obamaism

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Varieties of Obamaism: Structure,Agency, and the Obama PresidencyLawrence R. Jacobs and Desmond S. King

President Obama’s record stands out among modern presidents because of the wide range between his accomplishments and theboldness of his as-yet unfulfilled promises. Obamaism is a complex phenomenon, with multiple themes and policy ends. In thispaper we examine the administration’s initiatives drawing upon recent scholarship in political science to consider the political,economic andinstitutional constraints that Obama has faced andto assess how he hasfaced them. Ourkey theme is the importanceof integrating the study of presidency and public leadership with the study of the political economy of the state. The paper arguesagainst personalistic accounts of the Obama presidency in favor of a structured agency approach.

The first eighteen months of Barack Obama’s presi-dency have been marked by startling contrasts thatboth define his administration and underscore the

need for a more integrated approach to analyzing presi-dential leadership. With the largest popular vote in twodecades and the largest Democratic victory margin sinceLyndon Johnson, Obama smashed the race barrier andinspired majorities of voters to believe in the possibility of change that would remedy the country’s economic prob-lems while soothing the long-standing and bitter partisandivide. The high hopes surrounding Obama’s electionboosted his approval to stratospheric levels of 60 percentor higher during his first months in office and were—aftera tortuous year—realized in the passage of historic reformsof health care and higher education. These reforms willreshape policy and politics in these areas for decades. Butthese accomplishments coincided with his failure (todate) to deliver on a new, post-partisan politics; toenact far-reaching legislation on labor, immigration, andenergy; and to recast foreign policy toward the Middle

East and global climate change. The striking contrastsbetween historic accomplishment and abject failure arealso accompanied by more ambiguous cases. None standsout more than the strained effort to enact reform of

America’s financial system to prevent a repeat of Wall Street’scrisis and its disastrous consequences for the economy.Reform has been substantially watered down and falls farshort of the restructuring that the administration pro-posed and that many experts recommend to prevent futuresystem breakdowns.1

All presidents, of course, experience mixed success. ButObama’s record stands out among modern presidentsbecauseof thewide range between hisaccomplishments andthe boldness of his as-yet unfulfilled promises. Obamaism,then, is a complex phenomenon, condensing many themesand policy goals, and characterized by variable degrees of success. While it is too early to deliver a historical “verdict”on the Obama presidency, there has been no dearthof pub-lic commentary, and too much of it oversimplifies.We takea step back and examine the administration’s initiatives,drawing uponrecent scholarship in political science to con-sider the political, economic, and institutional constraints

that Obama has faced and to assess how he has faced them.Our key theme is the importance of integrating the study of presidency and public leadership with the study of thepolitical economy of the state.

We begin below by pushing back against thepersonalistic accounts of the Obama presidency in favorof a structured agency approach. We will outline thestructural context that constrains his actions in waysobscured by the all-too-common privileging of personaltraits and specify his relative skill in identifying vulnera-bilities, designing suitably-targeted policies, and building the support to enact them.

Lawrence R. Jacobs is Walter F. and Joan Mondale Profes-sor and Chair of Politics and Governance, University of

Minnesota ([email protected]). Desmond S. King is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Government and Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford ([email protected] ). An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on “Reconstitut-ing the American State: The Promise and Dilemmas of Obama’s First Year,” March 11–12, 2010, Nuffield Col-lege, Oxford organized by Jacobs and King. The authors are

grateful for valuable comments from conference participants and especially from Jeff Isaac.

Reflections

doi:10.1017/S1537592710002033 September 2010 | Vol. 8/No. 3 793

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The Limits of Personalism

Much popular commentary has attributed Obama’s accom-plishments and setbacks to his personality and that of hissenior advisors. Echoing the broad frustration of many supporters of Obama’s reform agenda in the weeks follow-ing the victory of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts US

race, Mike Lux (a former Clinton White House staffer)blamed Obama’s “passivity” and “lack of leadership onpulling everyone together” for the failure to move healthreform. Liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugmancriticized Obama for “not enough audacity” owing to hisinsufficient tenacity or naïve belief in the possibilities for“‘post-partisan’ . . . common ground where none exists.”2

The persistent result, Krugman suggests, has been “poli-cies that are far too weak” and “cautious,” due to Obama’sfailure “to exploit his early opportunities” and his “strong mandate . . . to take bold action” after his election. Otherobservers have criticized Obama and his aides for failing

to engage in a “radical rethink” of existing political eco-nomic arrangements and, in particular, the “busted” modelof free market.3 Indicative of a general criticism, JosephStiglitz disapproves of Obama’s overly deferential approachto finance reform because it “muddle[s] through” insteadof breaking up big banks, heavily regulating derivatives,and suffocating the securitization of mortgages.4

