From the Gallup Poll: Obama Averages 47.9% Job Approval as President

I'll begin posting a variety of items regarding Obama's tenure as president.

Here's a look at his approval rates as measured by the Gallup Poll.

- Click here for it.

Obama's highest individual job approval measurement in office was 69%, in January 2009 during the first few days of his presidency. He is one of only three presidents, along with Richard Nixon and Reagan, never to register an approval rating in the 70s.

And while he never achieved extremely high ratings, neither did he achieve extreme lows. At various points in his presidency his approval ratings dipped to 38%. This included in August and October 2011 after contentious negotiations over the debt ceiling limit and subsequent downgrading of the U.S. credit rating. Obama also failed to generate sufficient support for legislation designed to address the still-weak employment situation.

Obama's approval ratings also fell to 38% in September 2014, shortly after the Islamic State terrorist group released videos showing the beheadings of U.S. journalists captured overseas. Those incidents came on the heels of a summer of increased international tensions between Russia and Ukraine, and between Israel and the Palestinians.

Domestically, the deaths of young black men Eric Garner and Michael Brown in confrontations with white police officers led to increased racial tensions.
All other presidents except Eisenhower and Kennedy fell below 38% at some point in their presidencies, with five different presidents receiving ratings below 30%.

For more:

- President Obama Leaves White House With 58% Favorable Rating.

- What is the Gallup Poll?
-- Wikipedia: Gallup Poll.

From the Washington Post: Obama largely commutes sentence of Chelsea Manning, U.S. soldier convicted for leaking classified information

Checking and balancing:

- Click here for the article.

President Obama largely commuted the 35-year prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, an Army private convicted in 2013 of taking secret diplomatic and military documents and disclosing them to WikiLeaks.

Obama also granted a full and complete pardon to Ret. Marine General James E. Cartwright for lying to the FBI in a probe of a leak of classified information about a covert U.S.-Israeli cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear program. A former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was known as Obama’s favorite general, Cartwright pleaded guilty in October and was sentenced last week to two years in prison.

In addition, Obama granted clemency to about 200 low-level drug offenders who were sentenced under harsh drug laws and would have received lighter sentences if convicted today. In all, the president commuted 209 individuals and pardoned another 64. He is expected to grant more drug commutations on Wednesday.

More from Vox: Chelsea Manning’s commutation is part of a historic year in reducing prison sentences.

A few days before leaving office, President Obama broke one of his own records. Pardoning 64 people and shortening the prison sentences of another 209, he made Tuesday the biggest use of clemency by a president in a single day in US history — breaking a record he himself set last month.

It’s the culmination of a year-long effort to use the president’s clemency power to get hundreds of people — almost all of them nonviolent drug offenders — out of prison sooner.

Depending on how you look at it, Obama’s effort in the twilight of his presidency is either a historic act of criminal justice reform — or too little too late. Obama’s rejected thousands of petitions for reduced sentences, and there are still thousands more waiting for review — and the Trump administration, under attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions, is extremely unlikely to give them a second look.

Obama still has more time to get even more people out of federal prison — after all, presidents historically get most aggressive with clemency in the very last days of their term. But while it’s now clear that Obama’s done something very significant indeed, it’s also near-certain that it will, in some ways, fall short.

From the Pew Research Center: Presidential job approval ratings from Ike to Obama

Obama's have been remarkably stable.

- Click here for the article.

From the NYT: Obama After Dark: The Precious Hours Alone

An interesting look at Obama's decision-making style.

- Click here for article.

Mr. Obama calls himself a “night guy,” and as president, he has come to consider the long, solitary hours after dark as essential as his time in the Oval Office. Almost every night that he is in the White House, Mr. Obama has dinner at 6:30 with his wife and daughters and then withdraws to the Treaty Room, his private office down the hall from his bedroom on the second floor of the White House residence.

There, his closest aides say, he spends four or five hours largely by himself.

He works on speeches. He reads the stack of briefing papers delivered at 8 p.m. by the staff secretary. He reads 10 letters from Americans chosen each day by his staff. “How can we allow private citizens to buy automatic weapons? They are weapons of war,” Liz O’Connor, a Connecticut middle school teacher, wrote in a letter Mr. Obama read on the night of June 13.

The president also watches ESPN, reads novels or plays Words With Friends on his iPad.

Michelle Obama occasionally pops in, but she goes to bed before the president, who is up so late he barely gets five hours of sleep a night. For Mr. Obama, the time alone has become more important.

“Everybody carves out their time to get their thoughts together. There is no doubt that window is his window,” said Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s first chief of staff. “You can’t block out a half-hour and try to do it during the day. It’s too much incoming. That’s the place where it can all be put aside and you can focus.”

