Caesarism without apology

Well, as the Clintonites of yore might say, it all depends on what the meaning of the word “worked” is. Has “bold progressive action” — that is, executive unilateralism on issues where the Congress is theoretically supposed to have some say — been politically successful in the traditional sense of making this president more popular, and therefore more capable of furthering his preferred policies through the normal constitutional channels of elections and legislative votes? Maybe so, but the evidence seems lacking: The pattern of Obama’s fluctuating approval ratings suggests instead that there is still a persuadable center in American politics (however diminished), and that this center viewed the president more favorably back when he was trying to work with the Republican Congress (however unsuccessfully) than it has during his more unilateralist second term, which of course also featured a midterm clobbering for his party’s representatives in Congress. You could argue, again based on the polling numbers, that his subsequent refusal to be even mildly chastened by this defeat did rally the base somewhat — but to the extent that it “caused people to cheer,” that cheering managed to move him from truly dire approval ratings to the merely-mediocre, six points underwater despite an even-more-unpopular opposition and reasonably-strong economic growth.

Of course this unpopularity isn’t primarily caused by the White House’s shift to unilateralism; its roots are much more complicated. (Obama’s immigration power grab earned headlines and polled badly, but the debate came and went, and I’m doubtful that an issue like net neutrality is on many voters’ radar screens.) But it’s still strange for a White House adviser to dismiss the #thistown naysayers who questioned the political consequences of this strategy by saying, “see, it obviously worked” when as a political matter there’s precious little evidence that the strategy benefited Obama, and less evidence still that it’s done anything for his political party, which outside of presidential cycles has spent his entire presidency lurching from defeat to defeat. (I wonder, in particular, what the many Democrats who ran and lost in red-to-purple states in 2014 think about Pfeiffer’s indifference to the “what will this mean in red states” question.)

Unless, of course, you just define “worked” to mean “changed public policy without the opposition being able to stop us,” in which case we’re just dealing with Caesarism justified by consequentialism, and Pfeiffer’s argument is the boasting of a successful machiavel, unmoored both from constitutional norms and his boss’s own once-professed ideals. Which seems like the more accurate reading of the account he’s giving Chait: It’s less a story of how this president forged a political strategy better suited to our polarized times than it is a story of how Obama realized that a second-term president in an era of gridlock doesn’t need to be politically successful to put his stamp on major policy arenas … he just needs to let go of any principled concerns about what a president can and cannot do.