Beyond criticizing his supposedly cautious personality,commentators have repeatedly focused on Obama’s failureto perform what one Senate aide called a “major sales

job.”5 Other Washingtonians have yearned for “moretoughness” and the ability to “dominat[e] the room.”6

The personalistic account is alluring. The press chron-icles in minute detail the travails and whims of the presi-dent and White House staff. It is hard to resist drawing

what intuitively seems like reasonable connections between,say, an aloof professorial president and the maddeningly slow, meandering trajectory of health reform.

But personality is not a solid foundation for a persua-sive explanation of presidential impact and the shortfallsor accomplishments of Obama’s presidency. Modern pres-idents have brought divergent individual traits to their

jobs and yet they have routinely failed to enact much of their agendas. Preeminent policy goals of Bill Clinton(health reform) and George W. Bush (Social Security

privatization) met the same fate, though these presidents’personalities vary widely. And presidents like Jimmy Carter—whose personality traits have been criticized asill-suited for effective leadership—enjoyed comparable orstronger success in Congress than presidents lauded fortheir personal knack for leadership—from Lyndon John-son to Ronald Reagan.7 Indeed, a personalistic accountprovides little leverage for explaining the disparities inObama’s record—for example why he succeeded legisla-tively in restructuring health care and higher education,failed in other areas, and often accommodatedstakeholders.

Decades of rigorous research find that impersonal, struc-tural forces offer the most compelling explanations forpresidential impact.8 Quantitative research that compareslegislative success and presidential personality finds no over-all relationship.9 In his magisterial qualitative and histor-ical study, Stephen Skowronek reveals that institutional

dynamics and ideological commitments structure presi-dential choice and success in ways that trump the personalpredilections of individual presidents.10 Findings point tothe predominant influence on presidential legislative suc-cess of the ideological and partisan composition of Con-gress, entrenched interests, identities, and institutionaldesign, and a constitutional order that invites multipleand competing lines of authority.

The widespread presumption, then, that Obama’s per-sonal traits or leadership style account for the obstaclesto his policy proposals is called into question by a gener-ation of scholarship on the presidency. Indeed, the pre-

sumption is not simply problematic analytically, butpractically as well. For the misdiagnosis of the source of presidential weakness may, paradoxically, induce failureby distracting the White House from strategies and tac-tics where presidents can make a difference. Following a meeting with Obama shortly after Brown’s win, one Dem-ocratic senator lamented the White House’s delusion thata presidential sales pitch will pass health reform—“Justdeclaring that he’s still for it doesn’t mean that it comesoff life support.”11 Although Obama’s re-engagement afterthe Brown victory did contribute to restarting reform,the senator’s comment points to the importance of ideo-logical and partisan coalitions in Congress, organiza-tional combat, institutional roadblocks, and anticipatedvoter reactions. Presidential sales pitches go only so far.

Yet if presidential personality and leadership style comeup short as primary explanations for presidential successand failure, this does not render them irrelevant. There isno need to accept the false choice between volition andstructure—between explanations that reduce politics topersonality and those that focus only on system impera-tives and contradictions. The most satisfying explanationslie at the intersection of agency and structure—what wedescribe as structured agency. Presidents have opportuni-ties to lead, but not under the circumstances they choose

or control. These circumstances both restrict the param-eters of presidential impact and highlight the significanceof presidential skill in accurately identifying and exploit-ing opportunities. Indeed, Obama himself talks about walk-ing this tightrope—exercising “ruthless pragmatism” inseizing opportunities for reform while accepting the limitsand seeking to “bridge that gap between the status quoand what we know we have to do for our future”.12

The extraordinary economic and political circum-stances under which Obama took office as well as thedramatic disparity between his administration’s successesand failures underscore the need to synthesize the study of

