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Clearly, there are other reasons for this phenomenon: among them, the President's desire to take political credit or, on the flip side, his recognition that, whatever the outcome, he will be saddled with the political blame. The American public seems to equate the President with the Fourth Branch. Advances in technology and media may be exacerbating this effect. This phenomenon, however, cuts both ways. The President may be inclined to make policy decisions himself so that he can take the credit if the outcome is politically popular, but he may prefer to leave policymaking to his subordinates so that he can distance himself if the outcome is not politically popular. This does not, therefore, account fully for the dramatic [*557] rise in presidential direct action described below.

[FOOTNOTE]

Here, we take a different tack and emphasize the informal political∂ costs of unilateral action. Specifically, we argue that presidents consider∂ more than just whether Congress or the courts will act affirmatively to∂ overturn a unilateral presidential order. Rather, presidents consider the∂ longer-term political costs that unilateral action may entail. These∂ political costs can take many forms, two of which are particularly∂ important. First, when presidents act unilaterally, they may burn∂ bridges with members of Congress opposed to the action on political,∂ ideological, or even constitutional grounds. To be sure, in almost all∂ circumstances, presidents will be able to carry the day and beat back∂ any legislative effort to undo what they have done unilaterally.∂ However, the ill will so generated on Capitol Hill may prove politically∂ costly the next time the president’s policy wishes require action that∂ only Congress can take. For example, despite being a rather blunt∂ instrument, Congress retains the power of the purse and therefore,∂ ultimately, the power to support or de-fund most policies that∂ presidents begin unilaterally.40 This echoes Neustadt’s moral from the∂ “three cases of command”—Truman’s firing of General Douglas∂ MacArthur and seizure of the steel mills during the Korean War, and∂ Eisenhower federalizing the Arkansas National Guard to integrate∂ Central High School. In each case, the president succeeded in achieving∂ his immediate policy objective. Yet, in each case, Neustadt argues the∂ victory was a pyrrhic one, coming at a high political cost. Truman’s∂ actions, in particular, only intensified ongoing battles with Congress on∂ both the foreign and domestic fronts and likely hindered Truman’s∂ efforts to extract concessions from Congress on other key elements of∂ his legislative agenda.41

Clearly, there are other reasons for this phenomenon: among them, the President's desire to take political credit or, on the flip side, his recognition that, whatever the outcome, he will be saddled with the political blame. The American public seems to equate the President with the Fourth Branch. Advances in technology and media may be exacerbating this effect. This phenomenon, however, cuts both ways. The President may be inclined to make policy decisions himself so that he can take the credit if the outcome is politically popular, but he may prefer to leave policymaking to his subordinates so that he can distance himself if the outcome is not politically popular. This does not, therefore, account fully for the dramatic [*557] rise in presidential direct action described below.

[FOOTNOTE]

Moreover, other institutions, particularly Congress, may play an important role—even when presidents know that efforts to overturn an∂ executive action will fail—by engaging in the political debate and mobilizing public pressure against the president should he act unilaterally contra congressional preferences. Decades of political science scholarship have demonstrated that the public lacks systematic knowledge∂ of politics and therefore relies heavily on heuristics when forming their∂ political judgments.48 Political elites thus become key cue-givers who∂ help inform and shape public opinion.49 Finally, citizens acquire most∂ of their knowledge about politics from the mass media. Scholars have∂ long noted that the media depend on official Washington sources for∂ information. However, a robust literature in political communications∂ goes further and argues that the media tend “to ‘index’ the range of∂ voices and viewpoints in both news and editorials according to the∂ range of views expressed in mainstream government debate about a∂ given topic.”50 When other political actors, particularly members of∂ Congress, object and criticize presidential actions in the public sphere,∂ they are all but assured of receiving considerable media coverage, and∂ they are well-positioned to influence public opinion against the∂ executive branch.51∂ In essence, we argue that while the statutory and legal constraints∂ on presidential unilateral power are weak, the political constraints are∂ quite robust.52 Unilateral actions that could provoke public ire and∂ erode the president’s political capital, thereby undermining later efforts to pursue other aspects of the president’s programmatic agenda, may∂ fail a simple cost-benefit calculation. The informal political costs of∂ acting—even when Congress and the courts are almost certainly∂ unwilling or unable to strike down the action—may outweigh the policy∂ benefits of acting unilaterally. These political costs, which are not∂ accounted for in most extant models of unilateral politics, are tangible∂ and substantial; indeed, they may explain why presidents fail to act∂ unilaterally as aggressively and on as many issues across the gamut of∂ policy as formal models suggest they should.

