Elsewhere: Post-party, LBJ,

New Salon column: it turns out that of the ten low-numbered bills reserved for the party agenda, Republicans in the House have only used...one. They really aren't even trying to pretend they have an agenda, do they? And no, it's not a conservative/liberal thing: Republicans usually have no shortage of bills to highlight. It's this group.

Over at PP, I'm asking for please no more LBJ comparisons. One reason? There's a good chance that Johnson's overbearing arm-twisting backfired in the long run.

Yesterday, I argued that on immigration, the key players are House mainstream conservatives. John Boehner will ultimately do what they want. And yesterday at Greg's place, I noted that Republicans are still pushing the same old "cut spending, except on any program you name" talking points.

Q Day 5: Presidential Persuasion

Bill Harshaw asks:

Okay, you aren't on board with shmoozing as being important for a President, how about good ole Texas style arm-twisting a la LBJ? Or has that gone out the window with the pork barrel?

Presidents should attempt to use whatever they can to persuade, whether their targets are interest groups, Members of Congress, bureaucrats, leaders of foreign nations, party leaders, whoever.

What Neustadt says, more or less, is that substance mostly trumps style. Presidents usually don't persuade by badgering, bullying, sweet-talking, or befriending. Yes, those things can help. Perhaps a related point Neustadt does mention is something that Newt Gingrich has talked about, which is that just walking in to the Oval Office can be intimidating. They aren't the main tool.

In the long run, presidents persuade best by changing incentives or by finding something to trade that the target wants. Now, it's possible that what a Member of Congress might really want is to hang out with the president! Or, say, a Member might really care about being on the invitation list for a state dinner, perhaps because that's what it's going to take to make his or her spouse happy. But that's not really about making a transaction easier by establishing a smoother relationship, is it? What it is about, and what LBJ was really good at, is figuring out just what each Member of Congress (or bureaucrat, or governor) really wants. That takes political instinct, but it mostly takes information. Or, perhaps, a combination; it takes constantly seeking out information and having good instincts for what information is helpful -- for learning to see everything as a potential bargaining chip and knowing how to use it.

Remember, with Johnson, his bullying style may well have won him some victories, but it also made him enemies, and may well in the end made it harder for him to learn things he needed to know, whether on implementation of Great Society programs or, of course, on Vietnam.

And that's only on the bargaining part of things. I do think it's important -- but the bargaining president model shortchanges the overall political context. It's certainly easier for Obama to convince the 111th Congress to do something than the 113th Congress, no matter how skilled he might be.

So, sure, reading people and knowing how to adapt during negotiations, whether it's to turn on the charm or turn on the bully, is a useful skill for a president. It's just real easy, in my view, to overrate it.

Catch of the Day

Yesterday, really, but a very nice post by Alec MacGillis pointing out (1) that all the Robert Caro worship tends to promote the idea that presidential skill is all that separates LBJ from all the presidents who didn't pass as many things through Congress; (2) that Caro himself has encouraged that sort of thinking (not the Caro worship, but the Great Man view of history; (3) and that Caro actually played a small role in preserving the filibuster back in the previous decade, which is relevant because Senate rules are a big part of why Barack Obama's success has been limited.

None of which takes away from Caro's strengths (although I've only dipped into bits of the Johnson books; I'm a bit fan of the Moses book). However, exactly right. I'm one who does place quite a bit of emphasis on presidential skill as an important variable (which is why I'm constantly quoting Neustadt), but it's clearly true that context matters -- which includes the party structure, the party balance in Congress, the rules and norms in Congress, and other portions of the political situation.

The other piece of this is that with LBJ you have to ask: were the short-term gains from bullying and manipulation costly in the long run? I don't know the answer to that, but I've always suspected (following both Nelson Polsby and, I think, Neustadt) that Johnson's troubles were very much related to his style.

At any rate: Nice catch!

A Theory of Interesting Presidents

Stanley Cutler says that "of all the presidents in the last 50 years, it is Nixon that’s the most interesting." Is Nixon more interesting than LBJ? I'm not sure. I would say, however, that I find Nixon, Johnson, and Reagan to be the most fascinating postwar presidents.

