Contrary to popular belief, President Obama doesn’t have a magic wand

There is a dirty little secret about America’s most powerful elected office that pundits, reporters and politicians rarely share with the American people: Presidents really are not that powerful.

Yes, presidents can send the US military to practically every corner of the globe; give gaudy, well-covered, agenda-setting speeches; appoint Supreme Court justices and other federal officeholders; enforce regulations and live in an awesome house with nice views, but presidents are remarkably weak officeholders — at least in contrast to the assumption of omnipotence to which they are generally held.

Rarely has that contradiction been in starker relief than the past month. On both domestic policy and foreign policy, President Barack Obama is getting hammered for his inability to shepherd gun control legislation through Congress and his failure to exercise “presidential leadership” to stop the bloodletting in Syria. Both criticisms badly miss the mark because they place in the executive branch power it holds in limited degree namely the ability to a) pass laws and b) affect events overseas.

On the domestic front, the weakness of the president is fairly obvious: The executive branch implements laws, it does not enact them. Those who argue that a president is all powerful, make the opposite mistake of the economist stranded on the desert island who, faced with a can of soup having washed up from the sea, simply assumes the existence of a can opener. Proponents of presidential power assume away the existence of Congress.

In a best-case scenario, Congress is an irritant to presidential legislative initiatives — one that is far less irritating when the legislative branch and the White House are controlled by the same party. When that happens, you have the opportunity for lawmaking, though there is always the existence of the Senate filibuster to throw a monkey wrench in those plans.

When Congress is controlled by the other party, you have greater opportunity for obstructionism. Of course when that opposition party is the modern GOP, then you have the opportunity for historic, mindless, wanton and heartless obstructionism that strikes at the very heart of representative democracy.

Case in point: The recent debate in Congress over gun control legislation. After the horror of the Newtown massacre, in which a gunman brandishing an AR-15 assault rifle killed 20 schoolchildren, there was an impetus in Congress to finally do something about the seemingly unceasing daily carnage of US gun violence. President Obama embraced the challenge. He proposed legislation, travelled the country, gave numerous speeches, cajoled members of Congress and, in the end, got 55 US senators to go along with a bill that would have strengthened background checks for potential gun buyers.

Of course in the perversion to majoritarian democracy that is the US Senate, 55 per cent of that august body is, because of the 60-vote filibuster rule, a defeat. To be sure, even if Obama had used his powers of persuasion to get recalcitrant Republicans (and Democrats) to go along with stronger background checks, there is virtually no chance that such legislation would be passed in the House of Representatives (a feature of America’s bicameral legislature that further contributes to America’s political dysfunction).

The obvious lesson from this episode is that even when the president invests significant “political capital” in a legislative initiative, his abilities to get said laws enacted is highly constrained. Such reality-based arguments, however, did not penetrate the mindset of Washington pundits who viewed what was yet another clear case of Republican obstructionism as an example of presidential failure.

According to Maureen Dowd, Obama’s job “is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It’s called leadership”. In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan went even further, arguing that Obama “seems incapable of changing anything, even in a crisis.” “People do what they know how to do,” a hardened expert once said, meaning politicians use whatever talent they have and when it no longer works they continue using it.”

However, it was Ron Fournier at the National Journal who had the classic example of the genre. “Great presidents rise above circumstance. Not Obama, at least not yet. At a news conference marking the 100th day of his second and final term, the president seemed unwilling or unable to overcome stubborn GOP opposition.”

It is a funny thing about unwilling and unable — they mean two totally different things.

Indeed, a chief sponsor of the gun control legislation, GOP Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who was unable to convince his Republican colleagues to rally behind him, inadvertently put his finger on Obama’s dilemma: “There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it.”

Indeed, mindless GOP opposition to everything Obama supports is the single most important story of the last four years of American politics. No president, no matter how persuasive, could overcome GOP opposition.

When Obama was unable to get a public option in the health reform plan, liberals derided it as presidential fecklessness, even though any sentient observer of Senate politics would have understood that even Democrats were refusing to support such a plan.

When Obama was incapable of getting Republicans to sign off on a budget deal because of their allergy to any and all tax increases, pundits criticised Obama for failing to show greater leadership, even though all the leadership in the world would not have convinced Republicans to support a budget deal that would have involved significant compromise on their part.

Yet, the belief that the president carries a leadership magic wand to convince recalcitrant political opponents (and some allies) to do his bidding is not merely restricted to Congressional relations. It is evident in foreign policy as well.

As death tolls have mounted in the Syrian civil war, perhaps the loudest criticism of Obama is that he will not act to stop violence. However, this is based on the dubious notion that the US military can stop the violence in Syria. Consider, for example, the “plan” put forward by Bill Keller in the New York Times. The US should move “to assert control of the arming and training of rebels, cultivating insurgents who commit to negotiating an orderly transition to a nonsectarian Syria”. In addition, the US must “make clear to President [Bashar Al] Assad that if he does not cease his campaign of terror and enter into negotiations on a new order, he will pay a heavy price. When he refuses, we send missiles against his military installations until he, or more likely those around him, calculate that they should sue for peace”.

What can Obama be thinking in rejecting an idea as elegantly simple as this one?

Indeed, virtually every argument for the use of force in Syria, chronicled in great detail by Micah Zenko, including maintaining US credibility, sending a message to Iran or North Korea, winning back the confidence of the Arab League, maintaining influence with the Syrian rebels all lead in one direction: Success! If only the president will show leadership, then good things will happen. Yet, if there is any lesson that can be drawn from the wars fought by the US over the past 10 years, it is that America’s ability to shape events in foreign locales is limited and rarely works out well as the proponents of military force promise. To be sure, foreign policy is one of the few places where presidents can exercise significant institutional power (and largely because Congress has abdicated its oversight responsibilities). However, being able to act with greater flexibility does not equal an optimal outcome — a point that the presidencies of Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush amply demonstrate.

In the end, presidents, like all of us, are prisoners to events outside their control. At home and abroad, they are hamstrung both by the interests of other actors in America’s political system and by the national interests of other nations — and of course by adherence to a Constitution that was purposely written to prevent any president from becoming too powerful. If you want to blame anyone for why the president cannot do what you believe he should, blame them. Obama just works here.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Michael Cohen is the author of Live from the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the 20th Century and How They Shaped Modern America.