Losing the Syria vote does not turn Obama into a lame duck
ANALYSIS - The presidency is not one issue, or just about foreign policy...
The intense debate over Syria has caused speculation that if President Obama cannot convince the American public a strike in Syria is necessary, he will suffer a crippling defeat, lose his influence on a number of other issues and be rendered powerless for the next three years.
“If the president goes to Congress and says that this is in our national security, and Congress rejects it, if at the end of this process, the president loses, doesn’t he become a lame duck the next day?” Fox News Chris Wallace asked White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough on Sunday.
McDonough ducked the question, preferring to focus on the substance of the administration’s case for military action. But to be clear, no, Obama losing a vote on Syria does not turn him into a lame duck.
Would the defeat be bad for the president? Of course. Polls show majorities of not only conservatives, who oppose much of what Obama does on every issue, but also liberals and moderates disagree with the president on intervening in Syria. If a vote gets to the House of Representatives, there’s a chance it will be defeated with large blocs of liberals and black members of Congress voting against a president who they have strongly supported for much of the last five years. The White House would have made an all-out blitz to win the support of American voters and Congress and lost.
A defeat would show Obama’s words on chemical weapons and perhaps other foreign policy ideas won’t be supported by deeds. It would also illustrate Americans are even more wary of intervention in other nations than was generally believed and likely block Obama from any kind of military action in the future, even the kind of limited steps he took in Libya two years ago.
But the presidency is not one issue, or just about foreign policy. If the House or the Senate blocks action in Syria, Republicans still would be wise to back the immigration bill the Senate passed earlier this year, giving Obama a major victory but also making it easier for the GOP to win Latino votes in the future. House Republicans, divided internally on that issue, have been delaying consideration of the bill, and that process is unaffected by what happens on Syria.
The Obama administration, even if it does not act in Syria, will still be implementing a far-reaching health care law that could provide health insurance to millions of Americans. The president will still have the use of the bully pulpit, to make the case against America’s growing income inequality and urge our society to focus more on the specific challenges faced by African-American males, as Obama suggested he would do after the George Zimmerman verdict. The administration can still fight controversial voting laws passed in Republican-led states, urge fewer prosecutions of non-violent drug offenders and support the growing American acceptance of gay marriage.
And it wasn’t as if Obama’s agenda had been moving quickly through Congress before he starting talking about Syria. Republicans in the Senate had blocked his gun control push, the House delayed the immigration bill and members of both parties were not fully on board with his economic agenda. Before Syria was in the headlines, the administration was planning to spend September pushing for Congress to approve government funding for the next year and raise the federal debt limit, the kind of necessary but unexciting lawmaking that Obama has been limited to since Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2010.
That’s the key factor here: Republican control of the House. Much speculation has centered on Obama losing his “political capital” or his ability to influence Congress and the public over the last three years. But the evidence is fairly clear; Obama has struggled to get legislation through Congress since its membership came to include many more Republicans, who disagree with him on most issues. If Obama wanted to cut taxes on the wealthy Americans or allow the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, both ideas Republicans strongly support, they could easily be passed in Congress.
A loss by Obama on Syria won’t change the views of Republicans, who were already against most of what Obama proposed, or congressional Democrats, who won’t suddenly stop supporting Obamacare or other presidential initiatives.
If the president is barred from attacking Syria by Congress, that will not be the last real day of his presidency. The next day will not be the first day of the 2016 campaign, which has long been underway anyway. President George W. Bush’s poll numbers dropped quickly after his mishandling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and it was considered the end of presidency. But he still managed to implement a whole new strategy in Iraq and loan billions of taxpayer dollars to American banks and auto companies in his last two years in office — hardly the stuff of a man who was powerless.
No matter what happens in Syria, Barack Obama will still have more than 1200 days to make an impact on American public policy and culture.
