The first eighteen months of Barack Obama's presidency have been marked by startling contrasts that both define his administration and underscore the need for a more integrated approach to analyzing presidential leadership. With the largest popular vote in two decades and the largest Democratic victory margin since Lyndon Johnson, Obama smashed the race barrier and inspired majorities of voters to believe in the possibility of change that would remedy the country's economic problems while soothing the long-standing and bitter partisan divide. The high hopes surrounding Obama's election boosted his approval to stratospheric levels of 60 percent or higher during his first months in office and were—after a tortuous year—realized in the passage of historic reforms of health care and higher education. These reforms will reshape policy and politics in these areas for decades. But these accomplishments coincided with his failure (to date) to deliver on a new, post-partisan politics; to enact far-reaching legislation on labor, immigration, and energy; and to recast foreign policy toward the Middle East and global climate change. The striking contrasts between historic accomplishment and abject failure are also accompanied by more ambiguous cases. None stands out more than the strained effort to enact reform of America's financial system to prevent a repeat of Wall Street's crisis and its disastrous consequences for the economy. Reform has been substantially watered down and falls far short of the restructuring that the administration proposed and that many experts recommend to prevent future system breakdowns.Footnote 1
All presidents, of course, experience mixed success. But Obama's record stands out among modern presidents because of the wide range between his accomplishments and the boldness of his as-yet unfulfilled promises. Obamaism, then, is a complex phenomenon, condensing many themes and policy goals, and characterized by variable degrees of success. While it is too early to deliver a historical “verdict” on the Obama presidency, there has been no dearth of public commentary, and too much of it oversimplifies. We take a step back and examine the administration's initiatives, drawing upon recent scholarship in political science to consider the political, economic, and institutional constraints that Obama has faced and to assess how he has faced them. Our key theme is the importance of integrating the study of presidency and public leadership with the study of the political economy of the state.
We begin below by pushing back against the personalistic accounts of the Obama presidency in favor of a structured agency approach. We will outline the structural context that constrains his actions in ways obscured by the all-too-common privileging of personal traits and specify his relative skill in identifying vulnerabilities, designing suitably-targeted policies, and building the support to enact them.
The Limits of Personalism
Much popular commentary has attributed Obama's accomplishments and setbacks to his personality and that of his senior advisors. Echoing the broad frustration of many supporters of Obama's reform agenda in the weeks following the victory of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts US race, Mike Lux (a former Clinton White House staffer) blamed Obama's “passivity” and “lack of leadership on pulling everyone together” for the failure to move health reform. Liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman criticized Obama for “not enough audacity” owing to his insufficient tenacity or naïve belief in the possibilities for “‘post-partisan’ … common ground where none exists.”Footnote 2 The persistent result, Krugman suggests, has been “policies that are far too weak” and “cautious,” due to Obama's failure “to exploit his early opportunities” and his “strong mandate … to take bold action” after his election. Other observers have criticized Obama and his aides for failing to engage in a “radical rethink” of existing political economic arrangements and, in particular, the “busted” model of free market.Footnote 3 Indicative of a general criticism, Joseph Stiglitz disapproves of Obama's overly deferential approach to finance reform because it “muddle[s] through” instead of breaking up big banks, heavily regulating derivatives, and suffocating the securitization of mortgages.Footnote 4
Beyond criticizing his supposedly cautious personality, commentators have repeatedly focused on Obama's failure to perform what one Senate aide called a “major sales job.”Footnote 5 Other Washingtonians have yearned for “more toughness” and the ability to “dominat[e] the room.”Footnote 6
The personalistic account is alluring. The press chronicles in minute detail the travails and whims of the president and White House staff. It is hard to resist drawing what intuitively seems like reasonable connections between, say, an aloof professorial president and the maddeningly slow, meandering trajectory of health reform.
But personality is not a solid foundation for a persuasive explanation of presidential impact and the shortfalls or accomplishments of Obama's presidency. Modern presidents have brought divergent individual traits to their jobs and yet they have routinely failed to enact much of their agendas. Preeminent policy goals of Bill Clinton (health reform) and George W. Bush (Social Security privatization) met the same fate, though these presidents' personalities vary widely. And presidents like Jimmy Carter—whose personality traits have been criticized as ill-suited for effective leadership—enjoyed comparable or stronger success in Congress than presidents lauded for their personal knack for leadership—from Lyndon Johnson to Ronald Reagan.Footnote 7 Indeed, a personalistic account provides little leverage for explaining the disparities in Obama's record—for example why he succeeded legislatively in restructuring health care and higher education, failed in other areas, and often accommodated stakeholders.
