Politics Disad – Jackson-Vanik

Political Capital Key to Agenda

Political capital key to the agenda

Hill ‘10

(Dell, http://www.uncoverage.net/2010/05/obama-political-capital-tank-running-on-empty/, “Obama’s Political Capital Tank Running On Empty”,May 2)

Basically, political capital is the currency of politics.  It’s what one politician uses to convince another politician to support a particular piece of legislation.  Some would call it “one hand washing the other” and that’s a fair analogy.   For the President to advance a political agenda, political capital is his fuel tank to get things done.  He wheels and deals – all the while using that political fuel tank to get what he ultimately wants, and some agendas consume incredible amounts of that fuel.  ObamaCare, for instance, required an enormous amount of political capital to get enacted.  It has become the centerpiece of the Obama administration and is, quite frankly, about the only real victory the President can claim, but it came at a tremendous cost, literally and figuratively.

Political capital is key and finite – Congressional backlash risks the entire agenda

Feehery ‘9

(John, president of Feehery Group, a Washington-based advocacy firm that has represented clients including the News Corp., Ford Motor Co. and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Commentary: Obama enters 'The Matrix', http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/21/feehery.obama.matrix/)

Probably the most intangible and most unpredictable part of the legislative process is the rather large egos of the legislators. Despite having generally milquetoast reputations, each member of Congress has a variety of factors that impact how and why they vote. Of course, their chief motivation is political survival. But each assesses their political viability differently, and loyalty to the White House is not always top of the list. Some members of Congress, who have been in the trenches for decades, have healthy egos that need love and affection from the Obama administration. For example, when the White House concluded deals with health care providers, legislative leaders like Charlie Rangel and Henry Waxman, who weren't party to the talks, threw a fit, said the deals didn't apply to them, and sent a strong message that they weren't going to honor those commitments. That of course, threw the larger health care negotiations into disarray. Egos matter on Capitol Hill, and stroking them is an essential part of cracking the congressional code. In the movie "The Matrix," Keanu Reeves, playing Neo, ends the film with the line, "Anything is possible." In a Hollywood movie, anything is possible. But in Congress, with limited money, limited time and limited patience, the president can't get everything he wants. And after watching his cap and trade proposal fall flat in the Senate, his health care bill lose support in both chambers, his tax proposals meet stiff resistance from the business community and key centrist Democrats, and his financial service reform proposals go nowhere, he risks getting nothing that he wants.

Political Capital True

Political capital theory is true – newest data proves that presidents have significant legislative influence

Beckman 10 – Professor of Political Science

(Matthew N. Beckman, Professor of Political Science @ UC-Irvine, 2010, “Pushing the Agenda: Presidential Leadership in U.S. Lawmaking, 1953-2004,” pg. 2-3)

Developing presidential coalition building as a generalizable class of strategies is itself instructive, a way of bringing clarity to presidential– congressional dynamics that have previously appeared idiosyncratic, if not irrational. However, the study’s biggest payoff comes not from identifying presidents’ legislative strategies but rather from discerning their substantive effects. In realizing how presidents target congressional processes upstream (how bills get to the floor, if they do) to influence downstream policy outcomes (what passes or does not), we see that standard tests of presidential influence have missed most of it. Using original data and new analyses that account for the interrelationship between prevoting and voting stages of the legislative process, I find that presidents’ legislative influence is real, often substantial, and, to date, greatly underestimated.

Political capital theory is true – modern presidents have unique capabilities – it’s finite

Beckmann and Kumar 11

(Matt, Professor of Political Science, and Vimal, How presidents push, when presidents win: A model of positive presidential power in US lawmaking, Journal of Theoretical Politics 2011 23: 3)

