"Organizing Congress" means helping it be able to address serious problems, and solve them, on its own

Back in December, I wrote a comment at Al Giordano's blog, The Field, about why I think Obama lets Congress take the lead. It's because he is trying to organize the Senate:

I think that one of the things that Obama may have wanted to achieve with this process is to prove that Congress and especially the Senate is capable of addressing serious national problems in a meaningful way. That its members can come together and work through their differences to pass important legislation.

That means letting them take the lead, even letting them stumble and fall then pick themselves up and keep going. I suspect that Obama did a lot more behind the scenes than we know, especially in terms of putting steel in Harry Reid's spine, but the president's role should be on the sidelines cheering Congress on, not running the whole process himself.

Building a Congress that can actually act as a co-equal branch of goverment will bring benefits both for the rest of the legislative agenda (cap and trade, financial regulation, immigration reform, etc) and also further in the future, especially when there is a Republican president.

A lot of Democrats (including some in Congress) seem to act like small children who cause a mess then cry for Daddy to come fix everything for them (some foreign leaders seem to act the same). This kind of dysfunctional situation is bad for our democracy and bad for the cause of progressive change.

Hopefully, this process has been a step towards a more healthy relationship between the presidency and Congress.


I followed up on that theme tonight with a few thoughts I have been tweeting about:

Awhile ago I wrote about organizing the Senate. I think that reading this comment may give people a better idea where I am coming from. If this last week has proved anything, it is that Congress as an institution is broken. I think that part of Obama's "reticence" over the past year is that he is trying to get Congress to grow up and be able to take care of its own business. He wants it to be a co-equal branch of government. And we all need it to be a co-equal branch of government, so that it can function and get things done even when there is a Republican president.

The problem we are facing as a country is systemic. It will not be changed by the President changing his personality, his style, or his messaging. It will be changed by rebuilding the system. We need to identify what is wrong with Congress, what the causes are, and how we can fix them. In my opinion, if your proposed solution is for Obama to change something he does or is, you are looking in the wrong place. The problem is not the president. It is that the president by himself cannot fix a broken system.

Too much of the left, again, has a fetish with executive power (which I think we have absorbed from the right) and we are now seeing the limits of this approach.

Organize Congress!


And just for completeness, from a few days ago about wanting Superman or Daddy to come fix everything:

Al has commented before that many progressives seem to want a Daddy figure and I'm really seeing that in a lot of the responses to the current situation. Some is purely childish ("Waa, everything is broken, Daddy Obama better come fix it now for me!") but even some of the more reasoned responses seem to want Obama to fulfill an emotional need for them or to act like an authoritarian figure who simply "lays down the law" and apparently everybody will listen and behave. It is true that Congressional Democrats seem to be acting like young children (ahem, Raul Grijalva) but nobody seems to realize how dysfunctional this is. We are all adults with the capacity to act. The Balloon Juice blog is organizing readers to call their Representatives and is compiling a roll call to determine where they stand. This is a simple practical thing that helps us find out the lay of the land and what the realistic courses of action are, and is about 100 times more useful that what most on blogs and Twitter are doing right now.

I will also repeat what I said before, you are not a leader if you just march off on your own with no one following you. For Obama to make a big show of laying down the law when nobody knows yet what can realistically be accomplished, would be foolish and counter-productive. The only reason to ask for him to do it now, in my opinion, is because it makes us feel better in some vague way.

The House and Senate leadership are the ones who need to work with their members to calm them down and to determine what can be done. Then they and Obama can work cooperatively towards achieving that.

That is what adults do to resolve their problems.