There’s an argument for taking such a multipronged approach. Every president tends to have the greatest leverage at the start of their term, and momentum can be harder to generate as time goes on. But there is also the question of political capital, which tends to be finite. If Biden proves to have less heft than he thinks to pass legislation, he will disappoint key constituencies. “We’re going to need ... to be able to act on multiple fronts,” Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, said in the White House briefing room Friday. Deese was making that point in the context of the president’s proposed $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package advancing even as the Senate conducts former President Trump’s impeachment trial next month. But the same principle applies to other issues. Some Democrats are optimistic that across-the-board progress is possible. They suggest the pressure is on their Republican counterparts not to appear obstructionist. “If Biden does well, then people will be very upset if it looks like the Republicans are obstructing, particularly on the economy and on health — that will be very bad for them,” said Democratic strategist Tad Devine. “I’m not predicting that we are going to have immigration reform and all this stuff right at once,” Devine added. “But I do believe he has a very strong hand right now. There are a lot of votes out there for what Democrats want.” The issue of political capital and how best to deploy it is always a vexing one for new presidents. Former President Obama stuck to his commitment to enact health care reform even amid an economic catastrophe, persevering past the point when some advisers counseled him to settle for a more modest goal. He signed the Affordable Care Act into law in March 2010, only to see his party suffer crushing losses in the midterm elections later that year. Former President Clinton fared worse. His 1993 effort at health care reform ran aground, and other controversies also slowed his progress. Clinton early on sought to end the ban on LGBT people serving in the military and then backed off to the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” compromise policy that didn’t really satisfy anyone. Republicans suggest Biden could be vulnerable to comparable missteps. “He has got a very slim majority in the House and no real majority in the Senate,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist and former GOP leadership aide who is also a columnist for The Hill. “I think the problem is when you throw a punch of spaghetti up on the wall and hope something sticks. You really want to be more targeted. Biden is going to be disappointing a lot of people if he is making promises he can’t keep.”

But policy accomplishments don't really help a president much in terms of popularity. LBJ wasn't popular because he signed Medicare or the Civil Rights Act. It works the other way around; he was able to pass those in part because he was popular in 1964-65, thanks to a very strong economy and public goodwill in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. Notably, all his Great Society legislation didn't help him out once the public got annoyed by the Vietnam War; his party lost many seats in 1966 and he chose to resign rather than face the voters' wrath in 1968. Beyond that, to the extent productivity and popularity may be related today, they may run in the opposite direction. In a polarized political environment, a president's achievements are likely to generate as least as many enemies as friends. Take health care reform, Obama's signature accomplishment. No Democrat could credibly run for president in 2008 (or for many years before that) without health care reform being a top priority. That was the nature of the Democratic coalition for decades. Conversely, the Republican coalition had been organized for decades around preventing Democrats from enacting health care reform. Obama's efforts were bound to produce substantial pushback, just as Clinton's did twenty years ago. The passage of health care reform indeed exacerbated Democratic congressional losses in 2010, and may well have handed Republicans the House of Representatives. This doesn't mean that it was wrong for Democrats to pass health care reform or for Obama to do any of the things he's recently done. It just means that actually being productive will engender resistance. Obama is unpopular at least in part because he's been effective.

The paradox for Biden is that the more successful he is at addressing the pandemic and the economy, the more difficulty he could encounter in building bipartisan coalitions to address other problems. Political Science 101 would suggest that if Biden gets credit for ending the pandemic and restoring a strong economy, that popularity should translate into greater political capital for other problems in the queue.

Political Science 301 offers a cautionary warning: Solved problems fade from view. Biden is appropriately addressing the issues voters care about. But if the pandemic and the economy evolve as expected, voters will quickly bank those successes and focus on thornier problems — like immigration.

Important to the discussion of political capital is whether or not it can be replenished over a term. If a President expends political capital on his agenda, can it be replaced? Light suggests that “capital declines over time – public approval consistently falls: midterm losses occur” (31). Capital can be rebuilt, but only to a limited extent. The decline of capital makes it difficult to access information, recruit more expertise and maintain energy. If a lame duck President can be defined by a loss of political capital, this paper helps determine if such capital can be replenished or if a lame duck can accomplish little. Before determining this, a definition of a lame duck President must be developed.

