Jonathan Bernstein claims that “Obama has done no more or less than what any Democratic president in his circumstances would have done.” Chait takes exception:
It’s surely true that any Democratic president would have pursued health-care reform in 2009. But as the health-care bill dragged on, while it, Obama, and Democrats in Congress grew increasingly unpopular, many Democrats would have pulled the plug and tried to get out with a small, incremental bill. In late August of 2009, Jonathan Cohn later said in his deeply reported reconstruction of the bill’s passage that both Joe Biden and Rahm Emanuel wanted to pull the plug on comprehensive reform, but Obama overruled the. … Now, the logic of passage was always clear to those who paid close attention to the legislative dynamics, but not everybody did. If [after Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts] Obama had given up on health care, most analysts in Washington — and even many Democrats — would have deemed it a sensible, or even perfectly obvious, decision.
On most issues, Obama simply used his power the way any member of his party would have. On climate and health care, he bucked significant pockets of intra-party disagreement — not about policy goals themselves, which the whole Party shared, but of the prudence of accepting political risk to achieve them. And these two episodes where Obama’s own intervention proved decisive happen to be the two largest pieces of his domestic legacy.
I simply cannot imagine, for that matter, a Clinton backing marriage quality and military service with the same intensifying momentum as Obama, or a more liberal Democrat defending the NSA as strongly as Obama has. In some of these areas, perhaps, Obama is less an out-of-the-box Democrat than merely a Democrat of a certain generation. Which makes the looming ascendancy of someone well into her sixties seem such a strange leap forward into the past.
