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Ronald M. Peters, Jr. is Regents’ Professor of Political Science at the University of Oklahoma. Cindy Simon Rosenthal is the Carlisle Mabrey and Lurleen Mabrey Presidential Professor of Political Science and Director and Curator of the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma. Together, they have written Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the New American Politics.  Their book provides a comprehensive account of how Pelosi became Speaker and what this tells us about Congress in the twenty-first century. In the excerpt below,  the authors examine the dichotomies found in Pelosi’s approval ratings and what these findings articulate about the strengths and weaknesses of the speaker. Pelosi goes under the microscope as she’s compared to both the Energizer Bunny and the Big Bad Wolf.

In the first few months of 2009, congressional approval ratings spiked from January to March from 19% to 38% before falling back to 32% in April. As the year wore on debates over the economy, energy and health care became more intense, congressional approval ratings fell further. While approval of the Democratic Congress remained higher than during the past two years of Republican control, Congress continued to labor under a skeptical public eye. In September, Gallup found 63% of respondents disapproving of “the way Congress is handling its job.” Congressional Democrats received a 37% approval rating, while congressional Republicans lagged behind at 27%. The Real Clear Politics average of generic ballot polls conducted in early October showed the Democrats with only a 4.4% margin over the Republicans. Pelosi’s poll ratings were stubbornly and consistently negative… By September, her numbers were 27% approval, 44% disapproval, and embedded with those numbers was a striking gender story: among women the approval-disapproval balance was 31% to 36% while among men the approvals were dwarfed two-fold by disapprovals and among older men the ratio was 22% to 56%. Why have Pelosi’s approval ratings remained much more negative than positive? Certainty the gender difference reminds us of the longstanding pattern of bias against women’s suitability for politics… But more importantly, we surmise that Pelosi’s visible partisan role alienated both Republicans (who would not like her in any event) and many independents (put off by the perception that she is a highly partisan leader). The Republicans chose to make her rather than President Obama the object of their attack on the new regime, further eroding her standing. In spite of the fact that this is strategy had failed in both 2006 and 2008, Republicans decided to renew their attacks on Pelosi as a primary element of their 2010 election strategy. In addition… she damaged her public image when she undertook an attack on the CIA.

Pelosi’s relatively low approval ratings are, we believe, a reflection of the New American Politics. In the hyperpartisan environment in which Congress and the speakership are now enveloped, any Speaker will earn approval mostly from the base voters of her party. Pelosi’s exemplar, Tip O’Neill, consistently won approval from about half of the public and left office with a public approval rate above 60%. His high visibility and substantial support were buttressed by his ability to preserve an independent political persona even though he was an iconic liberal. As was also true of his nemesis, Ronald Reagan,  even his adversaries liked him… Today’s leaders are caught in a far more polarized environment. As we have seen, Pelosi has often presented herself as staunch partisan—one reason why she is Speaker today. In the era of the new Americ

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the health-care reform bill that the House passed. See his previous OUPblogs here.

Democrats must be thinking: what happened to the halcyon days of 2008? It is almost difficult to believe that after the string of Democratic electoral victories in 2006 and 2008, the vast momentum for progressive “change” has fizzled out to a mere five vote margin over one of the most major campaign issues of 2008, a health-care bill passed in the House this weekend. If you raise hopes, you get votes; but if you dash hopes you lose votes. That’s the karma of elections, and we saw it move last Tuesday.

Democratic Party leaders scrambled, in response, to keep the momentum of “Yes, we can” going, by passing a health-care reform bill in the House this weekend. But despite claims of victory, Democratic party leaders probably wished that their first victory on the health-care reform road came from the Senate and not from the House. President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have always hoped to let the Senate pass its health-care reform bill first, initiating a bandwagon effect so that passage in the House would follow quickly and more easily, and a final bill could be delivered to the president’s desk.

Instead, the order of bill passage has been reversed, making a final bill less likely than if things had gone according to plan. If even the House, which is not subject to supermajority decision-making rules, barely squeaked by with a 220-215 vote, then it has now set the upper limit of what health-care reform will ultimately look like. Potentially dissenting Democratic Senators see this, and there might now be a reverse band-wagoning effect. Already, we are hearing talk from the Senate about the timeline for a final bill possibly being pushed past Christmas into 2010. This is just what Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama were hoping against, by pushing the Senate to pass a bill first. Unfortunately for them, the Senate took so long that to keep the momentum going (and amidst the electoral losses in NJ and VA last week), they felt compelled to pass something in the House to signal a token show of progress.