Reflections | Varieties of Obamaism

794 Perspectives on Politics

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presidency with the analysis of political economy, Ameri-can political development, and comparative policy analy-sis.13 Such an analysis would focus on the intermeshing of government policy making with differentially organizedinterests; the relative advantages or disadvantages that dif-ferent institutional settings provide to different organized

groups; and the ways in which substantive policy deci-sions both reflect and shape political struggles. Such struc-tural constraints and differences in organizational powerdo not literally prohibit Obama, or any president, fromtaking initiatives—say, nationalizing the banks—but they do create two significant barriers to dramatic policy change:a political environment in which members of Congress,independent regulatory bodies, and officials in his admin-istration (especially in the Department of Treasury) canreject, stymie, or sabotage policies that threaten key rela-tionships (such as sources of campaign contributions orfuture employment); and an economic environment in

which private firms and their customers could respond topolicy proposals by taking actions that drive down profit-ability or by shifting capital out of the US, as happened inLatin America during its debt crisis and in France after theelection of Socialist Francois Mitterrand as president.Obama’s presidency can thus be viewed as a delicate danceto formulate policies that navigate these barriers and bluntconflicts with established economic/political relation-ships. Such a politics of compromise has thus far gener-ated dueling frustrations: liberals and progressives steamthat Obama’s policy proposals are too tepid and too easily stymied by stakeholders, while conservatives fume at histemerity in successfully challenging the basic market-deferring precepts of American political economy.

In short, the structured agency perspective integratestwo critical components of social science analysis. First, itsituates Obama’s initiatives within the existing politicaleconomic structure of organizational combat, institu-tions, and policy. Second, it scrutinizes Obama’s strategicand tactical decisions to mobilize coalitions that are tar-geted at points of political economic vulnerability and touse his expressive powers to manage the political narra-tive, to control expectations, and to frame challenges tothe existing power structure in ways that sustain andbroaden support.

A political economy perspective offers distinct contribu-tions to analyzing the Obama presidency and especially hisdomestic policies. The first is to recalibrate expectations of presidential leadershipand, in particular, Obama’s capacity forchange.Theinitial expectation thatObamawould trans-form America—which he himself encouraged—needs tobe refocused on the opportunities and constraints withintheexisting US politicaleconomy.This shiftsattentionfromObama as a kind of secular messiah to the strategic chal-lenge of seizing opportunities within existing institutionaland economic structures and instituting changes that insti-gate future developmental paths in desired directions.

The second contribution is to broaden our understand-ing of presidential action and inaction and its signifi-cance. Research in political economy, American politicaldevelopment, and comparative public policy finds thatdistinctive national constellations of institutions, policy,and economic practices generate “varieties of capitalism”

and wide differences among capitalistic countries in thetiming and nature of government policies and how they interact with individuals and markets. These traditions of analysis study the content of public policies (instead of treating them, for instance, as dichotomous variables basedon whether or not they legislatively succeed), with a par-ticular focus on the degree to which policy change reflectsor restructures established political and economic relation-ships.14 This approach sheds light on sources of inactionand stasis. Stalemate on candidate Obama’s agenda forreform of labor and climate change, for example, has oftenbeen chalked up to Obama’s leadership failings. Yet

neglected in these accounts are the organizational advan-tages of stakeholders and institutional rules (such as theSenate filibuster) that favor defenders of the existing political/economic status quo and disadvantage reformersand the less well-established.15

Obama’s Presidency and Structured Agency

As candidate and president, Obama targeted the overhaulof American political economy as a primary objective.Not long after his inauguration, he maintained that “wecan’t just look at things in the aggregate . . . [W]e want tomake sure that prosperity is spread across the spectrum of regions, and occupations and genders and races . . . tomake sure that everybody has got opportunity” to “findgood employment and see their incomes rise.”16 The Pres-ident targeted reforms in health care, education, and energy as decisive for expanding opportunities. He also sought torestructure finance and “change . . . [the] situation wherecorporate profits in the finance sector were such a heavy part of our overall profitability over the last decade.” Inparticular, Obama proposed substantial reforms thatentailed an “updating of the regulatory regimes compara-ble to what we did in the 1930s. . . . [in order to] inhibit

some of the massive leveraging and the massive risk-taking that has become so common.”17

How has Obama fared and what accounts for his vari-able success? The analytic challenge is both to situateObama’s actions (and inactions) within America’s politicaleconomic regime and to assess his success and failure inidentifying and exploiting opportunities within the regime.Has Obama accurately identified vulnerabilities or open-ings within the regime of financial capitalism? If so, has hebeen able to build the coalitions and support to establishpolicies that achieve his aims partially in the short termand more robustly over time?

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Three features of American political economy condi-tion Obama’s initiatives, generating both constraints andopportunities for his presidency.