Decades of rigorous research find that impersonal, structural forces offer the most compelling explanations for presidential impact.Footnote 8 Quantitative research that compares legislative success and presidential personality finds no overall relationship.Footnote 9 In his magisterial qualitative and historical study, Stephen Skowronek reveals that institutional dynamics and ideological commitments structure presidential choice and success in ways that trump the personal predilections of individual presidents.Footnote 10 Findings point to the predominant influence on presidential legislative success of the ideological and partisan composition of Congress, entrenched interests, identities, and institutional design, and a constitutional order that invites multiple and competing lines of authority.
The widespread presumption, then, that Obama's personal traits or leadership style account for the obstacles to his policy proposals is called into question by a generation of scholarship on the presidency. Indeed, the presumption is not simply problematic analytically, but practically as well. For the misdiagnosis of the source of presidential weakness may, paradoxically, induce failure by distracting the White House from strategies and tactics where presidents can make a difference. Following a meeting with Obama shortly after Brown's win, one Democratic senator lamented the White House's delusion that a presidential sales pitch will pass health reform—“Just declaring that he's still for it doesn't mean that it comes off life support.”Footnote 11 Although Obama's re-engagement after the Brown victory did contribute to restarting reform, the senator's comment points to the importance of ideological and partisan coalitions in Congress, organizational combat, institutional roadblocks, and anticipated voter reactions. Presidential sales pitches go only so far.
Yet if presidential personality and leadership style come up short as primary explanations for presidential success and failure, this does not render them irrelevant. There is no need to accept the false choice between volition and structure—between explanations that reduce politics to personality and those that focus only on system imperatives and contradictions. The most satisfying explanations lie at the intersection of agency and structure—what we describe as structured agency. Presidents have opportunities to lead, but not under the circumstances they choose or control. These circumstances both restrict the parameters of presidential impact and highlight the significance of presidential skill in accurately identifying and exploiting opportunities. Indeed, Obama himself talks about walking this tightrope—exercising “ruthless pragmatism” in seizing opportunities for reform while accepting the limits and seeking to “bridge that gap between the status quo and what we know we have to do for our future”.Footnote 12
The extraordinary economic and political circumstances under which Obama took office as well as the dramatic disparity between his administration's successes and failures underscore the need to synthesize the study of presidency with the analysis of political economy, American political development, and comparative policy analysis.Footnote 13 Such an analysis would focus on the intermeshing of government policy making with differentially organized interests; the relative advantages or disadvantages that different institutional settings provide to different organized groups; and the ways in which substantive policy decisions both reflect and shape political struggles. Such structural constraints and differences in organizational power do not literally prohibit Obama, or any president, from taking initiatives—say, nationalizing the banks—but they do create two significant barriers to dramatic policy change: a political environment in which members of Congress, independent regulatory bodies, and officials in his administration (especially in the Department of Treasury) can reject, stymie, or sabotage policies that threaten key relationships (such as sources of campaign contributions or future employment); and an economic environment in which private firms and their customers could respond to policy proposals by taking actions that drive down profitability or by shifting capital out of the US, as happened in Latin America during its debt crisis and in France after the election of Socialist Francois Mitterrand as president. Obama's presidency can thus be viewed as a delicate dance to formulate policies that navigate these barriers and blunt conflicts with established economic/political relationships. Such a politics of compromise has thus far generated dueling frustrations: liberals and progressives steam that Obama's policy proposals are too tepid and too easily stymied by stakeholders, while conservatives fume at his temerity in successfully challenging the basic market-deferring precepts of American political economy.
In short, the structured agency perspective integrates two critical components of social science analysis. First, it situates Obama's initiatives within the existing political economic structure of organizational combat, institutions, and policy. Second, it scrutinizes Obama's strategic and tactical decisions to mobilize coalitions that are targeted at points of political economic vulnerability and to use his expressive powers to manage the political narrative, to control expectations, and to frame challenges to the existing power structure in ways that sustain and broaden support.
