How Obama and Perry are alike

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Updated: December 19, 2011 8:16AM

The looming U.S. Supreme Court confrontation over the health-care law highlights the paradox at the heart of the presidency of Barack Obama — his signature legislative achievement betrays the failure of his leadership and his governing style.

The hallmark of his 2008 campaign, and one aspect of his candidacy that inspired so much hope, was his pledge to work across party lines, banish the vitriolic politics of the past and govern without cynicism nor malice.

Yet, almost as soon as he moved into the White House, Obama abandoned that noble goal, lecturing Republicans coming forth with ideas for legislation that he had won the election.

Nowhere was this truer than in passage of the Affordable Care Act. No significant GOP proposal was included, with the inevitable result that a bill commanding one-sixth of the nation’s economy, reaching into every home and representing the largest expansion of federal power in half a century passed on a strictly partisan basis.

That’s how they do things in European parliamentary systems, not under the U.S. constitutional framework tailor-written to forge consensus and compromise on big legislation. Social Security and Medicare, for all the storm of criticism they’ve generated, passed Congress with bipartisan support.

Bad politics make for bad law. Half of Obamacare’s claimed — and much disputed — deficit reduction evaporated when the administration had to scuttle a long-term care program that wasn’t financially viable. Despite Obama’s promise no one would lose insurance they liked, the evidence mounts that businesses are deciding it’s cost-effective to drop employee coverage and pay a fine. And the law hasn’t stemmed ever increasing medical costs.

Obamacare has only grown more unpopular. More than half the states filed court challenges. Much of the ire focused on the law’s individual mandate, requiring Americans to buy a product, insurance, for the simple reason that they breathe. Now the Supreme Court will have to settle the type of core issue best left to the give and take of the legislature.

Outrage over Obamacare and the way it was passed helped fuel the Tea Party movement and the big Republican election victories of 2010. But just as bad politics can make bad law, outrage over bad law can make for bad politics.

Seeking to revive his moribund presidential campaign, Texas Gov. Rick Perry attacks Congress as “overpaid, over-staffed and away from home too much.” He wants to make Congress a part-time enterprise by halving the pay and staff of the House and Senate. The fruits of that would only be a more powerful executive branch and its regulatory bureaucracy. Who but the GOP-led House has been a check on Obama the last year and a half? The power Perry would deprive Congress would naturally flow to the White House.

Congress is the first branch of government described in the Constitution, a sure sign of the prominence the Founding Fathers expected it play in our government. They set up competing provinces of government and placed checks and balances on them. The idea was of a limited government representing the broad interests of voters and requiring negotiations and consensus to do big things.

Obama and Perry may be from opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they both demonstrate little appreciation for the role of Congress, divided government, and working within the political process and across the partisan aisle for the good of the country.