A study finds Barack Obama has the highest legislative success rate of any president in recent history
The Republican riff on President Obama's first year is that he hasn't accomplished anything, that he's all hat and no cattle, to borrow a phrase from the Bush years. At the same time, conservatives yowl that all the socialistic programs and policies he's put in place are destroying the country. Which is it? He can't be both unaccomplished and accomplishing his nefarious agenda at the same time. It's like that old Borscht Belt joke where one elderly lady complains about how awful the food is and her friend responds, "Yes, and the portions are too small."
But to Republicans who joke Obama has done nothing, and to Obama's liberal critics who vent about the same, a study done by Congressional Quarterly suggests they are both wrong. CQ rates Obama higher than any president in the last five decades in working his will on Capitol Hill, surpassing even the fabled Lyndon Johnson. Obama's success rate in the House and Senate on votes where he staked out a clear position was 96.7 percent, beating previous record-holder Johnson's 93 percent in 1965.
This kind of statistical finding begs for more analysis. If Obama is doing so great, why does it feel like Democrats are staring into the abyss? If the congressional elections were held today, the results would not be pretty for the party in power. "In a democracy, what matters is how the people respond to what you've done, it's not the legislative body count," says William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "If the administration has a good story to tell, it hasn't told that story very well."
Obama sold his candidacy against all odds to a skeptical political establishment, but he's not nearly as good when it comes to selling his presidency. The CQ survey should help counter the myth that he hasn't done anything, but checking with sources on Capitol Hill, the impulse is to downplay a statistical finding that doesn't measure the magnitude of the legislative wins. One source cites what he calls "the 40-year rule." If people aren't talking about it in 40 years, it's not a significant legislative achievement. Johnson passed voting-rights legislation in the spring of 1965 and Medicare in the summer, his first year after winning the presidency in his own right. Johnson had the lamplight of President Kennedy's martyrdom guiding him, and he had 67 Democrats in the Senate, although some were conservative Southern Democrats committed to obstructing civil rights.
People may not be talking about Obama's stimulus package in 2050, but fair-minded historians looking back will give him credit for pulling the economy back from the brink, and the $787 billion stimulus bill that he passed during his first hundred days with almost no Republican support was critical to the rescue effort. If Obama gets health-care reform, which seems likely, that will be an enduring achievement despite all the partisan nitpicking. He will have accomplished these things without some of the structural advantages LBJ enjoyed. The filibuster, which has its poisonous history in Southern segregationist efforts to kill civil-rights legislation, has morphed into a routine requirement for a supermajority of 60 votes on everything. Also, the dealmaking in Johnson's time wasn't made public so voters didn't witness in real time the spectacle of reeling in a single senator the way the Democrats did with Ben Nelson.
Given these modern-day obstacles, what Obama has achieved is pretty impressive, and it speaks well of the partnership he has forged with Democratic congressional leaders. The downside to that, however, is that the public doesn't like Congress, and Obama doesn't get credit for working and playing well with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.
What kind of person lies about a "conscience issue"?
National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez unleashes a vicious smear of Massachusetts Senate Candidate Martha Coakley, suggesting under the header "It's a Good Thing for Martha Coakley That There Are No Catholics in Massachusetts" that Coakley said Catholics shouldn't work in emergency rooms:
The radio host, Ken Pittman, pointed out that complex legal principle that "In the emergency room you still have your religious freedom."
Coakley agrees that "The law says that people are allowed to have that." But, making clear her view - the attorney general who wants to be the next senator from Massachusetts - she declared that "You can have religious freedom, but you probably shouldn't work in an emergency room." (Listen here.)
In fact, Coakley said that if you refuse to provide legal medical services to rape victims, you probably shouldn't work in an emergency room. Lopez cut off the quote before that was clear, suggesting instead that Coakley's position is simply that Catholics shouldn't work in emergency rooms.
There is a massive difference between what Coakley said and what Kathryn Jean Lopez claims Coakley said. Just enormous. Lopez suggests Coakley's position is "Catholics need not apply"; in fact, Coakley's position is more like "people who don't want to do the job shouldn't take it." It says something about Lopez' confidence in the merits of her own position that she feels the need to dishonestly portray Coakley's.
This isn't Lopez's first fast-and-loose description of the issue this week. Here's something she wrote on Wednesday:
What Coakley and her campaign are referencing is a 2005 bill that mandated that hospitals provide emergency contraception to victims of rape. At the time, Scott Brown sponsored an amendment that sought to protect the consciences of hospitals and hospital personnel with religious objections to the medication, which sometimes works as an abortifacient.
As the Boston Globe explained last week, the amendment would have referred rape victims at a hospital that would not dispense emergency contraception to another hospital that would, at no additional cost. In an urban center like Boston, this is not akin to making emergency contraception unavailable to these women.
Set aside the callousness of Lopez' suggestion (reminiscent of Sen. Joe Lieberman's famous "short ride" comment) that it's ok to turn a rape victim away from an emergency room because there's another nearby. What's really striking about Lopez' description is what she leaves out: Not all of Massachusetts is "an urban center like Boston." For many people, there isn't another emergency room nearby. Again: it says something about Lopez' confidence in the merits of her position that she feels the need to mislead readers about its consequences.