Which suggests a theory of interesting presidents: the partisan presidency makes for less interesting presidents. Generally, the partisan presidency began to form as early as the Carter years, but really didn't pick up steam until the Reagan administration; it's pretty much fully formed, I would say, by George H.W. Bush's presidency.

The idea would be that partisan presidencies are much less likely to take on the shape of the president's personality. So Barack Obama or George W. Bush might be just as inherently interesting as John F. Kennedy or Jimmy Carter, but it just doesn't matter as much; what they do as president is much more a function of party than presidential personality.

To be sure: even now, personality (and skills, and other president-specific traits) certainly can matter. But less so, perhaps, than they did when party was less important.

Is this theory correct? I have no idea. Reagan doesn't quite fit. And it's certainly very possible that my sense of the presidents who are interesting is highly subjective -- or, that it might be influenced by other things that have nothing to do with party. It's certainly also possible that the three I find most interesting really are, in some sense, the most interesting -- but that it's just random luck that two of them served during the peak of the personal presidency.

So, who do you think were the most interesting postwar presidents?

Catch of the Day

Joseph Califano's "back in my day" op-ed about How To Handle Congress is absolutely demolished by Dylan Matthews.

I think Matthews caught just about all of the specific reasons to pretty much ignore the op-ed, but I'll add one more: it's worth noting that Lyndon Johnson's bullying style, whatever its strengths, wound up getting him exiled from Washington. Bullying, it turned out, traded short-term gains for long term disaster, for both Johnson and, then, although the style was different, Richard Nixon.

Yes, presidents should often fight hard when bargaining with Members of Congress (or the other people who they need to cut deals with). But both Johnson and Nixon found that there were severe policy and political consequences to treating themselves as the only legitimate policy makers, and treating everyone else with contempt. Johnson, in particular, found out that when you lie to and constantly humiliate everyone around you, they're not going to be particularly eager to tell you things you may not want to hear -- and they're not going to be particularly loyal to you when things go south.

Presidents for the Fourth Johnson/Jackson

Andrew Jackson's stock is falling.  New Deal historians loved Jackson, which makes sense in the same way that it makes sense that they loved Woodrow Wilson.  As the Democratic Party moved away from its traditional defense of bigotry, however, loving Wilson and Jackson has become far more problematic for newer generations of historians.  Jackson used to be a great president, finishing comfortably in the top ten in these sorts of surveys; Siena College now has him in the next tier down, at #14, which is consistent with where others have placed him recently.  In Siena's categories, Jackson scores very high on Leadership (#5), Party Leadership (#2), and Executive Ability (#6); he's at the low end on Ability to Compromise (#38), the economy (#28), and low on Integrity and Intelligence (#23, on each). 

Lyndon Johnson has settled in more or less in the same area.  He's 16th in Siena's survey;.in the fourteen such surveys in wikipedia's entry, he's as high as 10th and as low as 18th.  Within the rankings, however, Johnson is like Jackson, with plenty of extremes.  Siena has him the very best at Relationship with Congress, and third at Party Leadership.  He's 5th in Domestic Accomplishments.  On the other hand...he's dead last in Foreign Policy Accomplishments, 37th in "Avoid Crucial Mistakes," 34th in Integrity. 

Let's see...first of all, on LBJ, I think the party leadership score is way too high; they don't (at least in their release) define what "Relationship with Congress"  means but it deteriorated pretty badly by the end, so I'm not sure that I'd put it in the top ten -- although he obviously had as much legislative success as any other president.  Again, it's how you define the terms, and how you count things.

Which is sort of my overall point in this post.  Granted, this is just a parlor game to begin with, but even as a parlor game it basically breaks down when you try to deal with these two presidents.  How do you average out Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Immigration...and Vietnam?  How do you average out the achievement of, well, Jacksonian democracy, with all that that implies, positive and negative?  Yes, Siena includes a category for "integrity," but there's no category for "Actions of a Moral Monster" -- and if there were, how would you weigh it? 

So I can't say that either Jackson or Johnson is overrated, or underrated...they just don't work in the Rating the Presidents Game, as far as I can tell.