Politics and Private Markets

The economic and political circumstances that greeted

Obama at his inauguration created opportunities for hispresidency. The profound disruption of the economy andof political/economic relationships jarred received wis-dom and eroded the position of financial and corporateinterests and relationships, opening up space for eco-nomic and social welfare reform. As White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously observed at the outset of Obama’s presidency, “You never want a serious crisis to goto waste.” In the arena of health care financing and deliv-ery, cost escalations for business and government and theunraveling of employer health insurance coverage and ris-ing rates of uninsurance, which the Great Recession accel-

erated, unsettled the stakeholder community and createdpolitical and fiscal pressure for change. On finance reformCongressman Barney Frank, chair of the House FinancialServices Committee, initially declared that the financialand economic crises had created a “new political consen-sus” to shift from “light-touch regulation” to stricter finan-cial regulation.18 But the crises turned out not to be asdestabilizing as he (or Emanuel) assumed and the oppo-sition from stakeholders in the finance sector and else-

where remained intense, well-organized, and skilled atexploiting its institutional connections and advantages.

Although the reforms of health care and higher educationhighlight the openings for change, Obama’s efforts onfinance, immigration, and labor point to three durablebarriers that slowed and watered down reforms or stoppedthem in their tracks.

Where’s the class war? One of the most striking features of recent American politics has been the absence of a sus-tained and organized backlash against rising inequality by the broad public or the working and middle classes.19 TheTea Party meetings around the country tap the public rageagainst “big government” and big banks but it has failed toarticulatea coherent visionof class politics andremain polit-icallyinchoatedespitethebesteffortsoftheRepublicanParty

to capitalizeon them. Fury againstgovernmentand thecon-viction by a quarter of Tea Party supporters that violence is

justified (accordingto an April NewYorkTimes survey) mixes with acknowledgement by 62 percent that Medicare andSocialSecurity areworth it;majorities both opposeObama’spolicies and report differences with Republican Party; 52percent report too much is made of problems facing blacks

while 65 percent report that Obama’s policies treat blacksand whites equally; and nearly three-quarters complain of favoritism for rich and poor even while Tea Party support-ers enjoy more wealth, education, and personal economic

well-being than the average American.

In other affluent democracies, class conflict is institu-tionalized in high levels of unionization and laws andpractices that routinize collective bargaining; effective polit-ical parties that are directly aligned with employees andtheir interests; and parliamentary coalitions that enactresponsive policies.20 As Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme

argue, economic and social welfare policies are the “out-comes of, and arenas for, conflict between class-relatedsocio-economic interest groups.”21

The proportion of American employees who are union-ized and covered by collective bargaining agreements is low compared to the levels found in other affluent democra-cies.22 Outside of the workplace, American employees havetraditionally notdefinedtheir interests in class terms.23 Oneresult is the “barren marriage” between the union move-ment andthe Democratic Partyand thecomparativeabsenceof a political party andgoverning coalitionthat directly andconsistently represents labor within government.24

President Obama has lacked an encompassing organi-zation to build support and legislative votes for his initia-tives, and this has created an imbalance between theunorganized and diffuse support of beneficiaries and theintense, well-organized opposition of stakeholders. In healthreform, the administration has chosen to accept its vul-nerability and strike deals with doctors, hospitals, and phar-maceutical companies that split the stakeholder opposition.In finance reform, the imbalance in organized pressureproduced quick sweetheart rescues for mammoth invest-ment firms, dithering on the foreclosures that are threat-ening millions of everyday Americans.

Our central point is to caution against the alluring butsimplistic formulation that attributes the defeat or severe

watering down of the administration’s initiatives to thelack of personal tenacity on the part of Obama and hisadvisors. In truth, administration reform efforts weredelayed or defeated in large part because their opponents

were far better organized, funded, and programmatically coherent.

It’s who you know. The US Constitution promises anindependent and representative democracy in which gov-ernment officials would, according to James Madison inFederalist No. 51, “best discern the true interest of their

country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will beleast likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial consider-ations.” Madison’s vision of a representative democracy devoted to the “public good” was complemented by Alex-ander Hamilton’s devotion to building a working “systemof administration” that was “steady” and organizationally capable of fending off an “artful cabal [that] . . . would beable to distract and to enervate the whole system of admin-istration [and to introduce] . . . a spirit of habitual feeble-ness and dilatoriness.”25

In reality, a substantial number of government officialsmake their living by working in high-paid corporate



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positions and then returning to government. The publicharbors intense doubt whether these officials serve the“true interests of their country” and “public good” or

whether they are members of “artful cabals” that promotethe “temporary or partial considerations” of certain pri-vate business. Seventy-eight percent of the February 2010