From the Atlantic: How Obama Bounced Back After a stinging defeat in the 2014 midterm elections, the president found a way to avoid being a lame duck.

Generally presidents lose power toward the end of their terms. They become lame ducks, but Obama seems to have been finding ways to turn this around.

- Click here for the article.

“We went big.”

That’s how White House press secretary Joshua Earnest explained how President Barack Obama had rebounded from a stinging defeat in the 2014 midterm election, to his present popularity. It was, he said on Sunday, a deliberate strategy crafted to ensure the “lame-duck label” wouldn’t stick.

He ticked off a list of initiatives. Obama endorsed net neutrality, shortly after the election. He went to China, and announced a carbon deal. He unveiled a set of executive actions on immigration. He reopened diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Earnest credited White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough for “seeing around a corner” in the weeks ahead of the election, and positioning the White House to respond. He made the remarks in an interview withThe Atlantic’s James Fallows at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic.

That aggressiveness, Earnest argued, had paid off, by demonstrating that “the president had the wherewithal and the energy and the authority” to accomplish things even at the end of his second term. Obama recently registered a 56 percent approval rating in a Washington Post poll, his highest level in that survey in five years.

From the NYT: Obama to Nominate Merrick Garland to Supreme Court

- Click here for the article.

President Obama on Wednesday will nominate Merrick B. Garland as the nation’s 113th justice, according to White House officials, choosing a centrist appeals court judge widely respected even by Republicans in hopes his choice will be considered by the Senate.

In choosing Judge Garland, a well-known moderate who has drawn bipartisan support over decades, Mr. Obama was essentially daring Republicans to press their election-year confirmation fight over a judge many of them have publicly praised and who would be difficult for them to reject, particularly if a Democrat were to win the November presidential election and they faced the prospect of a more liberal nominee in 2017.

For more on Garland:

- Wikipedia: Merrick Garland.
- Scotusblog: Afternoon round-up: President nominates Garland to Supreme Court.
- Vox: Merrick Garland is President Obama's choice to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.

What is the Obama Doctrine?

In 2305's section on foreign policy a variety of "doctrines" are mentioned. Wikipedia's page on "foreign policy doctrine" defines a doctrine as "a general statement of foreign policy," and that the purpose of a doctrine is to "provide general rules for the conduct of foreign policy through decisions on international relations. These rules allow the political leadership of a nation to deal with a situation and to explain the actions of a nation to other nations."

A number have existed over American history - click here for Wikipedia's list.

Every president since the end of World War 2 - when the United States became a dominant player in foreign policy - has had his own "doctrine" and President Obama is no exception. An analysis of the recent Iran deal makes more sense in light of the doctrine.

Here's background on it:

- Wikipedia: Obama Doctrine.
- President Explains The 'Obama Doctrine,' Defends Iran Deal.
- Heritage: The Obama Doctrine.
- Foreign Policy: The Obama Doctrine.
- Politico: The Obama Doctrine?
- Iran and the Obama Doctrine.

- Obama explains the 'doctrine' that underlies his foreign policy.
- US News: The Obama Doctrine Explained.
- Council on Foreign Relations: The Obama Doctrine.
- The American Prospect: The Obama Doctrine.

The Keystone Veto

Just in time for our look at the checks and balances:

- Obama vetoes Keystone XL bill.
- Read Obama's Keystone veto statement.
- Wikipedia: List of United States presidential vetoes.
- Obama Almost Never Vetoes Bills. That's About to Change.
- GOP Will Try To Override Obama's Keystone XL Pipeline Veto.

Reasonable commentary (in my opinion):

- The Symbolic Politics of Keystone XL.

What is this thing anyway?

- Wikipedia: Keystone Pipeline.

From the Hill: Obama veers left after red wave

The President seems to be itching for a fight with Congress, but doing so also helps rally Democrats behind him.

- Click here for the article.

President Obama has taken significant steps to the left since his party’s devastating losses in the midterm elections.

In a surprise, he announced a major deal on climate change with China during a trip to Beijing Tuesday. That followed another unanticipated move — a Monday statement pressuring the Federal Communications Commission to adopt new net neutrality rules for the Internet.

The moves are helping to rally a dispirited Democratic base while re-establishing Obama’s political leadership after he was sidelined during the midterms.

“He’s at his best when his back is against the wall,” said Democratic strategist Bob Shrum. “Jeremiah Wright in 2008, Scott Brown’s election in 2009, after the first debate in 2012 — he comes back and tends to fight pretty hard.”