A political economy perspective offers distinct contributions to analyzing the Obama presidency and especially his domestic policies. The first is to recalibrate expectations of presidential leadership and, in particular, Obama's capacity for change. The initial expectation that Obama would transform America—which he himself encouraged—needs to be refocused on the opportunities and constraints within the existing US political economy. This shifts attention from Obama as a kind of secular messiah to the strategic challenge of seizing opportunities within existing institutional and economic structures and instituting changes that instigate future developmental paths in desired directions.
The second contribution is to broaden our understanding of presidential action and inaction and its significance. Research in political economy, American political development, and comparative public policy finds that distinctive national constellations of institutions, policy, and economic practices generate “varieties of capitalism” and wide differences among capitalistic countries in the timing and nature of government policies and how they interact with individuals and markets. These traditions of analysis study the content of public policies (instead of treating them, for instance, as dichotomous variables based on whether or not they legislatively succeed), with a particular focus on the degree to which policy change reflects or restructures established political and economic relationships.Footnote 14 This approach sheds light on sources of inaction and stasis. Stalemate on candidate Obama's agenda for reform of labor and climate change, for example, has often been chalked up to Obama's leadership failings. Yet neglected in these accounts are the organizational advantages of stakeholders and institutional rules (such as the Senate filibuster) that favor defenders of the existing political/economic status quo and disadvantage reformers and the less well-established.Footnote 15
Obama's Presidency and Structured Agency
As candidate and president, Obama targeted the overhaul of American political economy as a primary objective. Not long after his inauguration, he maintained that “we can't just look at things in the aggregate … [W]e want to make sure that prosperity is spread across the spectrum of regions, and occupations and genders and races … to make sure that everybody has got opportunity” to “find good employment and see their incomes rise.”Footnote 16 The President targeted reforms in health care, education, and energy as decisive for expanding opportunities. He also sought to restructure finance and “change … [the] situation where corporate profits in the finance sector were such a heavy part of our overall profitability over the last decade.” In particular, Obama proposed substantial reforms that entailed an “updating of the regulatory regimes comparable to what we did in the 1930s…. [in order to] inhibit some of the massive leveraging and the massive risk-taking that has become so common.”Footnote 17
How has Obama fared and what accounts for his variable success? The analytic challenge is both to situate Obama's actions (and inactions) within America's political economic regime and to assess his success and failure in identifying and exploiting opportunities within the regime. Has Obama accurately identified vulnerabilities or openings within the regime of financial capitalism? If so, has he been able to build the coalitions and support to establish policies that achieve his aims partially in the short term and more robustly over time?
Three features of American political economy condition Obama's initiatives, generating both constraints and opportunities for his presidency.
Politics and Private Markets
The economic and political circumstances that greeted Obama at his inauguration created opportunities for his presidency. The profound disruption of the economy and of political/economic relationships jarred received wisdom and eroded the position of financial and corporate interests and relationships, opening up space for economic and social welfare reform. As White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously observed at the outset of Obama's presidency, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” In the arena of health care financing and delivery, cost escalations for business and government and the unraveling of employer health insurance coverage and rising rates of uninsurance, which the Great Recession accelerated, unsettled the stakeholder community and created political and fiscal pressure for change. On finance reform Congressman Barney Frank, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, initially declared that the financial and economic crises had created a “new political consensus” to shift from “light-touch regulation” to stricter financial regulation.Footnote 18 But the crises turned out not to be as destabilizing as he (or Emanuel) assumed and the opposition from stakeholders in the finance sector and elsewhere remained intense, well-organized, and skilled at exploiting its institutional connections and advantages. Although the reforms of health care and higher education highlight the openings for change, Obama's efforts on finance, immigration, and labor point to three durable barriers that slowed and watered down reforms or stopped them in their tracks.
Where's the class war?