New York Times and CBS poll indicated that “govern-ment is pretty much run by a few big interests looking outfor themselves” instead of benefiting all, and less thanone-fifth indicated that they trust the government in Wash-ington always or even most of the time.26 To the publicand many political observers, the US government and itsofficials are an “instrument” or tool of the leading eco-nomic powers within finance capitalism.27

The interchangeability of personnel from business andgovernment is most apparent in finance. The “revolving door” between Washington and Wall Street starkly illus-trates Hamilton’s fear of an “artful cabal” that used its

government positions to distract, enervate, and enfeebleeffective administration to serve private interests. The moti-vation of Washington’s Wall Street transplants may be overtor they may be implicit in their understanding of what

will “work.” As Stiglitz explained, the “mindsets” of gov-ernment officials who work on Wall Street are “shaped by [the] people [they] associate with [so they come] to think that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America” eventhough their policies contained “deeply obvious flaws.”28

Former IMF chief economist, Simon Johnson, soundedthe alarms about the “channel of influence [that has cre-ated] . . . the flow of individuals between Wall Street and

Washington” and the “easy access of leading financiers tothe highest U.S. government officials.” The “Wall Street-

Washington Corridor” has “interw[oven] the career tracks”of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan as

well as the top echelons of the Department of Treasury from former Secretaries Robert Rubin and Henry Paul-son, and incumbent Secretary Timothy Geithner to Gei-thner’s current chief of staff (former Goldman Sach’slobbyist) and senior advisor (former Citigroup chief econ-omist).29 Drawing on his extensive IMF experience bat-tling corruption in Russia and less well-developed countries,

Johnson sharply criticizes the “quiet coup” by “America’sOligarchs”—a takeover carried off not by rifles but by the

“confluence of campaign finance, personal connections,and ideology”.30 The most visible forms of corruption—such as bribes—are not necessary in Washington becausethe industry is literally represented within government.31

Although business does exert disproportionate influ-ence, there are countervailing factors. Disagreementbetween stakeholders can offset even the best-placed indus-tries. Wall Street’s efforts, for instance, have been coun-tered by aggrieved commercial banks and “Main Street”businesses as well as by members of Congress and Presi-dent Obama, who face outcry from voters that sustainedits intensity from the bailouts through the SEC charges

against Goldman Sachs for fraud. The counter-pressurereflects the fracturing of American economy and politicsbased on distinct (often geographically-based) cleavagesbetween different industries (service vs. manufacturing)and regions.32 In addition, business influence is also offsetby incomplete or inaccurate information and by uncer-

tainty and risk. After all, the winners in the battle forlowering capital requirements and deregulating financeand repealing the Glass-Steagall Act gutted the rules thathad protected them, unleashing a crisis that terminatedsome of the earlier “winners.”

Yet despite the limits on the stakeholder influence in American finance, the preeminent firms and pressuregroups do impact policy. Part of their success is keeping the most threatening options (such as nationalization) off the agenda of sustained government attention. Even afterfinancial reform was harshly scrubbed in committees andfloor debate to exclude threatening issues or policy options,

the final maneuvering in June and July 2010 further watered-down the legislation to accommodate the intensepressure. Wall Street firms, commercial banks, and insur-ers have spent millions to oppose reform, to seek friendly amendments, and, where legislation has been passed, toachieve favorable implementation by, for instance, loosen-ing the availability of the bailout funds to commercialbanks and insurers. Senate Leader Dick Durbin candidly acknowledged that the track record of the finance indus-try as “major contributors . . . is a major factor in thedecision making process in Washington.”33 This influ-ence is not partisan: financial sector donors contributegenerously to both the Republicans and the Democrats.

Living with structure. Focusing on the Wall Street/ Washington revolving door directs our attention to indi-viduals and, specifically, the personnel who work in bothdomains. Names like Rubin, Paulson, and Geithner put a face on the shared workforce for government and Ameri-can finance. Beyond this interweaving of personnel, how-ever, the dominant political economic relationships shapegovernment policy by determining the conditions andstructures that define what seems rational and feasible togovernment officials who have no direct ties to the pro-viders and funders in finance, health care, and other are-

nas. After all, Washington is dependent on the success of business to generate revenues, to create or maintain thepublic or private sector jobs that voters expect, and tosustain expected services.34 The reform of health care, forinstance, was premised on sustaining and, indeed, hand-somely rewarding private medical providers, suppliers, andpayers with billions in profitable new business and subsidies.