Despite the relief plan's popularity outside the Beltway, it is unlikely that momentum from its passage will hurtle Biden into future legislative wins, Howell said. “The idea that a legislative win begets a subsequent legislative win in this environment is probably asking for too much,” he said, noting the prospect of passing COVID-19 relief was higher than more hot-button issues like immigration or health care. A legislative defeat would have raised questions about Biden’s ability to pass any meaningful legislation, but its passage won’t be a “springboard to the production of all kinds of landmark legislation – far from it," Howell said.

Noah, Prof @Stony Brook University, “Biden Must Avoid Obama's Mistake When Setting His Agenda; Stick to the crisis at hand or risk spurring a backlash that could slow economic reforms and hurt Democrats in 2022,” January 13, 2021,

The universe of possibilities for the Biden administration radically expanded after the Democrats clinched the Senate majority, but the increase in political capital isn’t infinite. When deciding which problems to tackle first, President Joe Biden should prioritize initiatives that address the pandemic while moving the nation toward long-term goals for public health and green-energy stimulus. Biden can learn from the experience of Barack Obama, whose focus on health-insurance reform provoked a midterm backlash and probably forfeited a chance to boost the country out of the Great Recession sooner. He should heed the words of Winston Churchill who urged, “never let a good crisis go to waste.” Because crises are times when the public understands that change is necessary, it’s possible to make deep and lasting reforms. President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood this when he focused parts of his New Deal on long-term alterations to America’s economic structure, such as Social Security and the National Labor Relations Board. These policies not only contributed to the recovery from the Great Depression — the reason for Roosevelt's election — but created a more equal and stable economy in which workers had more bargaining power and old people didn’t have to live in penury. The U.S. was in the depths of the Great Recession when Obama took office in 2009. With the benefit of unified Democratic control of Congress, he passed a fairly substantial stimulus. But it was still too small to make more than a modest dent in the recession. It was too weighted toward tax cuts and it didn’t include much of a bailout for underwater homeowners. Instead, Obama spent much of his political capital on passing the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Now, it’s true that health insurance was, and is, one of the country’s biggest problems. And it’s also true that Obamacare substantially reduced the ranks of the uninsured, which was a big, important victory. But the system Obama crafted was a compromise, which left the problem of ruinously high costs mostly unaddressed. The legislation failed to satisfy many on the left, with a few now even labeling it as mass murder for not making deeper reforms. Meanwhile, Obamacare remained unpopular throughout Obama’s term in office and may have substantially contributed to the Democrats’ catastrophic midterm election losses in 2010. Alternate histories are difficult to imagine, but it seems likely that had Obama spent his 2009 political capital on things more directly related to the recession — such as more infrastructure spending, a bigger bailout for underwater homeowners and a stronger welfare state — he'd have realized a higher return on that political capital. In other words, a crisis does present an opportunity for long-term reforms, but it’s best to use that opportunity for reforms that address the immediate crisis. The Democratic victories in the Georgia Senate runoffs have given Biden an unexpected opportunity to pass major legislation in the first year of his presidency, instead of relying on executive action and the faint hope of bipartisan compromise. The left will be clamoring for major action on health care and a variety of other momumental issues, but Biden needs to spend his political capital on reforms that are also tied to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting recession. The first priority is public health. COVID-19 exposed deep and catastrophic weaknesses in the U.S. public health institutions. Right now, vaccination is proceeding at a glacial pace due to an uncoordinated rollout that dumped vaccines in the lap of state public health agencies utterly unequipped to rapidly inoculate the entire populace. Biden needs to come right out of the gate with a coordinated, well-funded vaccination plan that reaches maximum vaccination rates as fast as possible. In doing so, he also needs to bolster public health agencies and revitalize and reform both the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration after years of neglect. This will be a bigger challenge than is popularly realized because of the possibility that vaccine-resistant virus strains will emerge. Biden will need to reorient much of the U.S. economy toward vaccine production and distribution until COVID-19 has been decisively beaten all around the world. It will take a lot of money and a lot of will. After the virus is beaten, the U.S. economy will still linger in recession unless the government acts decisively to boost demand. The best tool for doing this, as usual, is infrastructure investment. And the rapid progress in solar power and batteries means that Biden has a unique opportunity to address the climate crisis at the same time. A huge build-out of solar power and electric-car charging stations, including subsidies to rapidly replace fossil fuel plants and gasoline vehicles, will ensure that the U.S. economy comes roaring back while making huge steps toward decarbonization. Public health and green infrastructure should be the top priorities for Biden in 2021 and 2022. Yes, there are lots of other things in America that need reform, including health care. But the realities of the political system mean these will have to wait. Reforms must fit the crisis of the day; Biden can’t afford to get sidetracked on a quixotic quest to fix everything that’s wrong with the American economy.