One of the most striking features of recent American politics has been the absence of a sustained and organized backlash against rising inequality by the broad public or the working and middle classes.Footnote 19 The Tea Party meetings around the country tap the public rage against “big government” and big banks but it has failed to articulate a coherent vision of class politics and remain politically inchoate despite the best efforts of the Republican Party to capitalize on them. Fury against government and the conviction by a quarter of Tea Party supporters that violence is justified (according to an April New York Times survey) mixes with acknowledgement by 62 percent that Medicare and Social Security are worth it; majorities both oppose Obama's policies and report differences with Republican Party; 52 percent report too much is made of problems facing blacks while 65 percent report that Obama's policies treat blacks and whites equally; and nearly three-quarters complain of favoritism for rich and poor even while Tea Party supporters enjoy more wealth, education, and personal economic well-being than the average American.
In other affluent democracies, class conflict is institutionalized in high levels of unionization and laws and practices that routinize collective bargaining; effective political parties that are directly aligned with employees and their interests; and parliamentary coalitions that enact responsive policies.Footnote 20 As Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme argue, economic and social welfare policies are the “outcomes of, and arenas for, conflict between class-related socio-economic interest groups.”Footnote 21
The proportion of American employees who are unionized and covered by collective bargaining agreements is low compared to the levels found in other affluent democracies.Footnote 22 Outside of the workplace, American employees have traditionally not defined their interests in class terms.Footnote 23 One result is the “barren marriage” between the union movement and the Democratic Party and the comparative absence of a political party and governing coalition that directly and consistently represents labor within government.Footnote 24
President Obama has lacked an encompassing organization to build support and legislative votes for his initiatives, and this has created an imbalance between the unorganized and diffuse support of beneficiaries and the intense, well-organized opposition of stakeholders. In health reform, the administration has chosen to accept its vulnerability and strike deals with doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies that split the stakeholder opposition. In finance reform, the imbalance in organized pressure produced quick sweetheart rescues for mammoth investment firms, dithering on the foreclosures that are threatening millions of everyday Americans.
Our central point is to caution against the alluring but simplistic formulation that attributes the defeat or severe watering down of the administration's initiatives to the lack of personal tenacity on the part of Obama and his advisors. In truth, administration reform efforts were delayed or defeated in large part because their opponents were far better organized, funded, and programmatically coherent.
It's who you know
The US Constitution promises an independent and representative democracy in which government officials would, according to James Madison in Federalist No. 51, “best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” Madison's vision of a representative democracy devoted to the “public good” was complemented by Alexander Hamilton's devotion to building a working “system of administration” that was “steady” and organizationally capable of fending off an “artful cabal [that] … would be able to distract and to enervate the whole system of administration [and to introduce] … a spirit of habitual feebleness and dilatoriness.”Footnote 25
In reality, a substantial number of government officials make their living by working in high-paid corporate positions and then returning to government. The public harbors intense doubt whether these officials serve the “true interests of their country” and “public good” or whether they are members of “artful cabals” that promote the “temporary or partial considerations” of certain private business. Seventy-eight percent of the February 2010 New York Times and CBS poll indicated that “government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves” instead of benefiting all, and less than one-fifth indicated that they trust the government in Washington always or even most of the time.Footnote 26 To the public and many political observers, the US government and its officials are an “instrument” or tool of the leading economic powers within finance capitalism.Footnote 27
The interchangeability of personnel from business and government is most apparent in finance. The “revolving door” between Washington and Wall Street starkly illustrates Hamilton's fear of an “artful cabal” that used its government positions to distract, enervate, and enfeeble effective administration to serve private interests. The motivation of Washington's Wall Street transplants may be overt or they may be implicit in their understanding of what will “work.” As Stiglitz explained, the “mindsets” of government officials who work on Wall Street are “shaped by [the] people [they] associate with [so they come] to think that what's good for Wall Street is good for America” even though their policies contained “deeply obvious flaws.”Footnote 28
Former IMF chief economist, Simon Johnson, sounded the alarms about the “channel of influence [that has created] … the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington” and the “easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials.” The “Wall Street-Washington Corridor” has “interw[oven] the career tracks” of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan as well as the top echelons of the Department of Treasury from former Secretaries Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson, and incumbent Secretary Timothy Geithner to Geithner's current chief of staff (former Goldman Sach's lobbyist) and senior advisor (former Citigroup chief economist).Footnote 29 Drawing on his extensive IMF experience battling corruption in Russia and less well-developed countries, Johnson sharply criticizes the “quiet coup” by “America's Oligarchs”—a takeover carried off not by rifles but by the “confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology”.Footnote 30 The most visible forms of corruption—such as bribes—are not necessary in Washington because the industry is literally represented within government.Footnote 31
Although business does exert disproportionate influence, there are countervailing factors. Disagreement between stakeholders can offset even the best-placed industries. Wall Street's efforts, for instance, have been countered by aggrieved commercial banks and “Main Street” businesses as well as by members of Congress and President Obama, who face outcry from voters that sustained its intensity from the bailouts through the SEC charges against Goldman Sachs for fraud. The counter-pressure reflects the fracturing of American economy and politics based on distinct (often geographically-based) cleavages between different industries (service vs. manufacturing) and regions.Footnote 32 In addition, business influence is also offset by incomplete or inaccurate information and by uncertainty and risk. After all, the winners in the battle for lowering capital requirements and deregulating finance and repealing the Glass-Steagall Act gutted the rules that had protected them, unleashing a crisis that terminated some of the earlier “winners.”
