The House of His Dreams

Obama campaigns for a Democratic Congress. Good luck with that.

 

By James Taranto
WSJ.com

President Obama's preantepenultimate State of the Union address reinforced the perception that he has, for the most part, given up on working constructively in a divided government. His supporters will say he is resolute and the Republicans are pigheaded; his opponents (including this column) would reverse the adjectives. A neutral way of describing it is that the two parties' worldviews are irreconcilable.

Obama last night called for more spending on "stimulus" and "green energy" projects, higher taxes (including on energy), a minimum wage hike, new antidiscrimination and gun-control laws and even a federal nursery-school entitlement. Only on immigration, a subject on which there are divides in both parties, did there seem to be room for compromise. "In its ambition and partisan framing, the agenda sounded like the opening bell in the 2014 Congressional campaign, an attempt to mobilize the new liberal majority he believes he has forged in his first four years," editorializes The Wall Street Journal.

The New York Times, which of course cheers the agenda, seems to agree with that analysis. Its editorial doesn't expressly mention the 2014 campaign, but the implication is hard to miss:

What is required to move the country forward is political will, which has been missing for too long. While many of the president's proposals were familiar, and will probably be snuffed out by politics, his speech explained to a wide audience what could be achieved if there were even a minimal consensus in Washington. . . .

Mr. Obama's broad second-term agenda is impressive. It is largely what won him re-election. His task now is to turn his widespread public support into a wedge to break Washington's gridlock.

If the Democrats win the House next year, it would be a historic first. Never has the president's party taken control of the chamber in a second-term midterm election, and only once, in 1998, has it even gained seats (and then only five of them). That includes not only presidents elected to two full terms but also the four vice presidents who won a full term after succeeding their predecessors.

Of course unprecedented things do happen in politics. Never before 2010 had a party captured the House while leaving the Senate in the other party's hands. And last year Obama became the first president to be elected to a second term with a smaller popular-vote total than in his first election. But the rarity of such occurrences suggests that they are the product of unusual or changed circumstances.

Do today's circumstances point toward a precedent-shattering Democratic victory in 2014? We think not. One may harbor doubts about the reliability of our prognostication here, given that we were among those who greatly underestimated Obama's re-election chances. But it seems to us that error does not augur well for Democratic House prospects.

We were skeptical of polls that showed Obama in the lead because their partisan composition seemed suspicious to us. The 2008 electorate, according to exit polls, was 39% Democratic and only 32% Republican. The 2010 electorate was evenly split at 35%. The polls suggested the 2012 electorate would look like 2008, which we thought unlikely given the high initial expectations of Obama and his disappointing performance in office. We were wrong: The partisan gap in 2012 narrowed by only one point, to 38% Democratic and 32% Republican.

The trouble for the Democrats is that the 2012 electorate voted for a Republican House.

 

The reason for that is not that a majority of voters, or even anywhere near a plurality, prefer divided government. It is, rather, that presidential candidates seek to carry states, House members campaign in districts that are smaller, more homogeneous and redrawn each decade, in the case of the current district lines more often to advantage Republicans than Democrats.

In a column last month, we cited a Puffington Host analysis that found Mitt Romney would have won the election with 273 electoral votes if every congressional district had a single electoral vote (as is currently the case in Maine and Nebraska only). That includes 48 statewide electoral votes from the 24 states Romney carried, so that Romney outpolled Obama in 225 congressional districts--not far short of the 233 districts where GOP House candidates won.

The map that accompanies the Puffington Host analysis shows that Romney outpolled Obama in a majority of congressional districts in each of six states the president carried: Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. Republicans are the majority, in some cases lopsidedly so, in all these states' House delegations. Democrats in these states tend to be concentrated in urban strongholds such as South Florida, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Northern Virginia and Milwaukee.

Turning those voters out in large numbers helped Obama carry those states, but the combination of geographic concentration and Republican gerrymandering after the 2010 census ensures that most of them are in safe Democratic congressional districts--and assures that most districts in the state are GOP-friendly.

Democrats gerrymander too, of course, in states like Illinois and Maryland, where they control the process of drawing district lines. Although California has an independent commission to draw district lines, it arguably ended up with a Democratic gerrymander, too: ProPublica reported in 2011 that Dems gamed the system by sending partisan operatives, who "identified themselves as ordinary Californians and did not disclose their ties to the party," to testify before the commission.

For the most part, the post-2010 gerrymandering solidified Republican gains in the states where they controlled the process and allowed Democrats to pick up seats in states where they did. Those gains are in the bank, since according to custom states won't redraw their lines until after 2020. Which means that to win the House in 2014, the Democrats would have to carry districts that not only sent Republicans to the House in 2012 but preferred Romney to Obama. If Obama is betting his presidency on a Democratic House in 2015-16, it's a long shot.

Burn, Baby, Burn
"It is our generation's task, then, to reignite the true engine of America's economic growth--a rising, thriving middle class."--Barack Obama, State of the Union, Feb. 12

'A Paying-For Problem'
Here's some crystal-clear Washingtonian thinking from Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic whip, in an interview with CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera:

Caruso-Cabrera: Does the country have a spending problem sir? Does the country have a spending problem?

Hoyer: Does the country have a spending problem? The country has a paying for problem. We haven't paid for what we bought, we haven't paid for our tax cuts, we haven't paid for war.

Caruso-Cabrera: How about what we promised? Are we promising too much?

Hoyer: Absolutely. If we don't pay, we shouldn't buy.

Caruso-Cabrera: So how is that different than a spending problem?

Hoyer: Well, we spent a lot of money when George Bush was president of the United States in the House and Senate were controlled by Republicans. We spent a lot of money.

Note how, when Caruso-Cabrera defeats Hoyer's attempt to evade acknowledging the problem, he shifts to evading responsibility for the problem. Of course if the problem were simply that Republicans spend too much, Hoyer could have said the spending problem was solved when Democrats won Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008. In reality, both parties spend too much, which is to say that the answer to Caruso-Cabrera's original question is affirmative: The country has a spending problem.

Everybody Talks About the Weather, but Nobody Defies It and Gets Arrested
The Hill's Congress Blog features a bizarre contribution by Julian Bond, a veteran civil-rights leader (best known for his stint as NAACP chairman) and Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. The title is "When the Climate Crisis Merits Civil Disobedience," and it begins:

With the announcement that the Sierra Club will engage in an act of civil disobedience for the first time in its 120-year history, this grassroots environmental organization is stepping up to join a long and honorable American tradition that civil rights advocates and so many others have used to strengthen American values.

The piece is all rhetoric and no substance. We never even learn what "act of civil disobedience" the Sierra Club intends to engage in or precisely what putative injustice it is protesting. The obvious aim of the article is to transfuse the moral credibility of the civil rights movement to the cause of global warmism.

There's something sad about Bond participating in such an effort. Civil disobedience was an effective tactic for the civil rights movement, but it doesn't even make sense as a response to bad weather. But we suppose when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.