The universe of possibilities for the Biden administration radically expanded after the Democrats clinched the Senate majority, but the increase in political capital isn’t infinite. When deciding which problems to tackle first, President Joe Biden should prioritize initiatives that address the pandemic while moving the nation toward long-term goals for public health and green-energy stimulus.

Biden can learn from the experience of Barack Obama, whose focus on health-insurance reform provoked a midterm backlash and probably forfeited a chance to boost the country out of the Great Recession sooner.

If we want clean energy to succeed in the upcoming Biden administration, we have to (a) be realistic, and (b) fight like hell to keep him focused on it as much as possible. Political capital is scarce, and the threats to our future from climate change are real, so allowing the various Democratic lobbies to suck all of the oxygen out of the room is not an option. Here’s a quick rundown of the problem and some ideas on what we can do to help clean energy win. It’s All About Political Capital In short, political capital is a way to think about political power in democratic countries. Yes, winning elections does give some political power, but you can’t effectively use it unless you have coalitions, alliances, trust, goodwill, and influence. Your earned trust and connections are like money (capital). You can work hard to earn it and build it up, but it’s easy to spend it and even waste it, just like money. If you get power from an election and then quickly spend all of the political capital impressing loyalists, you’ll get to the point where you can’t win future elections (Trump is a great example of this), can’t get votes together for legislation, and can’t get people to help you in a variety of other ways. At worst, a political leader who has run completely out of political capital might not even be able to get normal citizens to follow laws. As the consent of the governed is withdrawn, you see protests, riots, violence, terrorism, and even war. For better or worse, Biden won’t start out with much political capital to begin with. After a narrowly won election, not taking the Senate (because many voters rejected Trump but voted for Republicans further down the ballot), and then extended accusations of cheating, it’s not going to be easy to get things done.

POLITICAL CAPITAL is crucial for any president. With it, he can win legislative victories; without it, opponents circle like sharks. For Joe Biden — after a solid second half — the issue is how he will spend his new political capital after the Democrats’ decent showing in the Nov. 8 elections. WITH POLITICAL CAPITAL, Biden can afford to alienate his allies in organized labor; yesterday he essentially told Congress to intervene and end the railroad strike threat. WITH POLITICAL CAPITAL, Biden can afford to anger human rights advocates by staying relatively quiet on the protests that are sweeping through China. Biden does not want to jeopardize chances of better relations with Xi Jinping. AND WITH POLITICAL CAPITAL, Biden can push for a spending package in December that may resurrect the child tax credit, raise the debt ceiling and provide $40 billion or more in new aid to Ukraine. THERE ARE SOME ISSUES — banning assault weapons, for example — that are unattainable. But Biden can demand action on guns. with public support. He also can speak out forcefully against the murderous ayatollahs in Iran, but that’s another issue where Biden’s capital is limited. BIDEN’S BIGGEST ASSET may be the looming GOP chaos in the House of Representatives, where Republicans will have a tiny majority. And the GOP is now consumed with a controversy over Donald Trump’s dinner with a Holocaust denier. BIDEN’S LEGISLATIVE SUCCESSES this year reportedly have made him more inclined to run for a second term. He’s known for extensive deliberations before making a decision, so it could be late winter before Biden decides on whether to run again. IF HE DECLARES THAT HE’S RUNNING, Biden probably won’t have to worry about a serious challenge from any Democrat, most of whom have declared that they won’t run if he does. This includes California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said over the past weekend that he will not challenge Biden. WITH A SOLID RECORD of legislative wins and a Democratic Senate, Biden may be tempted to overlook the elephant in the room — his age. If he won re-election, Biden’s second term theoretically would end with him at 86 years old. An 86-year-old president is inconceivable to us; it’s a very stressful job, even with political capital.

