Clinton pursued agreements across party lines more consistently than either Bush or Obama. But this persistent polarization likely owes less to the three men’s specific choices than to structural forces that are increasingly preventing any leader, no matter how well-intentioned, from functioning as more than “the president of half of America.”
That phrase, coined by Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, aptly describes an environment in which presidents now find it almost impossible to sustain public or legislative support beyond their core coalition.
That dynamic is partly explained by institutional changes that have transformed Congress into a quasi-parliamentary institution and hindered presidents from building productive partnerships with the opposite party.
The move by both parties to rely less on seniority and more on votes by their full membership when allocating coveted committee chairmanships has increased pressure on legislators to toe the party line, which almost always discourages cooperation with the other side. The rise of national fundraising networks to bankroll more primary challenges has reinforced that effect: Legislators today are denied renomination for compromising too much, not too little. And the roar of overtly liberal and conservative media has provided each party’s ideological vanguard another powerful cudgel against legislators tempted to stray.
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