Yet despite the limits on the stakeholder influence in American finance, the preeminent firms and pressure groups do impact policy. Part of their success is keeping the most threatening options (such as nationalization) off the agenda of sustained government attention. Even after financial reform was harshly scrubbed in committees and floor debate to exclude threatening issues or policy options, the final maneuvering in June and July 2010 further watered-down the legislation to accommodate the intense pressure. Wall Street firms, commercial banks, and insurers have spent millions to oppose reform, to seek friendly amendments, and, where legislation has been passed, to achieve favorable implementation by, for instance, loosening the availability of the bailout funds to commercial banks and insurers. Senate Leader Dick Durbin candidly acknowledged that the track record of the finance industry as “major contributors … is a major factor in the decision making process in Washington.”Footnote 33 This influence is not partisan: financial sector donors contribute generously to both the Republicans and the Democrats.
Living with structure
Focusing on the Wall Street/Washington revolving door directs our attention to individuals and, specifically, the personnel who work in both domains. Names like Rubin, Paulson, and Geithner put a face on the shared workforce for government and American finance. Beyond this interweaving of personnel, however, the dominant political economic relationships shape government policy by determining the conditions and structures that define what seems rational and feasible to government officials who have no direct ties to the providers and funders in finance, health care, and other arenas. After all, Washington is dependent on the success of business to generate revenues, to create or maintain the public or private sector jobs that voters expect, and to sustain expected services.Footnote 34 The reform of health care, for instance, was premised on sustaining and, indeed, handsomely rewarding private medical providers, suppliers, and payers with billions in profitable new business and subsidies.
In the financial sector, the dependence of businesses and ordinary Americans on credit constrains the administration and the Democratic Party. Even if they favor taking more aggressive measures against this sector, they are fully aware of their reliance on private firms to resume their business of extending credit in order to renew consumer purchases and reignite the economy. In a telling analysis, two seasoned financial reporters expressed frustration with Wall Street's success in imposing an “enormous barrier to reform” but concluded by stressing its structural hold on Washington—“Realistically, there is only so much that can be done to fix the problem.”Footnote 35
In short, the opportunities and constraints on Obama's presidency reflect not simply his personal predilections but the mediated structural pressure of private markets.
The institutional self-interest of Washington generates pressures both to create and to sustain conditions for the continuation of private markets and to avoid policies that may unsettle markets or lead to an exodus of capital in a fluid international market.
Institutions Matter
Government institutions themselves form an environment that shapes how private interests and lawmakers size up relative power and define interests and whether new policies emerge or are delayed and blocked.Footnote 36 The administration's decisions over policy and its track record in pursuing them have been informed by three critical features of the American political system, which we review here.
A legacy of hapless administrative capacity
National administrative capacity affects the ability of presidents to pursue their agendas as well as win the confidence of administration officials, legislators, and “opinion makers.”Footnote 37 The nature, extent, and form of the government administration have been a longstanding fulcrum of intense political conflict.
Proposals to create a national health insurance exchange and a public option were defeated by well-organized interests and their advocates within Congress in an arena where provision and financing among the non-elderly were privately controlled.Footnote 38 Whether the government could be trusted to control costs and work within the budgetary projections of the Congressional Budgetary Office was also a flashpoint between the political parties and indeed within the Democratic Party.