But the danger is that the move to regain control may initiate a further loss of control. The less than plenary “victory” in the House bill has only made it clearer than ever that if a final bill is to find its way to the President’s desk, it will have to be relieved of its more ambitiously liberal bells and whistles. Even though the House Bill, estimated at a trillion dollars, is more expensive than the Senate version being considered, and it has added controversial tax provisions for wealthier Americans earning more than $500,000, what the House passed was already a compromise to Blue Dogs. On Friday night, a block of Democratic members of Congress threatened to withhold their support unless House leaders agreed to take up an amendment preventing anyone who gets a government tax credit to buy insurance from enrolling in a plan that covers abortion. If even the House had to cave in some, there will have to be many more compromises to be made in the Senate, especially on the “public option.”

Sequencing matters in drama as it does in politics. It is at the heart of the Obama narrative, the soul and animating force behind the (now unraveling) Democratic majority in 2009. “Yes, we can” generates and benefits from a self-reinforcing bandwagon effect that begins with a whisper of audacious hope. From the State House of Illinois to the US Senate, from Iowa to Virginia – the story of Barack Obama is a narrative of crescendo. “They said this day would never come” is a story of improbable beginnings and spectacular conclusions. The structural underpinnings of the Obama narrative are now straining under the pressure of events. To regain control of events, the President must first regain control of his story.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he reflects on the economic stimulus bill. In the article below he reflects on how the Republicans are doing in the Obama administration. Read his previous OUPblogs here.

The unity and clarity of message exhibited by the Republicans this past week seemed to suggest that they have found their role as loyal opposition in minority. This may be, but Republicans have an uphill battle before them. This week in politics, it was the President who won.

Bipartisanship only became a governing keyword in the 20th century because of the frequency of divided party control over the different branches of government. The fact is there is no need for
bipartisanship when a majority exists in the Congress, and the Republicans know it. This is why they have tried to make a virtue out of bipartisanship as an end in itself, decrying the way in which the economic stimulus bill was passed.

Yet Republicans were complaining about a 1,100 page bill that nobody had perused at the same time that they were arguing that it was a bill of pork and spending. Here’s the problem: the more Republicans made a stand against the process by which their input was stymied, the less credibility they had making a stand against the substance of the bill. So the wisest Republicans focused most of their attack on the process, because accusing the Democrats for not consulting with them is a face-saving strategy on the off-chance that the stimulus package actually works. In 2010, we shall see if their gamble paid off.

The truth is it is not easy being in the minority. In the run-up to the passage of the bill in the Senate, everywhere we heard that 60 was the new 50. But this may have been a higher bar than was necessary for the Democrats to cross. The fact is 50 may well have been enough, given the high political cost the Republicans would have had to bear if they filibustered a bill in a moment of perceived economic
emergency. As it is, Democrats are already accusing the opposition party for becoming the obstructionist party.

The President has only stood to gain from the Democrats’ victory in Congress. When the revised conference bill passed in the House, Congressional Democrats lavished praise on the president, even though they were the ones who had crafted and delivered on the bill. All the president did was go on the road in the final days before passage to sell it. This is hands-off leadership that has benefited him, because the cries of foul from the Republican aisle are mostly being leveled on congressional Democrats, not the president. But Obama’s gain does not come without strings. Both Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid know that he needs them, so it is unclear for how long he would be able to stand above party in his hitherto futile effort to chase the ghost of bipartisanship.

For now, President Obama has won the battle, and the honeymoon is still his to enjoy. The stimulus package may have more spending than tax cuts in it, as Republicans assert, but congressional majorities agree with him that such spending is necessary. Without income support (making up $100 billion of the bill), unemployed workers would be forced to reduce spending, thereby causing a vicious contractionary circle. If the federal government did not offer support to cash-strapped state and local governments (making up $250 billion of the bill), more jobs would be lost, or so modal opinion seems to hold. The Daschle and Gregg nomination embarrassments reveal the danger of making lofty promises on the campaign trail that the reality of government may not permit, but they also pale in comparison to the significant achievement of passing the biggest economic stimulus package in US history. If the president’s fortunes tell us anything, they suggest that the Republican minority have not yet found their
footing.