Next year’s election affecting Congress

Rep. Bart Gordon of Tennessee last week became the fourth veteran Democrat from a potentially competitive House district to announce he won’t seek re-election. In a switch from earlier, Democrats also hold a majority of next year’s vulnerable Senate seats.

Both factors presage the likelihood of substantial Democratic losses in the 2010 midterm elections. While neither party yet expects the Republicans to win back either house, the numbers also explain a lot about the closing days of the current legislative session.

Democratic leaders, realizing they are unlikely to enjoy the same majorities in Barack Obama’s second two years, are pushing hard to enact his most significant initiatives — health care, financial reform and climate control — and his budget priorities.

That was certainly behind Obama’s plea to Senate Democrats on Tuesday stressing that, if the current push on health care fails, it will be many years before another attempt.

Republicans, recognizing that time may be on their side, are doing their best to obstruct Democratic programs. It’s a tactic far better suited to the Senate, which remains the major partisan battleground.

The relentless nature of modern 24-hour cable television news and Internet coverage lend immediacy to such legislative combat and the accompanying partisan bitterness. But while the stakes are indeed high, the situation is hardly unique. In fact, it mirrors a pattern that often emerged on those relatively rare occasions when a president and a supportive Congress sought to push through a landmark legislative program.

As a young congressional reporter, I remember watching far larger Democratic majorities increasingly struggle to enact the last of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs as the Vietnam War sapped his popularity and the nation headed for 1966 elections destined to trim those margins.

Maximum results

As has been true this year, Democratic leaders kept Congress in session as long as possible to attain maximum results.

In the fall of Republican Ronald Reagan’s first year, a bipartisan majority that enacted his signature tax and spending cuts weakened as a persistent recession lowered his job approval numbers and Democrats saw hopes of regaining seats lost in 1980.

It’s not even a modern phenomenon.

Reading “A Country of Vast Designs,” Bob Merry’s new biography of President James Polk, I was struck by the similarities between Polk’s efforts to hold his Democrats together against the opposition Whigs in pressing war against Mexico and Obama’s current travails in maintaining Senate Democratic unity on health care.

Even Franklin Roosevelt faced this sort of challenge, though massive first-term majorities delayed his time of reckoning until his second term.

Historic parallels also suggest that the real stake is the president’s ultimate legacy. The extent to which past executives prevailed in those heated struggles was crucial in defining their presidencies, despite later setbacks or loss of popularity.

Public concern over Vietnam and domestic turmoil ultimately turned the political tide against Johnson and his expansive policies. But a generation later, such breakthroughs as Medicare, federal aid to education and civil rights are firmly established as integral factors in American life.

And though Reagan’s conservative counter-revolution flagged notably after the first year — as Congress forced him to slow spending cuts and accept some tax hikes — his effort to curb big government and federal spending affected our politics for a generation.

Similarly, the issues featured in Obama’s agenda, if ultimately enacted, will have impact far beyond his presidency. Despite polls showing that most Americans oppose this health bill, most Democrats believe they would be far worse off if it fails.

Republicans hope all-out opposition will either prevent passage or, failing that, benefit them if their criticisms prove valid.

Of course, that was the GOP’s hope in opposing Bill Clinton’s economic proposals in 1993. That may have helped achieve short-term 1994 gains, but it boomeranged when Clinton’s measures helped produce economic prosperity throughout the 1990s.

X Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.