The federal government's role and administrative capacity within the financial sector is also a longstanding source of conflict. The financial crises stemmed, in part, from the ineffectiveness of America's administrative system to tame the “tyranny of the short term” —as conservative jurist Richard Posner explains in his critique of the financial crisis—and to guide self-interested behavior toward “enlightened self-interest.”Footnote 39 The system failed to supervise the securitization of mortgages (as exemplified by the failure of SEC to regulate credit default swap trading), to insist on reasonable capital requirements for trades, or to take necessary steps to check the drive of bankers, insurers, and others to reap massive short-term returns. Gillian Tett, a Financial Times journalist, reports that the “story of the great credit boom and bust is … a story of how an entire financial system went wrong” owing to non-existent or ineffectual regulation and oversight.Footnote 40
America's 2008–10 financial crises confirm a broader and well-known theme in American political development—the administrative state's generally porous, easily penetrated boundaries; its consistent (though not uniform) lack of independent expertise to independently assess and respond to the behavior of markets and individuals; and multiple and competing lines of authority that stymie even necessary intervention.Footnote 41 Indeed, the low confidence of legislators and other policy makers in American public administration has fueled their tendency to create multiple and competing bodies with redundancies and checks. The flip side, though, is that pressure groups exploit this plethora of options to “venue shop” for the friendliest body or to play them off against each other. The financial industry searched for a sponsor and protector in the regulatory bazaar of the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of the Currency, and the Security and Exchange Commission. For instance, when the states attempted to use consumer protection laws to crack down on predatory lending, the lenders turned to the Comptroller of the Currency to block them.
America's administrative structure is also prone—as generations of research have demonstrated—to penetration and influence by pressure groups and parochial interests. If the lobbyists fail to shape agency behavior, they turn to the White House or, if that turns out to be unrewarding, to responsive members of Congress. What seems from afar like inexplicable lapses in administrative competence can often be traced to successful industry interventions into a porous administrative structure. For instance, the “light touch” regulation of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae has been blamed for their stupendous failure to accurately assess risk and intervene. Retracing this breakdown finds that it originated in campaign contributions and intense lobbying of both agencies and relevant members of Congress.Footnote 42 The continued whittling down of provisions for independent financial consumer protection prompted one consumer advocate to complain that “it's hard for your voice to be heard” when faced with the “money and the resources of the banking industry”.Footnote 43 Overall, the American administrative state often lacks the kind of independent and skilled capacity to monitor and intervene to prevent market breakdowns.
The booby-trapped road to lawmaking
The comparative weakness of America's administrative state is compounded by a legislative process that is individualized and diffuse, and therefore nearly immune to efforts by presidents to form supportive coalitions. Most of the time, lawmaking is hobbled by the conflict between presidents and one or both chambers of Congress that are controlled by the opposing party. Even when one party's control of both the White House and Congress allows presidents unusual legislative success, the potential for deadlock and delay are considerable, as Obama has discovered.Footnote 44 Each member of Congress enjoys “rights” to serve on major committees as the power of seniority has eroded; enjoys staff support that allows them to develop their personal legislative agenda; and depends for their reelection on assembling their own record with money they have raised and a staff they have hired and organized. Although party leaders can provide services to individual legislators, the centrifugal forces of individualization often prevail with presidents and congressional leaders unable to dictate nomination—the key power in parliamentary systems to discipline legislators who defect from party coalitions.Footnote 45
With neither presidents nor congressional leaders able to control votes by legislators (even under conditions of unified party control), they rely on a more subtle but nonetheless potent power—setting the agenda. In particular, they limit floor votes to bills that enjoy the support of party caucuses. Critics chastised the Obama's White House for proposing vague principles of health reform rather than a detailed plan; but the decision reflected its acceptance that the legislative process required time and deference to the leadership to build agreement in committees and caucus meetings before moving reform onto the agenda.
The institutional hurdles of lawmaking do not shape organized interests equally. Rather they interact with America's market-deferring political economy to the advantage of stakeholders and their allies who ably work their allies to capitalize on multiple veto points to protect the status quo by blocking new government action. In addition to favoring the status quo over change, the institutional maze advantages conservatives over reformers seeking to expand social welfare policy generally. Republicans more readily pass their top legislative priority (tax cuts) by using the budget reconciliation process that requires a simple majority.Footnote 46 The conservative bias of building legislative coalitions in an environment of intense polarization and institutional booby-traps is broadly consistent with the partisan differences in macroeconomic and tax policies and, of late, the weakening impacts of Democratic presidents in expanding employment and economic growth.Footnote 47 By comparison, the filibuster requirement of 60 Senate votes in an environment of polarization makes it more difficult to enact ambitious new social welfare programs because party leaders will likely only receive the votes of Democrats.
