — but he did order the staff to heed the critique part of what Democrats had been saying, even though we knew that much of it was partisan, tendentious, or misinformed. Of course, the president later chose to ignore the recommendation part of what Democrats had been saying, and in doing so he ushered in a full year (2007) of bitter political contestation between the two branches of government.

According to early reports and his remarks at his press conference, President Obama doesn’t feel inclined to credit his critics even as far as President Bush did. Although President Obama took pains to point out how his policies were on the ballot even if he wasn’t, his aides also took pains to emphasize that he does not feel repudiated in any way by how the electorate voted on those policies. Moreover, even as the election results were pouring in, his aides were telling reporters that the president would be defiant and would press ahead with a controversial exercise of unilateral executive power to defy Congress on immigration policy during the lame duck session. The president doubled down on that threat repeatedly in his press conference.

Now it is possible that the Obama White House views these moves on immigration as their moral equivalent of the Iraq surge decision — a bold move that has the best interests of the country at heart even if it is politically toxic and produces, in the short run, partisan gridlock from Congress. Perhaps they even believe that the move will be vindicated as the surge was, with the most prominent opponents later conceding that the surge was successful and that their opposition to it had been partisan rather than principled. 

But before they make such a move, I think the Obama administration would be well-served to do the first-part of the Bush response to the 2006 midterm — take a cold, hard look at the critique and take on board what is legitimate. A critique that mobilized the electorate to produce a result as stunning as yesterday’s — more stunning than the 2006 results in many ways — is not likely to be entirely without merit. President Bush ended up with the surge not because it defied Democrats but despite that fact, and only after the bureaucratic equivalent of a thorough soul-searching. Right now, President Obama seems not to be in the mood to do any soul-searching or make any concessions at all.

I understand that feeling, but I don’t think it is the best for the Obama administration or for the country.

A parting word: I encourage the president’s advisors to compare the transcript from President Bush’s session with the one President Obama just held. The contrast is striking. Is the President sending the message he really intends to send?