He was the top-ranking Democrat on the highly influential Senate Judiciary and Senate Foreign Relations committees for decades. Then, in 2008, Biden served as a sounding board for Obama on national security and foreign policy, according to The New Yorker. And in the Obama White House, Biden subsequently took on a foreign policy-centric portfolio and served as the White House proxy in Congress during contentious moments, like passing the 2009 economic stimulus package and avoiding the fiscal cliff. Biden’s reputation as a dealmaker throughout his time in the Senate and as vice president was forged by his unconventional partnerships across the aisle. Sometimes, that meant compromise in addressing the fiscal cliff directly with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. While the compromise was touted as a victory by the Obama administration, some progressives said the administration should have held the line. Democrats such as Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet have subsequently argued “that deal extended almost all those Bush tax cuts permanently.” In other instances, forging unconventional partnerships in order to get things done included policy debates with figures now considered to have values diametrically opposed to the ones Biden has said are at his core. That included co-sponsoring legislation with South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, a segregationist, on several crime bills. It also included hashing out several differences in a chemical weapons treaty with North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms in the 1990s. Helms, who died in 2008, used racial signals in campaigns and fought against establishing a Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday because he felt the civil rights leader held radical political views. Biden’s return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue this year also undoubtedly marks a shift in the way the American president approaches lawmakers on the Hill compared to how things were done over the last four years. Now, there are fewer tweets from the commander in chief personally denigrating members of Congress. The new President in office is not just one who has brought Republicans in for meetings in the Oval Office early in his term, but one who has also congratulated Republican senators for winning their races. And so far, unlike what happened during the Trump years, there have been no known walkouts by the President during White House meetings with members of Congress. Despite four years of a President calling to drain the swamp, Biden’s many years in Washington, allies argue, is for the better. “(Biden’s past experience in) the executive branch is not only relevant experience, but I think it’s going to help them enormously as President. Whereas if went right from the Senate, there would certainly be a gap there,” Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Bob Casey said. “The other thing is, I think he’s made it his business over the years to interact a lot with mayors and governors.” Biden in action It’s not clearly known what pushes Biden to pick up the phone or schedule a meeting with lawmakers these days to hash out a deal. But in his first months in office, it’s widely known that he’s making those calls and scheduling those meetings frequently. When White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about Biden’s relationship with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin – the moderate Democrat who has already proved to be a crucial and fickle vote for the President’s legislative proposals – Psaki said Biden is talking to Manchin and many other lawmakers often. Biden has a list of seasoned aides dedicated to legislative efforts, but the White House has suggested that he’s involved in a large portion of the direct negotiations with lawmakers himself. “He speaks with a range of senators and members of Congress and members of the House regularly as well. Obviously, they have meetings here, but he, perhaps because he served for 36 years, certainly doesn’t hesitate to pick up the phone and have a conversation, whether it’s something he agrees with, disagrees with,” Psaki said. “That’s something he’s prone to do, even when it’s not on his schedule for that day. Just when it comes up and it’s an ask somebody makes on the team.”

Joe Biden knows how to handle a tough crowd. This was evident last night at the State of the Union, and it was apparent to me seven years ago, on March 20, 2016. On that day, President Barack Obama sent Biden to sell the recently struck Iran nuclear deal to the national conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). This was the political equivalent of asking the vice president to push New York Times subscriptions at a Donald Trump rally. Over the previous year, AIPAC had spent every ounce of its political capital to oppose Obama’s accord with Iran, which it cast as an existential threat to Israel. Obama, for his part, had implied that opponents of the deal were effectively pro-war. As 18,000 AIPAC delegates converged on Washington, Biden was dispatched to defend the administration to a crowd whose feelings ranged from skeptical to hostile. To call this a thankless task would be to woefully understate the animosity in the arena. What happened next was remarkable: Biden somehow won over the room. He turned on his well-honed political charm, flattered the audience, and spoke passionately about his personal attachment to Israel, and by the time he got to the unpopular nuclear deal, he had the crowd applauding for it. He exited to a standing ovation. That same Biden was on full display last night. Not known for the eloquence of his oratory, the president instead spoke conversationally to Congress and the cameras. Folksy rather than formal, and straightforward rather than stentorian, the president exceeded expectations, as even some critics acknowledged. “It was quite effective as a rhetorical ploy,” the conservative Jeffrey Blehar wrote in National Review. “Biden played a losing economic and electoral-polling hand with the public as deftly as possible … by leaning into his retail political skills, 50 years of memorized blue-collar schtick, and the laughter and encouragement of the friendly half of the room.” Nowhere was Biden’s skill more apparent than in his interactions with those who sought to derail him. At several points during his address, he was confronted by a chorus of hecklers led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Observing this spectacle, some pundits tut-tutted at the incivility. But Biden seemed to enjoy it. Far from being flustered by the interruptions, he was energized by them. When the hecklers called Biden a “liar” for stating that some Republicans wanted to sunset Social Security and Medicare, he quipped, “I enjoy conversion,” and proceeded to get the entire chamber to applaud for preserving the programs, turning his critics into props in his performance. “We got unanimity!” he crowed. As the chamber clapped, Biden looked presidential at his podium. Greene, shouting ineffectually from the back while draped in an ostentatious white fur coat, looked like she’d just lost her last Dalmatian. Anyone who’d witnessed Biden at AIPAC, or in similar situations over his long career, would not have been surprised by his ability to roll with the rhetorical punches. But Biden’s Republican critics clearly did not anticipate his nimble response, for a very simple reason: They continue to underestimate the man they seek to replace. Since the 2020 Democratic primary, Biden’s secret weapon has been the low expectations set for him by his opponents. Rather than approach him as the flawed but formidable politician that he is, Biden’s critics on the left and right have consistently presented him as a befuddled individual who is unable to finish his sentences. They have cocooned themselves in clips of his gaffes, both real and fabricated, and convinced themselves that the Biden they see in their social-media bubble is the Biden that exists in actuality. The only problem with this caricature is that it does not survive contact with reality. It’s true that at 80 years old, Biden is no longer as adept an operator as he once was. He speaks slower and struggles more to control his stutter. And of course, he has been prone to comical verbal stumbles his entire career. But Biden’s experience working a crowd, his empathetic human touch, and his sense of humor remain intact. His ability to unite disparate factions of a fractured party remains undiminished. It’s no wonder that a handful of unruly political neophytes at the State of the Union failed to knock him off his game. He’s been playing it for longer than they’ve been alive.

Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter, “Biden Is Delivering on His Bipartisan Promise” June 19, 2022 dmr

For all his many political struggles, President Joe Biden is quietly delivering on one of the central — and most implausible — promises of his campaign: restoring a sense of normalcy and bipartisanship to the legislative process. The latest example is an apparent bipartisan deal on gun regulation, which finally puts vague Republican rhetoric on school security and mental health into action while also embracing modest Democratic proposals on such matters as background checks and red-flag laws. The bill will probably not dramatically alter the level of gun violence in the US. But it should do some good, and re-establishes the idea that Congress can act in response to dramatic events. Before the gun deal, of course, Biden worked with Congress to deliver the kind of bipartisan infrastructure legislation that both his predecessors only talked about. There have also been many more obscure bills, ranging from legislation changing the regulation of ocean shipping to a major overhaul of the US Postal Service. Bipartisan science funding legislation has been languishing for months now, but that’s due to boring House-Senate disagreements that are being worked out by a conference committee — a process so old-school it had become basically forgotten in Washington. Progress is also being made on bipartisan bills about such thorny issues as Chinese investment in US companies and antitrust scrutiny of big technology companies. Much of this work is happening through a process I like to call the Secret Congress: Members quietly working together while allowing the political press to focus on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which books are in which school libraries, the latest Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet or any of the million other controversies that engage the body politic. The Secret Congress dynamic, of course, is one reason why it’s difficult for Biden to secure credit for delivering on this promise. During Barack Obama’s presidency, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was open about the fact that he was reluctant for Republicans to engage constructively on any topic lest the passage of bills come to reflect positively on an incumbent president he hoped to defeat. Biden has a much lower public profile than his recent predecessors. And while his team has been constructively engaged on all these issues, it’s been a quiet form of engagement that aims to be helpful without hogging the spotlight or preventing the members themselves from owning the process. Conservative firebrands found plenty of (real and fake) controversies with which to fill the air and maintain a sense of combat even as they collaborated on policy. Meanwhile, quite apart from Biden’s efforts, there is the fact that Donald Trump’s presidency helped break down the doors of ideological dogmatism on the right. Republicans don’t talk about it much these days, but the Trump administration’s willingness — led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin — to work with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the CARES Act is the only reason the 2020 elections didn’t turn into a party-destroying landslide. A free-market approach that devastated consumer spending power and led to liquidated many businesses would have ruined the economy, ruined Trump’s political standing, and driven the GOP into the ground. Trump lack of ideological purity, and Democrats’ willingness to bargain in good faith, saved the economy and the Republican Party — and perhaps opened the doors to further rounds of creativity. Alas, Biden has not had nearly such good fortune with his economic management. The multiple inflationary shocks — first a fiscal stimulus that spent too much too quickly, then a central bank that was probably too slow to react, then a war in Ukraine that’s ravaged the supply side of the global economy — have wrecked Biden’s public standing. When a president is unpopular due to bad economic news, the public doesn’t give him credit for anything. And columnists of all stripes are wont to criticize an unpopular leader. But the fact remains that important elements of Biden’s agenda have succeeded, notably including a Russia policy that has secured strong bipartisan and even international support despite the economic cost. The cloak of unpopularity, meanwhile, makes it even easier for bipartisanship to continue. In his current state, Biden is not politically threatening to Republicans, so they have no reason to avoid collaborating on bills they happen to like. A new proposal from Republican senators Mitt Romney, Richard Burr and Steve Daines to consolidate and simplify various family support programs in a way that would cut poverty and reduce marriage penalties has earned some cautious praise from Democratic Senator Michael Bennet and could be the basis for more bipartisan work. At the end of the day, life as a legislator is more fun if you get to legislate. Sheer exhaustion with the tedium of obstruction has helped make Biden’s approach work.