What stands out about Obama's legislative record, then, are not simply the delays, compromises, defeats, and failures—from energy and climate change to financial reform and strengthened labor rights. These are the predictable outcomes of the current legislative process and the networks of vested interests that permeate it. More remarkable and surprising are the intermixing of plain vanilla “delay and deadlock” with success as epitomized by health reform.Footnote 48
Despite the usual tendency toward impasse, reform passed in the House and in the Senate (with the support of all Democrats and two independents). The polarization of the parties created unusual unity among Democrats at a time when they enjoyed the largest majorities in three decades and intermittent presidential promotion. Nonetheless, the process was slow, close to deadlocked at several junctures, and doomed after Brown's Senate win until the bane of progressives—the reconciliation process—was converted into a mechanism for modifying aspects of the originally enacted Senate legislation in ways acceptable to the House.
Obama's refuge—the administrative presidency
As Obama has seen parts of his agenda delayed or dragged down by the veto-strewn legislative process, he has turned—as have presidents for three decades—to the institutional prerogatives in his office to by-pass Congress. The White House has issued more than three dozen executive orders in its first year, to take unilateral action on a host of issues from restoring regulatory powers over workplace safety and the environment to enhancing the power of employees of government contractors.Footnote 49
Perhaps the most striking domestic example is the Treasury's implementation of funds for the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF). Bereft of legislative authorization, it committed up to one trillion dollars to purchasing securities backed by credit cards, student loans, and other assets. In addition, the administration created a program to mitigate the mortgage crisis based on the executive branch's authority and without congressional approval. Moreover, shortly after his health care victory Obama appointed 15 recess senior nominees by executive authority. Reviewing the administration's unilateral initiatives, one New York Times columnist concluded that the “crises have expanded the power of the executive branch”.Footnote 50
Obama's Presidency within America's Racial Orders
Obama's election as president is a product of and challenge to America's racial orders. Racial inequities and struggles are historically constitutive of US politics, generating competing coalitions of political actors with distinct conceptions of race equity.Footnote 51 Competing conceptions of America's racial order have structured every era of US history—from antebellum battles over slavery and Reconstruction struggles about segregation to today's controversies over whether government policy should include race conscious measures to address continuing inequities including the disproportionately high levels of foreclosures, unemployment, and other economic woes among African Americans and Latinos.Footnote 52
Racial orders are part of the structured context of policy making for any American president but they uniquely affect Obama. Obama's election is a culmination of centuries of struggle for racial equity and, yet, his presidency is constrained by the enduring conflict of racial orders. While liberal commentators and activists yearn for Obama to channel Lyndon Johnson's notorious skill in lobbying Congress and to unleash sharp denunciation of his predecessors as had Ronald Reagan, the reality is that Obama is haunted by lingering stereotypes and bias. His advisors have steered him away from actions and rhetoric that could trigger the “angry black man” stereotype, which is already bubbling up in protests.Footnote 53 He has resisted pleas from African American leaders to target resources into their communities and into reducing unemployment among blacks.
Varieties of Obamaism
Understanding Obama requires exceptional discipline to avoid knee-jerk reactions—either of support or opposition or vilification or adulation of his personal style and skills. The need to avoid personalistic accounts need not lead to one-sided structural interpretations that exclusively focus on economic and state structures and their relationships. Obama's presidency is defined by structured agency. The constellation of America's entwined economic and political relationships and embedded institutional dynamics conditioned the Obama administration's proposals and their differential outcomes.
Seeking to understand the wide range of Obama's policy outcomes poses enduring questions about the nature of presidential power and the reconstitution of private markets, government, and the individual's relationship to each at a critical historic juncture. The real world of American politics today poses remarkable shifts of historic consequence. It also opens up exceptional opportunities for synthesizing the study of the presidency with political economy, American political development, and comparative public policy.