“He’s a fourth-quarter player, and he’s in the fourth quarter of his presidency,” Shrum added.

The moves are also prompting questions about whether Obama is shifting to the left in his final two years in office, or if the moves are meant to cushion the blow when he moves to the center to negotiate with a Republican-controlled Congress.

From the Washinton Post: Obama to sign two executive orders aimed at narrowing gender gap in wages

This fits our discussion of economic policy making and civil rights and executive power - probably a few others as well.

- Click here for the article.

President Obama will take two executive actions Tuesday aimed at narrowing the wage gap between men and women, forcing federal contractors to let their workers discuss their earnings with one another and to disclose more information about what their employees earn.

The push by Obama, who also is commemorating Tuesday as “National Equal Pay Day,” is part of a broader effort by Democrats to increase turnout among female voters during the 2014 midterm elections, which party strategists consider critical to limiting Republican gains this fall.

One of the new measures is an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from retaliating against workers who discuss their salaries with one another. The other is a presidential memorandum ordering new rules for contractors to file data with the federal government showing how they compensate employees, including by sex and race.

White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said Monday that the two policies aim to address the “pay secrecy” that often keeps workers from seeking more equitable compensation.

“Unfortunately, pay inequity is a real and persistent problem that continues to shortchange women, their families and our economy as a whole,” she told reporters in a conference call.

The first bill that Obama signed into law in 2009 was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which gave employees more time to file discrimination claims. Jarrett said the administration is disappointed that Republicans in Congress have opposed another bill, the Paycheck Fairness Act, which includes reforms like the ones that Obama is applying to federal contractors.

From the Hill: An excess of executive power?

Congressional resistance - instigated mainly by the Republican dominated House of Representatives - has put President Obama in a position where if he wants to implement his agenda he has to make use of executive tolls that allow him to act without Congressional authorization.

The Hill details the controversies associated with this move - and also puts it in perspective. Is Obama doing anything previous presidents have not done? Republicans will of course say yes - but there's no consensus on whether this is the case. The article outlines this argument. I recommend a quick read to catch up with the current state of executive power. Remember that the executive has consistently gathered strength over the course of American history - so there's little surprise that this trend may be continuing. Putting it in proper - non partisan - perspective can be a chore though.

- Click here for the article. 

President Obama's aggressive use of administrative power is testing the boundaries of executive authority on several fronts.

Obama throughout his presidency has pushed the envelope on recess appointments, prosecutorial discretion and the way his administration executes laws, drawing resistance from the other two branches of government.

Experts say Obama's tactics are not unusual and note he has issued fewer executive orders than many of his predecessors. But congressional Republicans counter it is the content, not the number, of presidential directives that has them up in arms.. . . In remarks Friday at House Democrats’ annual retreat, Obama said he would prefer to work with Congress than act unilaterally.

“But, I'm not going to wait, because there's too much to do,” he said. “And America does not believe in standing still.”

In recent days, Obama signed an executive order effectively raising the minimum wage for employees of federal contractors, while his administration extended additional legal rights to same sex couples and issued new banking guidelines for legal pot businesses, among other contentious actions.

“All modern presidents have done this,” said Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin political science professor who has studied the presidency extensively. “All presidents utilize the tools of executive power to implement policies.”

To be sure, Obama is not the first president to be accused of overstepping the bounds of his authority — a point emphasized Friday by White House press secretary Jay Carney, who said, “It is funny to hear Republicans get upset about the suggestion the president might use legally available authorities … when, obviously, they supported a president who used executive authorities quite widely.”

But the same point could be made in reverse. President George W. Bush faced an onslaught of criticism from Democrats in response to “signing statements” used to expound his administration’s interpretations of hundreds of laws passed by Congress.

. . .In the House, Rice is leading a more aggressive rebuke to Obama’s executive power play. His "Stop This Overreaching Presidency" Resolution directing the House to file a federal lawsuit challenging four executive actions has attracted more than 100 co-sponsors.

The lawsuit would challenge the employer mandate delay and the 2011 decision to stop certain deportations after the Dream Act failed to gain traction in Congress. Also targeted are the extension of "substandard" insurance policies that would otherwise have been canceled under the Affordable Care Act, and a waiver of welfare work requirements under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

Before hearing the case, a court would have to find that the House has standing to sue over the actions. A Congressional Research Service analysis conducted for Rice late last year found that such a lawsuit might clear that hurdle.

“It appears likely that a one-house resolution specifically authorizing such judicial recourse would satisfy this authorization requirement,” the nonpartisan CRS concluded.

