Illustration by KAL

THE easiest way for a president to make his life miserable is to antagonise his fellow politicians on Capitol Hill. Bill Clinton tried to steamroll Congress into passing a baked-in-the-White House version of health-care reform. Congress took one look at his 1,342-page draft bill and decided it had better things to do. Jimmy Carter treated Congress as an embodiment of everything that was wrong with American politics. Congress responded in kind.

Barack Obama has clearly learnt a lesson from his two Democratic predecessors. One of the earliest signs of the impending troubles between Mr Carter and Congress came at a breakfast that the newly elected president threw for congressional leaders. Tip O'Neill, the speaker, was appalled to find that the only victuals available were coffee, juice and a roll. “Hell, Nixon treated us better than this!” he roared—and demanded bacon, sausage, eggs and toast. Mr Obama has made a point of entertaining generously. Matt Bai, of the New York Times, says that he has created “the most Congress-centric administration in modern history”. Thomas Mann, of the Brookings Institution, calculates that by late April, Mr Obama had already had personal meetings with more members of Congress than George Bush managed in his eight years in Washington.

As the first president to be elected from the Hill since 1960, Mr Obama has surrounded himself with congressional colleagues. Joe Biden, his vice-president, spent 36 years in the Senate. Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, was chairman of the House Democratic caucus. Pete Rouse, one of his most senior advisers, is a former chief of staff to Tom Daschle, and has been a fixture on the Hill since the early 1970s. Peter Orszag, his budget chief, is a former head of the Congressional Budget Office. Numerous other aides have deep roots on the Hill.

So far Mr Obama has been happy to leave much of the legislative heavy lifting to Congress. But he makes sure his aides work closely with their congressional colleagues. He occasionally resorts to the bully-pulpit to chivvy legislation along: this week he hammered away at the importance of health-care reform at a press conference on June 23rd and held a televised town-hall meeting in the White House on the health-care crisis next day. But he argues that his job is to lay down a broad agenda and let Congress fill in many of the details.

This has got things done fast, including a $787 billion stimulus bill, a $3.6 trillion budget and an expanded health-care programme for children. A cap-and-trade bill is well on the way to passing in the House. It has also helped to shield Mr Obama from criticisms from his own left flank. But the administration is also learning that deferring too much to Congress can produce as many problems as deferring too little.

The problem with Congress is that it is a many-headed monster, ill-suited to making hard choices or producing neat solutions. Individual members of Congress are more concerned with their own districts than with the future of the republic. The chairmen of committees are obsessed with defending their turf. The House is dominated by veteran liberals, who are well to the left of the electorate, and the Senate is full of prima donnas. Around 40 members of Congress have spouses who work in the health-care industry, as did Michelle Obama.

Mr Obama's Congress-centric approach has also taken a serious toll on the quality of his policies. The cap-and-trade bill does not do nearly enough to limit carbon emissions from politically powerful industries. The recent reforms of the financial regulatory system fail to tackle one of its most conspicuous weaknesses—its complexity—because doing so would mean stripping congressional committees of their oversight powers.

Health scare

But the toughest test of Mr Obama's approach will be health-care reform, the centrepiece of his domestic programme. He had hoped to subcontract the issue to two Senate veterans who know both Congress and health care better than anybody else in the country: Mr Daschle, whom he tapped to be both health secretary and health-reform tsar, and Senator Edward Kennedy. But Mr Daschle ran into tax problems and was unable to take up the jobs, and Mr Kennedy is seriously ill. Now two competing health-care bills, both unacceptably expensive in their current forms, are winding their way through the Senate and seem to be on a collision course, while in the House there is a third bill that must be melded into a compromise Senate version. Mr Obama's goal of getting this done by the summer recess seems to be receding fast.

There is no ideal way to reconcile the competing claims of the executive and legislative branches of government; America's system of checks and balances is a puzzle without a right answer. The Obama administration can argue that its governing style has produced plenty of successes, not least a timely response to the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s. It can also point out that Mr Bush, who emphasised “energy in the executive”, succeeded in passing lots of bad and expensive legislation, but failed to reform either Social Security or immigration policy.

But a little more assertiveness on Mr Obama's part would be no bad thing. It is hard to see how he can bring spending under control without roughing up Congress a bit. It is also hard to see how he can fulfil his promise to be a post-partisan president while he continues to give so much power to Democratic barons. Back in 1962, when he tried to rank America's presidents according to their merits, Arthur Schlesinger concluded that “mediocre presidents believe in negative government, in self-subordination to the legislative power.” Mr Obama does not give the slightest impression of being a man who wants to go down in history as a mediocre president.





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