Style Points

Sheryl Gay Stolberg's article on Barack Obama's negotiating style in today's NYT strikes me as a really good piece of reporting trapped in a forced and unfortunate analysis.  Her thesis is:

Ever since his days as a young community organizer in Chicago, Mr. Obama has held fast to the belief that by listening carefully and appealing to reason he can bring people together to get results, an approach that in Washington has often come up short.

And yet... her reporting doesn't seem to match that thesis at all.  Her opening vignette is about the House/Senate health care negotiations, but she doesn't finish the story, and in fact what we know is that those negotiations eventually were largely successful until the Massachusetts Senate election rendered them (sort of) moot.  The next two stories are mixed results, with Obama failing to win Olympia Snowe's vote on health care but succeeding with Jay Rockefeller.  And, well, that's it.  The only "failure" story to support "often come up short" is that he couldn't keep Snowe on board for the health care bill when it reached the Senate floor, but of course in any larger sense it's hard to say the president came up short when his position prevailed. 

In fact, the president hasn't lost a lot of close ones in Congress so far.  The stimulus bill and health care in the Senate, and climate/energy and health care in the House, all prevailed in close votes.  There have certainly been setbacks, but those don't seem to be the sorts of cases that personal persuasion might have turned around.  Perhaps that's wrong -- but if so, where's the evidence from the story? 

A larger problem, I think, is that Stolberg constructs a framework in which Lyndon Johnson's style -- "an arm around the shoulder, a full-body lean, a finger poking into the chest" -- is assumed to be the gold standard for political one-on-one influence.  There are certainly plenty of stories of Johnson intimidating, and humiliating, those around him.  And Johnson was without a doubt a master manipulator.  It's less clear to me, however, that Johnson's bullying style was something that a president would want to emulate.  Johnson was also known as an information sponge, someone who knew everything about every Senator, and knew how to deploy that knowledge for maximum manipulative effect. 

Moreover, as effective as the Johnson Treatment was in the Senate and early in his presidency, it was apparently pretty worthless when things started going badly.  This is hardly surprising.  Humiliating people might be effective in bullying them into actions today, but it is unlikely to make a loyal friend for tomorrow.  A better example to emulate might be FDR, who by all reports was at least as good at collecting and deploying information to manipulate others as Johnson, but without the physical intimidation.  A larger point might be that there's no reason to assume that we know what constitutes "toughness" in negotiations.  And, again, Stolberg just doesn't give us very much in the article to support either that Obama has or has not been effective.

What she does give us, however, is some excellent (if true -- always hard to tell with a sitting president whether something is someone's spin or not) into how Barack Obama operates.  Nothing in the story is a great surprise, but there's good detail here to flesh out what we know.  Obama likes sit back; he doesn't, according to Louis Slaughter, dominate a room.  I don't think I've ever heard anyone say anything like that about any other president, certainly not as president; that's an extraordinary claim.  We also learn that he is always in control of his emotions, but that there's "sort of steel in his voice," at least according to Steny Hoyer.  One does get the sense that Obama enjoys a good cop, bad cop strategy, in which he has a succession of people -- White House staff, Congressional leaders -- play the bad cop on his behalf.  I'd say that sounds more like Ronald Reagan than any other recent president, although I'd guess that it's perhaps a more deliberate strategy by Obama than it was by Reagan, who seemed more of a personality-driven conflict avoider.. 

The other, and perhaps less amorphous, important piece of Obama's style Stolberg reports is that "during his 13-month-old presidency, he has had countless one-on-one meetings with lawmakers."  I'd love to see a bit more detail on that, but it strikes me as very interesting, and at least perhaps a good long-term strategy.  For example, just this week Jay Rockefeller did what I'd consider to be a favor to the president by shooting down the attempt to bring back the debate on the public option.  Is that, to some extent, a consequence of the time the president has spend with him?  Can we expect future dividends from the time he spent with Olympia Snowe, even if he didn't win her vote on health care?

So: I do recommend the this story, but as you read it, strip away the evaluative framework; the takeaway here is the details, not the conclusions.