The first Morning Jolt of the week salutes this assessment from Jonathan Last over at the Weekly Standard . . .
Before Obama, citizens hoped that their elected leaders would be wise, independent, and disinterested leaders — but they never really counted on utopian vision. What they banked on was that the people they elected would, at the very least, be self-interested vote-seekers — so that if voters started punishing politicians for a specific course of action, the politicians would abandon it.
The passage of Obamacare broke this arrangement. And the impending passage of the Iran nuclear deal, in the face of voter discontent will cement this new relationship as the norm. In both cases, Democratic law makers went along in processes that were highly irregular (the nuclear option for passage of Obamacare; no treaty ratification with Iran); with initiatives they largely disliked on the merits; that voters demonstrably disliked in polling; and that had (or are likely to have) negative outcomes not just in the real world, but in the political world, too. This sort of power dynamic is new in American politics.
Other things are new, too. Such as having the understanding of marriage dating back thousands of years redefined by a single unelected justice. Or having the rule of law downgraded to the level of executive discretion (on Obamacare, on marijuana, on immigration, etc). Or having an economic recovery that, seven years in, still feels like a recession. Or having a stretch of four presidential terms in which you could plausibly argue that at the end of the term the country has been in worse condition than it was at the beginning.
And notes that the rules started “breaking” a bit before then. Back in 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to warn Hillary Clinton that “sweeping, historic laws don’t pass barely. They pass 70-to-30 or they fail.” The unwritten rule of Washington was, if you wanted to get something big and sweeping done, you had to get the other party to buy into the idea; otherwise, they have no incentive to help make the proposal work.
In 2003, President George W. Bush got 82 House Democrats and 29 Senate Democrats to vote in favor of a resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq.
Except the Democrats didn’t feel like they had actually “bought in” by voting for the war. The moment it became unpopular, they flipped. Even though they had voted for it, they didn’t feel any incentive to help the war effort. We’ve seen candidates change their views on an ongoing war before, but in the past, turning on a dime the moment a war becomes unpopular was seen as craven and poor leadership. Yet in 2004, we saw candidates running presidential campaigns based on opposing a war that they had voted for less than two years prior. John Kerry, John Edwards, and then four years later Hillary Clinton all ran anti-war campaigns, all casually discarding any sense that they had any responsibility to finish what they had voted to start. Heck, in 2007, Bill Richardson was pledging to bring back every troop within six months.
Do you think ISIS would have formed quicker or slower if the U.S. had pulled out all of its troops in 2008?