Fortunately for contemporary presidents, today’s White House affords its occupants an unrivaled supply of persuasive carrots and sticks. Beyond the office’s unique visibility and prestige, among both citizens and their representatives in Congress, presidents may also sway lawmakers by using their discretion in budgeting and/or rulemaking, unique fundraising and campaigning capacity, control over executive and judicial nominations, veto power, or numerous other options under the chief executive’s control. Plainly, when it comes to the arm-twisting, brow-beating, and horse-trading that so often characterizes legislative battles, modern presidents are uniquely well equipped for the fight In the following we employ the omnibus concept of ‘presidential political capital’ to capture this conception of presidents’ positive power as persuasive bargaining. 1 Specifi cally, we define presidents’ political capital as the class of tactics White House officials employ to induce changes in lawmakers’ behavior. 2 Importantly, this conception of presidents’ positive power as persuasive bargaining not only meshes with previous scholarship on lobbying (see, e.g., Austen-Smith and Wright (1994), Groseclose and Snyder (1996), Krehbiel (1998: ch. 7), and Snyder (1991)), but also presidential practice. 3 For example, Goodwin recounts how President Lyndon Johnson routinely allocated ‘rewards’ to ‘cooperative’ members: The rewards themselves (and the withholding of rewards) . . . might be something as unobtrusive as receiving an invitation to join the President in a walk around the White House grounds, knowing that pictures of the event would be sent to hometown newspapers . . . [or something as pointed as] public works projects, military bases, educational research grants, poverty projects, appointments of local men to national commissions, the granting of pardons, and more. (Goodwin, 1991: 237) Of course, presidential political capital is a scarce commodity with a floating value. Even a favorably situated president enjoys only a finite supply of political capital; he can only promise or pressure so much. What is more, this capital ebbs and flows as realities and/or perceptions change. So, similarly to Edwards (1989), we believe presidents’ bargaining resources cannot fundamentally alter legislators’ predispositions, but rather operate ‘at the margins’ of US lawmaking, however important those margins may be (see also Bond and Fleisher (1990), Peterson (1990), Kingdon (1989), Jones (1994), and Rudalevige (2002)). Indeed, our aim is to explicate those margins and show how presidents may systematically influence them.

Even if pundits exaggerate the president’s influence, it still is salient

Beckman 10 – Professor of Political Science

(Matthew N. Beckman, Professor of Political Science @ UC-Irvine, 2010, “Pushing the Agenda: Presidential Leadership in U.S. Lawmaking, 1953-2004,” pg. 17)

Even though Washington correspondents surely overestimate a sitting president's potential sway in Congress, more than a kernel of truth remains. Modern presidents do enjoy tremendous persuasive assets: unmatched public visibility; unequaled professional staff, unrivaled historical prestige, unparalleled fundraising capacity. And buttressing these persuasive power sources are others, including a president’s considerable discretion over federal appointments, bureaucratic rules, legislative vetoes, and presidential trinkets.9 So even with their limitations duly noted, presidents clearly still enjoy an impressive bounty in the grist of political persuasion - one they can (and do) draw on to help build winning coalitions on Capitol Hill.

Presidents can agenda set and marshal public support.

Drum 3/12

(Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones. “Presidents and the Bully Pulpit’. March 12, 2012. Mother Jones. http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/03/presidents-and-bully-pulpit)

I also think that Ezra doesn't really grapple with the strongest arguments on the other side. For one thing, although there are examples of presidential offensives that failed (George Bush on Social Security privatization), there are also example of presidential offensives that succeeded (George Bush on going to war with Iraq). The same is true for broader themes. For example, Edwards found that "surveys of public opinion have found that support for regulatory programs and spending on health care, welfare, urban problems, education, environmental protection and aid to minorities increased rather than decreased during Reagan’s tenure." OK. But what about the notion that tax cuts are good for the economy? The public may have already been primed to believe this by the tax revolts of the late '70s, but I'll bet Reagan did a lot to cement public opinion on the subject. And the Republican tax jihad has been one of the most influential political movements of the past three decades. More generally, I think it's a mistake to focus narrowly on presidential speeches about specific pieces of legislation. Maybe those really don't do any good. But presidents do have the ability to rally their own troops, and that matters. That's largely what Obama has done in the contraception debate. Presidents also have the ability to set agendas. Nobody was talking about invading Iraq until George Bush revved up his marketing campaign in 2002, and after that it suddenly seemed like the most natural thing in the world to a lot of people. Beyond that, it's too cramped to think of the bully pulpit as just the president, just giving a few speeches. It's more than that. It's a president mobilizing his party and his supporters and doing it over the course of years. That's harder to measure, and I can't prove that presidents have as much influence there as I think they do. But I confess that I think they do. Truman made containment national policy for 40 years, JFK made the moon program a bipartisan national aspiration, Nixon made working-class resentment the driving spirit of the Republican Party, Reagan channeled the rising tide of the Christian right and turned that resentment into the modern-day culture wars, and George Bush forged a bipartisan consensus that the threat of terrorism justifies nearly any defense. It's true that in all of these cases presidents were working with public opinion, not against it, but I think it's also true that different presidents might have shaped different consensuses.