In the financial sector, the dependence of businessesand ordinary Americans on credit constrains the admin-istration and the Democratic Party. Even if they favortaking more aggressive measures against this sector, they are fully aware of their reliance on private firms to resume


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their business of extending credit in order to renew consumer purchases and reignite the economy. In a telling analysis, two seasoned financial reporters expressed frus-tration with Wall Street’s success in imposing an “enor-mous barrier to reform” but concluded by stressing itsstructural hold on Washington—“Realistically, there is only

so much that can be done to fix the problem.”35

In short, the opportunities and constraints on Obama’spresidency reflect not simply his personal predilectionsbut the mediated structural pressure of private markets.

The institutional self-interest of Washington generatespressures both to create and to sustain conditions for thecontinuation of private markets and to avoid policies thatmay unsettle markets or lead to an exodus of capital in a fluid international market.

Institutions Matter

Government institutions themselves form an environ-

ment that shapes how private interests and lawmakerssize up relative power and define interests and whethernew policies emerge or are delayed and blocked.36 Theadministration’s decisions over policy and its track recordin pursuing them have been informed by three criticalfeatures of the American political system, which we review here.

A legacy of hapless administrative capacity. National admin-istrative capacity affects the ability of presidents to pursuetheir agendas as well as win the confidence of administra-tion officials, legislators, and “opinion makers.”37 Thenature, extent, and form of the government administra-tion have been a longstanding fulcrum of intense politicalconflict.

Proposals to create a national health insurance exchangeand a public option were defeated by well-organized inter-ests and their advocates within Congress in an arena whereprovision and financing among the non-elderly were pri-vately controlled.38 Whether the government could betrusted to control costs and work within the budgetary projections of the Congressional Budgetary Office was alsoa flashpoint between the political parties and indeed withinthe Democratic Party.

The federal government’s role and administrative capac-

ity within the financial sector is also a longstanding sourceof conflict. The financial crises stemmed, in part, fromthe ineffectiveness of America’s administrative system totame the “tyranny of the short term” —as conservative

jurist Richard Posner explains in his critique of the finan-cial crisis—and to guide self-interested behavior toward“enlightened self-interest.”39 The system failed to super-vise the securitization of mortgages (as exemplified by the failure of SEC to regulate credit default swap trad-ing), to insist on reasonable capital requirements for trades,or to take necessary steps to check the drive of bankers,insurers, and others to reap massive short-term returns.

Gillian Tett, a Financial Times journalist, reports that the“story of the great credit boom and bust is . . . a story of how an entire financial system went wrong” owing tonon-existent or ineffectual regulation and oversight.40

America’s 2008–10 financial crises confirm a broaderand well-known theme in American political develop-

ment—the administrative state’s generally porous, easily penetrated boundaries; its consistent (though not uni-form) lack of independent expertise to independently assessand respond to the behavior of markets and individuals;and multiple and competing lines of authority that stymieeven necessary intervention.41 Indeed, the low confidenceof legislators and other policy makers in American publicadministration has fueled their tendency to create multi-ple and competing bodies with redundancies and checks.The flip side, though, is that pressure groups exploit thisplethora of options to “venue shop” for the friendliestbody or to play them off against each other. The financial

industry searched for a sponsor and protector in the reg-ulatory bazaar of theTreasury Department, Federal Reserve,Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of the Cur-rency, and the Security and Exchange Commission. Forinstance, when the states attempted to use consumer pro-tection laws to crack down on predatory lending, the lend-ers turned to the Comptroller of the Currency to block them.

America’s administrative structure is also prone—as gen-erations of research have demonstrated—to penetrationand influence by pressure groups and parochial interests.If the lobbyists fail to shape agency behavior, they turn tothe White House or, if that turns out to be unrewarding,to responsive members of Congress. What seems fromafar like inexplicable lapses in administrative competencecan often be traced to successful industry interventionsinto a porous administrative structure. For instance, the“light touch” regulation of Freddie Mac and Fannie Maehas been blamed for their stupendous failure to accurately assess risk and intervene. Retracing this breakdown findsthat it originated in campaign contributions and intenselobbying of both agencies and relevant members of Con-gress.42 The continued whittling down of provisions forindependent financial consumer protection prompted oneconsumer advocate to complain that “it’s hard for your

voice to be heard” when faced with the “money and theresources of the banking industry”.43 Overall, the Ameri-can administrative state often lacks the kind of indepen-dent and skilled capacity to monitor and intervene toprevent market breakdowns.

