Obama's "Congress-centric" Administration

Matt Bai makes a strong point in this week's New York Times Sunday Magazine regarding Obama filling his staff with former Congressional aides.

Obama’s White House is run by Rahm Emanuel, a former House leader who was generally considered to be on a fast track to the speakership before he resigned to become chief of staff, and it is teeming with aides plucked from the senior ranks of both chambers. Obama seems to think that the dysfunction in Washington isn’t only about the heightened enmity between the parties; it’s also about the longstanding mistrust between the two branches of government that stare each other down from twin peaks on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

And so, from Obama’s perspective, passing a health care plan this fall isn’t primarily a question of whether to include an “individual mandate” requiring every American to have insurance or how fully to regulate providers or even how to hit back against “Harry and Louise”–type attack ads, although his aides spend time contemplating all of those things. It’s more about navigating the dueling personalities and complex agendas within his own party’s Congress. Rather than laying out an intricate plan and then trying to sell it on the Hill, as Clinton did, Obama’s strategy seems to be exactly the opposite — to sell himself to Congress first and worry about the details later. As Emanuel likes to tell his West Wing staff: “The only nonnegotiable principle here is success. Everything else is negotiable.”

I get the feeling that with the coming health care debate the real work of Obama's term will begin, at least on the domestic side. The reason the Republicans are trying to slow-play Sotomayor's apparently inevitable confirmation is to put the health care discussion off as long as they can. This would allow maximum time for slowing Obama's momentum as well as rallying the opposition to health care reform. Obama seems to have thought this through early on and taken steps to court Congress and smooth the path for his agenda.

Stay tuned.

--Ballard Burgher