DOES THE CREDIT CRUNCH MAKE HIM NOT McGOVERN?:

The Next New Deal: The huge opportunities—and huge risks—of a possible Obama administration. (John Heilemann, Oct 26, 2008, New York Magazine)

It requires no prodigious feat of memory, of course, to see how this dream could come a cropper. Back in 1993, Bill Clinton surfed into Washington on a similar wave of enthusiasm and expectation. Democrats then, too, controlled both the upper and lower chambers on Capitol Hill. The party’s agenda was bold, ambitious, far-reaching. And then everything fell to pieces. In something like a heartbeat, Clinton’s reputation as a Third Way centrist was reduced to rubble. The degree of Democratic political malpractice was so severe that it enabled the GOP, in 1994, to snatch the reins of the House and Senate simultaneously for the first time in four decades. [...]

Late in the afternoon on the second day of the Democratic National Convention, several dozen contemporaries of Obama’s from Harvard Law School more than twenty years ago gathered in a private room at the Denver Ritz-Carlton for a cocktail party–cum–reunion. The mood was warm and convivial but sober in every sense. There was no high-fiving, no backslapping, no whooping or hollering. The bartender reported that he’d never served so few drinks at an open bar; Pellegrino was the only beverage in short supply.

That Obama’s impending coronation as the Democratic nominee occasioned no boisterous celebration on the part of some of his oldest friends was a function of many factors—their Harvardian, type-A tightassedness not least among them. But for some, a deeper source of reserve was a stubborn sense of doubt: not over whether Obama was equipped to be president but whether he could do, would do, what it took to capture the prize. “I was scared,” says one Obama classmate and Democratic activist. “A friend of mine, a big supporter of his all along, wrote me an e-mail that said, ‘Oh, my God, he is McGovern!’ ”

But then came the fall of Lehman, the implosion of AIG, and the constriction of the global credit markets—and the race began to turn. By the end of last week, Obama had assumed a commanding lead in almost every significant national poll. [...]

For Obama, doing the converse—widening the margin, running up the score—is more than a matter of political pride. The scale of his victory will determine the size and scope of the mandate that he can legitimately claim. If Obama racks up the totals currently projected by FiveThirtyEight’s resident numbers guru, Nate Silver, his Election Night tally will be impressive indeed: 52.2 percent of the popular vote (making him the first Democrat to break 50 since Jimmy Carter) and 354 electoral votes (a modest landslide). But equally critical in terms of governing will be another metric: the length of Obama’s coattails when it comes to the House and Senate.

Nobody understands this better than Obama—and so he has been applying ample pressure on the relevant players. “Obama has said to me, ‘If you guys don’t pick up a significant number of seats, it will be far more difficult for me to accomplish the kind of change America needs,’ ” Chuck Schumer tells me. “And he’s right. If we don’t, he would probably have to limit his proposals, let alone what he could reasonably expect to pass.”

For the second election cycle in a row, Schumer is at the helm of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Two years ago, he was widely credited for the party’s success in recapturing control of the upper chamber. Today, his eyes are firmly fixed on a grander prize: picking up the nine seats that Democrats would need to get them to 60, a filibusterproof majority.

On a recent Sunday, I drove out with Schumer to the annual bivalve festival in Oyster Bay, where I watched him both schmooze the crowd and chomp on an ear of corn with equally obscene gusto. When I asked him to rate his party’s prospects of reaching the magic number, Schumer cited—what else?—FiveThirtyEight: “They said there’s an over 50 percent chance that we pick up seven seats, 40 percent that we pick up eight, and 30 that we pick up nine, and that’s probably about accurate.”

Though 60 is Schumer’s holy grail, he contended that getting to 58 or 59 would be almost as good. “Every seat in the Senate makes a difference,” he said. “On an issue like taxes where the Republicans are all locked in together, like the Bush tax cuts, you might need 60. But on an issue where you can pick off one or two, like the Iraq war, you don’t. There are a large number, fifteen or twenty, of what I call traditional conservatives: John Warner, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Dick Lugar, Johnny Isakson, Bob Corker. I think they went along with the hard right for the past eight years grudgingly, because they felt the hard right had the upper hand. But if we get to 57, 58, 59, they’re going to smell the coffee. They’re going to be more pliable than before, more open to our arguments.”

On the House side, Rahm Emanuel radiates a similar brio about the Democrats’ outlook for November. Emanuel ran the party’s Congressional Campaign Committee for 2006, and although he’s graduated to chairman of the caucus, he remains neck-deep in data concerning competitive House contests. “North of 20 and less than 30,” is how Emanuel answers when I ask how many seats he expects his side to gain. “Yesterday I would have said 22, today I’m at 26. The way things are going, I need to keep opening up a bigger band.”

If Emanuel and Schumer are right in their estimations of what’s likely to play out on Election Day, the Democrats will enjoy commanding majorities in the next Congress. So commanding that the temptation will be nearly overwhelming in some quarters to declare 2008 a realigning election: the end of the Reagan-Bush era, the start of the Obama epoch.

It’s worth pointing out that the postulated Democratic numbers for 2009–11—57 to 59 seats in the Senate, 253 to 263 in the House—aren’t all that different from those that obtained in the doomstruck 1993–95 session. [...]

Obama advisers make no bones about why they see all this as essential: Given the unusually crisis-plagued environment into which Obama will be stepping, he will want to move quickly, especially when it comes to selecting his Cabinet. Almost certain to come first, perhaps within days, will be his economic and national-security teams. And with those choices, they say, he will want to send a message of centrism and bi-partisanship. It’s conceivable that Obama will ask Bob Gates to stay on as Defense secretary; Chuck Hagel, too, might find a place high in the administration. But although there has been chatter that Obama might also retain Hank Paulson at the Treasury, the inside betting is on a Larry Summers encore. “They’re gonna want somebody who knows the building, knows the economy, has been confirmed before and been advising them on economics,” says the former Clinton aide. “I’d be flabbergasted if they chose somebody else.”

Once the Cabinet is in place, Obama will turn to congressional relations, and here too the contrast with Clinton is likely to be pronounced. From the get-go, WJC and the Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate were at loggerheads. The old bulls regarded him as an outsider, an interloper, a president elected with just 43 percent of the vote—as someone to be pushed around. They informed him in no uncertain terms that they wouldn’t help him pass his promised package of political reforms. They pressured him (along with his wife) to put health-care reform ahead of welfare reform, a fateful blunder.

But Obama has no inbuilt animosity toward the congressional leadership. Sure, he vowed to transform Washington, but he did not run against it. He is surrounded by people—Emanuel, Podesta, former Tom Daschle aide Pete Rouse, and Daschle himself, who stands a reasonable chance of being Obama’s White House chief of staff—steeped in the legislative culture and masters of the legislative arena.

Not that dealing with a pair of institutions led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will be any kind of picnic. “They’re incredibly weak leaders running a Congress with 12 percent approval ratings,” one Democratic think-tank maven says. “They’re not people with much of a record of, you know, actually getting things done.” Making matters worse, Obama will be hounded constantly by the old-school liberal interest groups, with all their bottled-up desires and demands. The unions, the health-care groups, the teachers, and so on: Everyone will have their hand out.

It's natural to focus on the hash that Bill Clinton made of the Democrat majorities, but at least he was re-elected himself. The prior four Democrats to win the presidency couldn't get re-elected. In a conservative country a Democratic presidential victory -- with the exception of FDR's -- is just a way of hitting the pause button.

N.B.: Making Tom Daschle, another legislator, his chief of staff would be disastrous. He needs a strong executive to run his presidency for him, since he probably can't.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 27, 2008 9:23 AM