The booby-trapped road to lawmaking. The comparative weakness of America’s administrative state is compoundedby a legislative process that is individualized and diffuse,and therefore nearly immune to efforts by presidents toform supportive coalitions. Most of the time, lawmaking is hobbled by the conflict between presidents and one or



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both chambers of Congress that are controlled by theopposing party. Even when one party’s control of both the

White House and Congress allows presidents unusual leg-islative success, the potential for deadlock and delay areconsiderable, as Obama has discovered.44 Each memberof Congress enjoys “rights” to serve on major committees

as the power of seniority has eroded; enjoys staff supportthat allows them to develop their personal legislative agenda;and depends for their reelection on assembling their ownrecord with money they have raised and a staff they havehired and organized. Although party leaders can provideservices to individual legislators, the centrifugal forces of individualization often prevail with presidents and con-gressional leaders unable to dictate nomination—the key power in parliamentary systems to discipline legislators

who defect from party coalitions.45

With neither presidents nor congressional leaders ableto control votes by legislators (even under conditions of

unified party control), they rely on a more subtle butnonetheless potent power—setting the agenda. In partic-ular, they limit floor votes to bills that enjoy the supportof party caucuses. Critics chastised the Obama’s WhiteHouse for proposing vague principles of health reformrather than a detailed plan; but the decision reflected itsacceptance that the legislative process required time anddeference to the leadership to build agreement in commit-tees and caucus meetings before moving reform onto theagenda.

The institutional hurdles of lawmaking do not shapeorganized interests equally. Rather they interact with

America’s market-deferring political economy to the advan-tage of stakeholders and their allies who ably work theirallies to capitalize on multiple veto points to protect thestatus quo by blocking new government action. In addi-tion to favoring the status quo over change, the institu-tional maze advantages conservatives over reformers seeking to expand social welfare policy generally. Republicans morereadily pass their top legislative priority (tax cuts) by using the budget reconciliation process that requires a simplemajority.46 The conservative bias of building legislativecoalitions in an environment of intense polarization andinstitutional booby-traps is broadly consistent with thepartisan differences in macroeconomic and tax policies

and, of late, the weakening impacts of Democratic presi-dents in expanding employment and economic growth.47

By comparison, the filibuster requirement of 60 Senatevotes in an environment of polarization makes it moredifficult to enact ambitious new social welfare programsbecause party leaders will likely only receive the votes of Democrats.

What stands out about Obama’s legislative record, then,are not simply the delays, compromises, defeats, andfailures—from energy and climate change to financialreform and strengthened labor rights. These are the pre-dictable outcomes of the current legislative process and

the networks of vested interests that permeate it. Moreremarkable and surprising are the intermixing of plainvanilla “delay and deadlock” with success as epitomized by health reform.48

Despite theusualtendencytowardimpasse, reform passedintheHouseandintheSenate(withthesupportofallDem-

ocrats and two independents). The polarization of the par-ties created unusual unity among Democratsat a time whenthey enjoyed thelargestmajoritiesin three decades andinter-mittent presidential promotion. Nonetheless, the process

was slow, close to deadlocked at several junctures, anddoomed after Brown’s Senate win until the bane of progressives—the reconciliation process—was convertedinto a mechanism for modifying aspects of the originally enacted Senate legislation in ways acceptable to the House.

Obama’s refuge—the administrative presidency. As Obama has seen parts of his agenda delayed or dragged down by

the veto-strewn legislative process, he has turned—as havepresidents for three decades—to the institutional prerog-atives in his office to by-pass Congress. The White Househas issued more than three dozen executive orders in itsfirst year, to take unilateral action on a host of issues fromrestoring regulatory powers over workplace safety and theenvironment to enhancing the power of employees of gov-ernment contractors.49

Perhaps the most striking domestic example is theTreasury’s implementation of funds for the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF). Bereft of legisla-tive authorization, it committed up to one trillion dollarsto purchasing securities backed by credit cards, student

loans, and other assets. In addition, the administrationcreated a program to mitigate the mortgage crisis based onthe executive branch’s authority and without congressio-nal approval. Moreover, shortly after his health care vic-tory Obama appointed 15 recess senior nominees by executive authority. Reviewing the administration’s unilat-eral initiatives, one New York Times columnist concludedthat the “crises have expanded the power of the executivebranch”.50

