[RC] Real Clear Politics -Failure hasn't taught Obama a thing

[BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community]

NYTimes
 
David Brooks
 
Obama in  Winter

 
November 17, 2014
 
 
They say failure can be a good teacher, but, so far, the Obama  
administration is opting out of the course. The post-midterm period has been 
one  of 
the most bizarre of the Obama presidency. President Obama has racked up some  
impressive foreign-policy accomplishments, but, domestically and 
politically,  things are off the rails.
 
Usually  presidents use midterm defeats as a chance to rethink and refocus. 
That’s what  Obama did four years ago. Voters like to feel the president is 
listening to  them. 
But Obama’s  done no public rethinking. In his post-election news 
conference, the president  tried to reframe the defeat by saying the turnout 
was low, 
as if it was the  Republicans’ fault that the Democrats could only mobilize 
their core base.  Throughout that conference, the president seemed to 
detach himself from his own  party, as if the Democrats who lost their jobs 
because of him were a bunch of  far-off victims of some ethereal malaise.
 
Usually presidents at the end of their terms get less  partisan, not more. 
But with his implied veto threat of the Keystone XL oil  pipeline, President 
Obama seems intent on showing that Democrats, too, can put  partisanship 
above science. Keystone XL has been studied to the point of  exhaustion, and 
the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that it’s a modest-but-good  idea. The 
latest State Department study found that it would not significantly  worsen 
the environment. The oil’s going to come out anyway, and it’s greener to  
transport it by pipeline than by train. The economic impact isn’t huge, but at 
 least there’d be a $5.3 billion infrastructure project. 
Usually  presidents with a new Congressional majority try to figure out if 
there is  anything that the two branches can do together. The governing 
Republicans have a  strong incentive to pass legislation. The obvious thing is 
to start out with the  easiest things, if only to show that Washington can 
function on some elemental  level.
 
But the  White House has not privately engaged with Congress on the 
legislative areas  where there could be agreement. Instead, the president has 
been 
superaggressive  on the one topic sure to blow everything up: the executive 
order to rewrite the  nation’s immigration laws. 

The president was in no rush to issue this order through  2014, when it 
might have been politically risky. He questioned whether he had  the 
constitutional authority to do this through most of his first term, when he  
said that 
an executive order of this sort would probably be illegal.
 
But now the  president is in a rush and is convinced he has authority. I 
sympathize with what  Obama is trying to do substantively, but the process of 
how it’s being done is  ruinous. 

Republicans would rightly take it as a calculated insult  and yet more 
political ineptitude. Everybody would go into warfare mode. We’ll  get two more 
years of dysfunction that will further arouse public disgust and  
antigovernment fervor (making a Republican presidency more likely). 

This move would also make it much less likely that we’ll  have immigration 
reform anytime soon. White House officials are often  misinformed on what 
Republicans are privately discussing, so they don’t  understand that many in 
the Republican Party are trying to find a way to get  immigration reform out 
of the way. This executive order would destroy their  efforts.
 
The move would further destabilize the legitimacy of  government. 
Redefining the legal status of five million or six million human  beings is a 
big 
deal. This is the sort of change we have a legislative process  for. To do 
something this seismic with the stroke of one man’s pen is  dangerous. 
Instead of a nation of laws, we could slowly devolve into  a nation of 
diktats, with each president relying on and revoking different  measures on the 
basis of unilateral power — creating unstable swings from one  presidency to 
the next. If President Obama enacts this order on the  transparently flimsy 
basis of “prosecutorial discretion,” he’s inviting future  presidents to 
use similarly flimsy criteria. Talk about defining constitutional  deviancy 
down.
 
I’m not  sure why the Obama administration has been behaving so strangely 
since the  midterms. Maybe various people in the White House are angry in 
defeat and want  to show that they can be as obstructionist as anyone. Maybe, 
in moments of  stress, they are only really sensitive to criticism from the 
left flank. Maybe  it’s Gruberism: the belief that everybody else is slightly 
dumber and less  well-motivated than oneself and, therefore, politics is 
more about manipulation  than conversation. 
Whatever it  is, it’s been a long journey from the Iowa caucuses in early 
2008 to the  pre-emptive obstruction of today. I wonder if, post-presidency, 
Mr. Obama will  look back and regret that he got sucked into the very 
emotional maelstrom he set  out to destroy.

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