“The Politics Will Catch Up”—Part I

Is the President so dissatisified with his guaranteed historical electoral legacy? Could he be trying to cash in on an instant political legacy at the expense of his party, and even his reelection prospects?

Conventional historical wisdom holds that the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 turned the American South into permanent republican territory. Legend has it that he put down his pen after singing the 1964 Act, Lyndon Johnson told an aide ''We have lost the South for a generation." Similarly, the political price of forcing the legislation of a federally mandated system of health care has become increasingly clear to anyone with any political sensibility. However, a modicum of foresight might indicate the inevitablity of some kind of electoral “correction” to the current Democratic supermajority, as may or may have not been heralded by the special election of Scott Brown.

When White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs hopes that “that the politics will catch up”, he seems to have an eye on the above analog, if he is not praying that health care legislation ends up with the historical import of civil rights. However, a more directly relevant and/or accurate analog might be embodied in Senator Mitch McConnell’s claim that the Democrats “want to pass this anyway just to basically ignore the opinion of the American population and go ahead with this bill.”

In that vein, it might be more useful to employ another historical analogy. In the past century, there have been three instances of Democrats seizing control of Congress, and then the White House, in direct reaction to Republican crises: the 1930 midterms and 1932 general elections—in response to the Wall Street Crash and Great Depression; the 1974 midterms and 1976 general elections—in response to Watergate; and the 2006 midterms and 1980 general elections—in response to Katrina, Foleygate, Abramoff/Neygate, and finally, the housing crash. The question would seem to be: would one find that the contemporary situation mirrors 1930-2 or 1974-6 more closely?

One would obviously hope that the Great Recession “stays” a recession, which is actually mostly likely; as related in Liaquat Ahamed’s “Lords of Finance”, one of the reasons for the Depression’s severity was that the Federal Government of the 1920’s and 1930’s simply wasn’t equipped—read: big enough [!]—to handle the consequences of out-of-control economic indicators. Similarly, no one would compare any of the aforementioned “-gates” to the original, other than doctrinaire “W. Was The Worst President Ever” types [and, in that case, the politics will almost certainly catch up, eventually.]

To answer the questions I posed at the top of this post, this incessant drive to pass any type of “health-care reform” may simply be a case of the President’s personal inability to delay legacy gratification. This might be a direct side effect of the undeniable historical moment of his election and his possibly suffering a sort of withdrawal from the “high” of that moment; he needs to recapture that moment as fast as he possibly can with the least amount of effort and cement it forever.

Ironic, then, that it’s going to take health care for him to get his fix. [I'm sure someone came up with that before, but still...]