Regardless of the fate of that measure, the courts will be the final arbiter of whether Obama’s actions have exceeded the power of his office.

A Unilateral President?

After a State of the Union Address where he promised to use whatever means were at his disposal to implement his policies, a handful of commentators have asked whether Obama has gone to far in asserting executive power.

Other have tried to put it in perspective - throwing water on the idea that he's behaving lawlessly.

He's issued fewer executive orders than other recent presidents:



Pages added to the Federal Register per year are the same - more or less - as those under W Bush:



Here's a comparison to past president's who used executive power broadly:

These are push-the-envelope moves but strike me as within the bounds of the modern presidency. Some historical perspective:

First, the constitutional tug-of-war between the president and Congress is as old as the republic -- indeed, an essential element in the constitutional design. The framers were wary not only of creating a monarchical chief executive but also one hobbled by congressional interference.

Second, there is a robust history of presidents pushing ambiguous constitutional boundaries to engage in unilateral action. Jefferson executed the Louisiana Purchase despite his own doubts about its constitutionality.

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, notwithstanding the Constitution's recognition of slavery and his own concerns about the proclamation's susceptibility to legal challenge.

Third, this trend toward broad presidential power has accelerated in recent decades, under presidents of both parties -- even before George W. Bush's aggressive use of signing statements, and his war on terror.

In a 2001 Harvard Law Review article, Elena Kagan, a veteran of the Clinton White House, traced the growth of presidential power over regulatory agencies to Ronald Reagan (in pursuit of efforts to loosen regulations) through Bill Clinton (in pursuit of more activist government, a way around a balky Congress, and political credit).

Clinton's unprecedented interventions, she wrote, represented a "significant enhancement of presidential power over regulatory matters."

Fourth, assessments of presidential overreach are inherently matters of situational ethics: How you judge whether a president is overstepping his authority is inevitably colored by whether you agree with the substance of that exercise.

Put more bluntly, much of the hoopla about presidential imperialism is politics dressed up in constitutional clothing, to be put on and off depending on which party holds the White House.

Thus, Democrats condemned what they saw as Bush's unilateral excesses, while Republicans remained largely silent and unconcerned. Now, the roles are precisely reversed.

In short - Obama's actions are probably best seen as part of a general trend towards expanded executive powers. For better or worse.

From the Gallup Poll: In U.S., 67% Dissatisfied With Income, Wealth Distribution

Majorities of Republicans, Democrats and Independents agree, which suggests - but does not guarantee - that this will be on the agenda of Congress.

The only issue will be how this topic is addressed. What is the root cause of inequality? There will be disputes over this with liberal-ish Democrats more likely to blame outside factors and conservative-ish Republicans saying that a lack of individual initiative - probably exacerbated by misguided government programs - are the root cause.

Their relative solutions to the problem are bound to differ - and this difference will very likely (in my opinion) negate the passage/adoption of any actual policy proposals. But I could be wrong.

Poll numbers suggest that issue has legs

The partisan breakdown:



Numbers over recent history:


The bottom line according to the Gallup Poll:

Obama will almost certainly touch on inequality in his State of the Union address on Jan. 28. This will certainly resonate in a general sense with the majority of Americans who are dissatisfied with income and wealth distribution in the U.S. today. Members of the president's party agree most strongly with the president that this is an issue, but majorities of Republicans and independents are at least somewhat dissatisfied as well.

Although Americans are more likely to be satisfied with the opportunity for people to get ahead through hard work, their satisfaction is well below where it was before the economic downturn. Accordingly, improvement in the U.S. economy could bring Americans' views back to pre-recession levels.

Going Public on Syria

When we talk about the increase of presidential power over time, we will point out that increasingly powerful media technology has allowed presidents to attempt to mobilize public opinion in his favor. The term used to describe this is "going public" and it refers to a type of presidential leadership that has developed in the past two or three decades and involves presidents making direct appeals to the public primarily rather than Congress, and event tries to use the public as leverage against Congress.

President Obama attempted to do so tonight with a speech from the White House. The NYT details the speech here.

The problem for presidents in the contemporary environment is that their opponents have the same ability to get their messages out. Going public may have worked best in a simpler media environment where it was difficult to get a message out. That's less the case in this age of Facebook and Twitter.

The War Powers Resolution

2305 students ought to get familiar with this significant piece of Vietnam War era legislation. It's applicability to the current situation in Syria will be debated heavily in the upcoming week - last week as well.

It was an early attempt to reign in executive war making powers, though its actual impact is subject to debate. It has never been tested constitutionally, so there's a question about whether it allows Congress to interfere with powers related to the "commander in chief."