A number of studies have shown that Congress considers current levels of presidential approval when passing legislation (Brady and Volden 1998; Cohen et al. 2000; Edwards 1980, 1989). Early studies were able to find correlations between approval ratings and success in Congress (see, e.g., Edwards 1980; Ostrom and Simon 1985). However, later research depicts the relationship between approval ratings and legislative success as more conditional (Canes-Wrone and De Marchi 2002; Edwards 1989). Supporting a piece of legislation championed by an unpopular president could ultimately result in negative consequences for members of Congress. If presidents propose legislation to Congress that is salient with the mass electorate and has higher levels of approval, however, then members stand to gain from supporting the president.9

On a similar note, the honeymoon period of a president’s initial time in office has been shown to increase the likelihood of legislative success (Beckmann and Godfrey 2007; Brace and Hinckley 1991; Farnsworth and Lichter 2011; McCarty 1997). Presidents lose their favorability with the public and with Congress the longer that they are in office (McCarty 1997), which is why they often push for significant legislative accomplishments early in their term. Members of Congress are uniquely aware of the public’s sentiments after a presidential election, especially because they share a common constituency with the president and are more likely to capitulate to a president’s agenda.10 Therefore, a president should receive more cooperation from members of Congress for their legislative agenda items earlier in his term.

The concept of political capital captures many of the aspects of a president's political authority. Paul Light defines several components of political capital: party support of the president in Congress, public approval of the president's conduct of his job, the president's electoral margin, and patronage appointments (Light 1999, 15). Light derived this list from the observations of 126 White House staff members he interviewed (1999, 14). His indicators have two central uses. First, Light's research reveals that they are central to the “players' perspective” in Washington. That is, those “in the game” view these items as crucial for presidential effectiveness. Second, they relate to many central aspects of political authority as defined by Skowronek. So on both theoretical and practical levels, the components of political capital are central to the fate of presidencies. The data here will reveal that presidents over the last 70 years have suffered from a trend of declining levels of political capital, a trend that is at the heart of their political authority problem.

Time Management and the President’s Agenda Presidents use a wide range of tactics to set policy, including their ability to influence the legislative agenda and staff vacancies to lower level federal courts. In terms of influencing the legislative agenda, modern presidents introduce legislation and define policy alternatives (Covington, Wrighton and Kinney 1995; Eshbaugh-Soha 2005, 2010). While not unconditional, presidents can use their time and effort to secure the passage of key policy proposals (Edwards and Wood 1999; Light 1999; Neustadt 1960). Importantly, though, presidents’ ability to persuade the public is limited. To be successful in enacting desired policies presidents have to time their proposals to align with favorable conditions in public opinion and legislative makeup (Edwards 2009).

