The Monkey Cage

Since I’ve said bad things about Matt Bai, let me say one nice thing: I really enjoyed his NY Times Magazine piece on how the Obama administration has worked to build an effective relationship with Congress.

As Ezra Klein also notes, particularly interesting is the deliberate strategy of what we might call “reverse burrowing”: instead of putting White House people in Congress, the Obama administration has brought Hill staff into the White House. (Although they still regularly put White House people in Congress, if Biden’s and Emanuel’s exercise regimens are any indication.)

But Bai misses one crucial fact, I think. He writes:

Although Washington Democrats, in their euphoria over winning back total control of the capital, often overlook this fact, Clinton’s Congressional landscape during the health care debate in 1993 was, in terms of sheer numbers, strikingly similar to the one Obama has now inherited. At this time in 1993, Clinton’s party controlled 56 seats in the Senate and 258 seats in the House. Obama can claim a slightly higher margin than that in the Senate — he’ll have 60 seats, including independents, if the Minnesota courts release Al Franken from his purgatory — and his party has 256 House seats, or two fewer than Clinton’s. In other words, if Obama is to succeed where Clinton did not, it will have to be a triumph of circumstance and political salesmanship rather than a reflection of simple math.

There is, however, one big difference between the Congress that Clinton faced and this one. The graph below, which I previously poached from Nolan McCarty, gives some indication:

Simply put, Obama faces a Congress in which the parties are far more polarized than in 1994. Why does this matter? It doesn’t if he’s content to have health care reform pass with only Democratic support. After all, they have the votes, particularly if health care reform is passed via reconciliation in the Senate.

But it does matter. Because of Max Baucus. Bai writes:

…Baucus remains determined to send to the floor a bill with bipartisan support; passing health care reform by reconciliation, he says, would make the new law unsustainable in the long term. This is why Baucus hasn’t yet committed to the idea of a public plan to compete with private insurers. It’s not that he particularly dislikes the policy or that he can’t find enough centrist Democrats who might vote for it. It’s more that Baucus fears the provision will drive away Republicans, making it far less likely that Democrats can pass a bill without resorting to reconciliation. During our conversation in his office, Baucus told me his main goal is to keep Senate Republicans at the negotiating table for as long as he can. “Everything is on the table,” Baucus told me more than once, which is the same theme he’s been hammering home to his Republican colleagues.

And getting the support of Republican colleagues in a highly polarized Senate — and especially given the contending pressure from liberal Democrats — can be tough, as the stimulus debate illustrates. No wonder Obama has courted Baucus, as Bai explains.

Maybe polarization won’t matter. Rahm Emanuel is quoted as saying:

…the only nonnegotiable principle here is success. Everything else is negotiable.

If that’s true, then perhaps the Obama administration will deal with a polarized Congress by compromising with willing Republicans, even if some Democrats howl and scream. Obama does not, however, seem to be moving in that direction:

But Mr. Obama has grown concerned that he is losing the debate over certain policy prescriptions he favors, like a government-run insurance plan to compete with the private sector, said one Democrat familiar with his thinking. With Congress beginning a burst of work on the measure, top advisers say, the president is determined to make certain the final bill bears his stamp.