Obama’s Presidency within America’s Racial Orders

Obama’s election as president is a product of and chal-

lenge to America’s racial orders. Racial inequities and strug-gles are historically constitutive of US politics, generating competing coalitions of political actors with distinct con-ceptions of race equity.51 Competing conceptions of

America’s racial order have structured every era of UShistory—from antebellum battles over slavery and Recon-struction struggles about segregation to today’s controver-sies over whether government policy should include raceconscious measures to address continuing inequities includ-ing the disproportionately high levels of foreclosures,unemployment, and other economic woes among African

Americans and Latinos.52


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Racial orders are part of the structured context of pol-icy making for any American president but they uniquely affect Obama. Obama’s election is a culmination of cen-turies of struggle for racial equity and, yet, his presidency is constrained by the enduring conflict of racial orders.

While liberal commentators and activists yearn for Obama

to channel Lyndon Johnson’s notorious skill in lobbying Congress and to unleash sharp denunciation of his pre-decessors as had Ronald Reagan, the reality is that Obama is haunted by lingering stereotypes and bias. His advisorshave steered him away from actions and rhetoric that couldtrigger the “angry black man” stereotype, which is already bubbling up in protests.53 He has resisted pleas from Afri-can American leaders to target resources into their com-munities and into reducing unemployment among blacks.

Varieties of Obamaism

Understanding Obama requires exceptional discipline to

avoid knee-jerk reactions—either of support or opposi-tion or vilification or adulation of his personal style andskills. The need to avoid personalistic accounts need notlead to one-sided structural interpretations that exclu-sively focus on economic and state structures and theirrelationships. Obama’s presidency is defined by structuredagency. The constellation of America’s entwined eco-nomic and political relationships and embedded institu-tional dynamics conditioned the Obama administration’sproposals and their differential outcomes.

Seeking to understand the wide range of Obama’s pol-icy outcomes poses enduring questions about the nature

of presidential power and the reconstitution of privatemarkets, government, and the individual’s relationship toeach at a critical historic juncture. The real world of Amer-ican politics today poses remarkable shifts of historic con-sequence. It also opens up exceptional opportunities forsynthesizing the study of the presidency with political econ-omy, American political development, and comparativepublic policy.

Notes

1 Stiglitz 2010.2 Krugman 2009a and b.

3 Augar 2009.4 Stiglitz 2010.5 Herszenhorn and Stolberg 2010.6 Stolberg 2010.7 Bond and Fleisher 1990; Edwards 2009.8 Howell 2009.9 Bond and Fleisher 1990; Edwards 2009.

10 Skowronek 1993.11 Quoted in Werner 2010.12 Quoted in Leonhardt 2009.13 Bartels 2008; Hacker and Pierson 2010; Jacobs and

King 2009; Kenworthy 2009; Skowronek 2009.

14 Esping-Andersen 1990.15 McCarty 2007.16 Quoted in Leonhardt 2009, 41.17 Quoted in Leonhardt, 2009, 38.18 Quoted in Walsh 2009.19 Page and Jacobs 2009.

20 Esping-Andersen 1990; Korpi 1983.21 Korpi and Palme 2003, 425.22 Visser 2006 and see Silverstein 2009.23 Katznelson 1981.24 Davis 1980.25 Federalist Nos. 69, 70, 71.26 cf. Pew Research Center April 2010 survey of trust.27 Lindblom 1977; Miliband 1969.28 Quoted in Becker and Morgenson 2009.29 Becker and Morgenson 2009; see Morgenson and

Story 2010.30 Johnson 2009; Page and Winters 2009.

31 Kaiser 2009.32 Trubowitz 1998.33 Quoted in Schouten, Dilanian, and Kelley 2008.

And see SIGTARP 2009, 2010.34 Hacker and Pierson 2010; Lindblom 1977.35 Einhorn and Lewis 2009.36 Pierson 1993.37 Orloff and Skocpol 1984.38 Jacobs and Skocpol 2010.39 Posner 2009.40 Tett 2009, author’s original emphasis.41 Jacobs and King 2009; Johnson 2007; Sheingate

2009; Skowronek 1982.42 Becker, Labaton, and Stolberg 2008.43 Chan 2010.44 Bond and Fleisher 1990.45 Aldrich 1995.46 McCarty 2007.47 Bartels 2008; Jacobs and Skocpol 2010.48 Burns 1984.49 Judis 2010; National Archives 2009.50 Cowen 2009.51 Cohen 2009; King and Smith 2005; Lieberman

2005.52 Smith and King 2009.

53 Halperin and Heilemann 2010, 206.

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