One of the most important presidential strategies in the legislative arena is (trying) to set the agenda of Congress (see Wood 2009 for an extensive overview; Cohen 2012; Edwards and Wood 1999; Light 1999). The reasoning behind this is straightforward: Since presidents have only few tools at hand to sway lawmakers on how they cast their ballot, the focus of the White House is set at an earlier stage: by already influencing what is considered in the first place. Compared with the legislative prevalence of executives in parliamentarian democracies, presidents in the United States are clearly less able to dominate the agenda space. Yet based on his constitutional right to recommend legislation deemed necessary and appropriate (Art. II, Sec 3, U.S. Constitution), it is primarily the resources of the executive branch - i.e., the departmental bureaucracies, and the Executive Office of the President - which put the president into the position to exert policy leadership via drafting legislative proposals. Unmatched by any other single legislators or even Congress as a whole, John W. Kingdon is right to argue that “[…] no other single actor in the political system has quite the capability of the president to set agendas.” (Kingdon 2003, 24). Previous research has shown that defining the agenda is a promising strategy for the White House. Presidential initiatives, both major and minor ones, almost always find their way into the legislative hopper (Cameron and Park 2008, 51f; Cohen 2012, 24ff; Edwards and Barrett 2000, 116ff). Accordingly, legislation proposed by the administration makes up between 30% and 50% of the congressional calendar, while the remaining proportion is initiated by members of Congress, is based on recurring pieces of legislation, and are reaction to external events or imminent crises (Edwards and Barrett 2000, 112ff; Taylor 1998, 377ff; Theriault 2002). While this indeed makes the president the single most important agenda-setter, it also demonstrates that he does not dominate the legislative agenda of Congress (Sinclair 2006, 255–63). We can mainly identify three mechanisms how presidential agenda-setting affects the lawmaking process in Congress. First, it enables the president to define the boundaries of policies under consideration, and in this way to structure the following deliberation. In this sense, agenda setting is first and foremost about obtaining the Deutungshoheit - i.e., the prerogative of interpretation - over the policy debate through setting the terms of the debate, moving first on certain policy aspects, and via framing and priming of core arguments (Edwards and Wood 1999; Eshbaugh-Soha and Peake 2005). George W. Bush, for instance, during his 2000 presidential campaign advertised his plans for massive across the board tax breaks which, at that time, were perceived as a mere “pipe dream” on both sides of the political spectrum (Milbank 2001). Cutting taxes, and especially to this extent, did not rank high among the priorities of lawmakers nor the American public. The arrival of Bush in the White House, however, completely changed the dynamics of debate. It put the tax cut proposal upfront of the legislative agenda during his first half year as president, and Democrats in the end had to accept an amount of tax breaks which came up to more than double of what they called reasonable six months before during the election campaign. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was largely rolled by the issue dynamics in the debates regarding the overhaul of the Internal Revenue Service in 1997. Favoring only minor reforms, he had to concede early on to pressures from the public and Congress who, fueled by several major scandals, thirsted for a largescale reorganization of the IRS instead of a fine-tuning approach preferred by Clinton (Broder 1997). Of course, these are only two illustrations highlighting how presidents can succeed but also fail in setting the tone of the debate from early stages and through this pre-structure the outcome of the lawmaking process. Second, presidential leadership at the agenda-setting stage helps to overcome collective action problems within Congress and among its 535 legislators by providing a focal point around which other political actors’ policy positions can crystalize (Cameron and Park 2008; Cohen 2012; Neustadt 1991, 8f). The USA PATRIOT Act can serve as a prime example in this regard, on which the New York Times stressed that “[b]y and large, the House and Senate bills both use as a starting point a proposal sent to Capitol Hill nearly two weeks ago by the White House.” (Lewis and Pear 2001). Since lawmakers in Congress today only have scarce resources to draft their own bills, presidential input from the beginning is often highly appreciated. Yet, a proposal from the White House furthermore fulfills the role of first mover draft upon which the subsequent debate can be structured. In this sense, it both offers a distinct policy outline upfront and provides guiding posts for the further deliberation process. Third, agenda-setting offers the White House the opportunity to highlight its priorities, how they are distributed across various policy issues, and in which way policies should be packaged (Rudalevige 2005, 437ff; Wayne 2009b, 317ff). Because the resources of any administration to lobby Congress are not infinite and the multiple political arenas are usually heavily crowded with myriad policy items and problems striving to be solved, the White House needs to prioritize its policy agenda. This involves, among other things, to select some issues over others, decide about their sequencing, how to pursue them, and how much political capital it wants or needs to spend on any given item. Therefore, the administration will focus on certain policies with more attention, on others with less, depending on the prioritization by the president but also upon other considerations, such as the overall density of the policy agenda or imminent pressures of the time. The trick is to not overwhelm Congress with the president’s initiatives. As Lyndon B. Johnson famously quipped, “Congress is like a Whiskey drinker. You can put an awful lot of whiskey into a man if you just let him sip it. But if you try to force the whole bottle down his throat at one time, he’ll throw it up.” (cited in Rudalevige 2002, 113). Thus, the failure to prioritize easily leads to overload of Pennsylvania Avenue with Congress at the one end, and to excessive demands and exhaustion for the White House at the other end. The rocky start of the Clinton administration underlines this argument: since the White House did not pursue a ‘rifle-approach’ to define clear policy priorities for its initial months and then execute them, it got lost in numerous legislative battles and mine-fields early on in its first year. Instead it followed a ‘shotgun-approach’ by addressing as many issues as possible at once leading to an overkill and chaos (Rockman 1996; Sinclair 2000b).