From Jack Goldsmith: Why Doesn’t President Obama Seek Congressional Approval for Syria?

Goldsmith headed the Office of Legal Counsel in the W Bush Administration. He questions whether an intervention in Syria is justified, and whether the president has the power to act on his own. This will be useful for our future look in 2305 about the extent of presidential war powers.

I have a pretty broad view of presidential power to use military force abroad without congressional authorization.  On that view, which is close to the past views of the Office of Legal Counsel, the planned use of military force in Syria is a constitutional stretch that will push presidential war unilateralism beyond where it has gone before.  There are many reasons why it is a stretch even under OLC precedents.  The main ones, as I alluded to a few days ago, are (1) neither U.S. persons nor property are at stake, and no plausible self-defense rationale exists; (2) the main non-self-defense U.S. interest that the Commander in Chief has invoked since the Korean War to justify unilateral uses of force – upholding the integrity of the U.N. Charter – appears (as Wells argued) to be disserved rather than served by a military strike in Syria; and (3) a Syria strike would push the legal envelope further even than Kosovo, the outer bound to date of presidential unilateralism, which at least implicated our most important security treaty organization commitments (NATO).  (Note that the USG was, as Wells pointed out, never able to publicly articulate a legal rationale for Kosovo.  In our more legalistic age 14 years later, such silence likely won’t be possible, but it also won’t be possible to rely on Kosovo as a constitutional precedent without explaining why the invasion was lawful at the time.)

The understaffed federal judiciary in a handful of charts

This is one of the factors driving possible filibuster reform.

From WonkBlog, some charts detailing the factors leading to an understaffed - and possibly weakened - federal judiciary.

One of the featured charts:

Is Obama really a moderate Republican?

Here's an argument that policy wise, he is.

America is mired in three wars. The past decade was the hottest on record. Unemployment remains stuck near 9 percent, and there’s a small, albeit real, possibility that the U.S. government will default on its debt. So what’s dominating the news? A reality-television star who can’t persuade anyone that his hair is real is alleging that the president of the United States was born in Kenya.

Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s.

Obama's peculiar polling numbers

While he has not registered numbers as high as some of his predecessors, neither have his numbers been as low as theirs either. This may be the beneficial flip side of a polarized population. While the one's that don't like you never will, the obe that do, never won't.

Do we assume presidents are more powerful than they really are?

Norm Ornstein says yes, we do, and has a major beef with people who argue that things would work better in Washington if Obama was a better leader and could work his will with Congress. He reminds readers that our system does not work that way, and it never has even though we like to think otherwise.

. . . at nearly every speech I give, someone asks about President Obama’s failure to lead. Of course, that question has been driven largely by the media, perhaps most by Bob Woodward. When Woodward speaks, Washington listens, and he has pushed the idea that Obama has failed in his fundamental leadership task—not building relationships with key congressional leaders the way Bill Clinton did, and not “working his will” the way LBJ or Ronald Reagan did.

Now, after the failure to get the background-check bill through the Senate, other reporters and columnists have picked up on the same theme, and I have grown increasingly frustrated with how the mythology of leadership has been spread in recent weeks. I have yelled at the television set, “Didn’t any of you ever read Richard Neustadt’s classic Presidential Leadership? Haven’t any of you taken Politics 101 and read about the limits of presidential power in a separation-of-powers system?”

But the issue goes beyond that, to a willful ignorance of history. No one schmoozed more or better with legislators in both parties than Clinton. How many Republican votes did it get him on his signature initial priority, an economic plan? Zero in both houses. And it took eight months to get enough Democrats to limp over the finish line. How did things work out on his health care plan? How about his impeachment in the House?

No one knew Congress, or the buttons to push with every key lawmaker, better than LBJ. It worked like a charm in his famous 89th, Great Society Congress, largely because he had overwhelming majorities of his own party in both houses. But after the awful midterms in 1966, when those swollen majorities receded, LBJ’s mastery of Congress didn’t mean squat.

No one defined the agenda or negotiated more brilliantly than Reagan. Did he “work his will”? On almost every major issue, he had to make major compromises with Democrats, including five straight years with significant tax increases. But he was able to do it—as he was able to achieve a breakthrough on tax reform—because he had key Democrats willing to work with him and find those compromises.

For Obama, we knew from the get-go that he had no Republicans willing to work with him. As Robert Draper pointed out in his book Do Not Ask What Good We Do, key GOP leaders such as Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan determined on inauguration eve in January 2009 that they would work to keep Obama and his congressional Democratic allies from getting any Republican votes for any of his priorities or initiatives. Schmoozing was not going to change that.