Political capital is real.

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).