President Barack Obama moved into the White House with an ambitious legislative agenda and what appeared then to be a strong political wind at his back. Just 10 months in office, it's become a headwind. Going in, a big majority of Americans supported him and voiced backing for what he was promising. And, just as importantly, his Democrats held sizable majorities in both houses of Congress. But as the president struggles to push through a major overhaul of America's extravagantly expensive health care system, his deadline for Congress to pass his top domestic agenda item has slipped from late summer to an unspecified date in 2010. His ambition to have major legislation that would promote a greener US and assure cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in hand before next month's global climate change summit in Copenhagen has slipped toward next summer. What happened? “In Congress, re-election has become its own end rather than doing things for the common good,” said Robin Lauermann, a political science professor at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. Even though he cruised into power with Democratic majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, many of his fellow party members in Congress now are looking with unease toward midterm elections next November. Those who are proving particularly unreliable allies are seen as Democrats in name only. Senators Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson, all Democrats, needed heavy arm-twisting before they agreed to vote Saturday with the majority to send a health care bill to the floor of the upper chamber. And they still aren't promising to vote for the measure after it is debated. Why? They represent states where Republican voters are in the majority and the three are concerned for their political futures. Little of importance can be done in the Senate without 60 votes from among the 100 members. There are 58 Democrats in the chamber and two independents who normally vote with the majority party, Sen. Joe Lieberman and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Lieberman has been a problem for Obama as well. He is moderate to conservative on many issues just like Landrieu, Lincoln and Nelson. All four have balked at the Democratic version of the health care bill because it contains provisions for setting up a government-run insurance system to compete with the private insurers who now control health care coverage nationwide. Many of those companies have deep roots in Lieberman's state, Connecticut. Nelson is concerned about proposed cuts in Medicare reimbursement for doctors and hospital. That government program covers Americans over age 65. Those holdouts – part of the Democrats' so-called big-tent paradigm – are creating deepening frustration among more mainstream liberals and Obama. “I don't want four Democratic senators dictating to the other 56 of us and to the country, when the public option has this much support, that it's not going to be in it,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, a liberal Democrat, said Sunday on CNN. Obama has been less vocal but is working hard behind the scenes. In the House, similar forces were at play when it managed to pass its version of the health care measure on a vote of 220-215. That represented a defection by 38 Democrats, many who bolted from a last-minute amendment that place restrictions on abortion payments. The current party breakdown gives Democrats 258 seats, with 177 for the Republicans. But a simple majority is enough for passage of a bill in the House. “It's a very hard system to make work, and it was not designed to make it easy to get things done,” said Clyde Frazier, professor at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. He thinks the system of choosing candidates for the ballot through direct primary elections makes it particularly difficult for a president to assume congressional backing even when his party holds a majority. Were candidates chosen by the party hierarchy rather than voters, he says, the system would operate differently. But now, “a president almost has to build a separate coalition for each piece of legislation,” Frazier said. There also is the system for financing campaigns. These days, political parties cannot compete with special interest groups – the health insurance lobby for example. Rates of incumbency in both houses of Congress is now around 90 percent with candidates running for re-election far outstripping opponents in donations, especially among special interest groups. Thus the US system has evolved – especially given that a Democratic congressional majority will likely be that in name only – to a point where the will of a majority of Americans, as appears to be the case with health care reform, faces near insurmountable obstacles among lawmakers.
