The surveillance scandal, the IRS mess, Republican obstructionism, and general second-term malaise are all conspiring to make Obama the lamest of ducks. And he has less than 1,300 days left.



View The New Republic's full guide to how he should make the best use of them.

Not too long ago, California was in calamitous shape—if the unresolvable budget battles and furloughing of hundreds of thousands of workers weren’t depressing enough, there was also the decrepit condition of the school system. But over the last few years, California has experienced a remarkable turnaround. Unemployment is down, and the state’s bond rating is up. The budget, to everyone’s amazement, is in surplus. Equally surprising is the state’s political transformation.

California Democrats, an historically ineffectual bunch, are finally learning how to wield their majority power. They’ve been so successful that Barack Obama and the other Democrats in Washington who seem bedeviled by an intransigent opposition party should study their moves well.

For years, California’s political experts had insisted that what the state suffered from was party polarization—the Democrats had moved too far left, the Republicans too far right—and what the state needed was a post-partisan politics. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who became governor in 2003, embodied that dream; and his utter failure, ending in the 2009 budget debacle where the state had to issue IOUs to its workers, proved it to be unrealizable.

Many of Schwarzenegger’s attempts to reach a magical consensus kept running afoul of his own party’s leaders, and pretty soon, voters understood that the main reason for the state’s gridlock was the Republicans’ turn toward extremism. In his first two years in office, Jerry Brown, Schwarzenegger’s successor, cleverly reinforced this impression. He made significant concessions in his own budgets, angering his fellow Democrats, but he did it in large part because he knew the Republicans were never going to cooperate. He showed voters that, if they went along with Republican opposition to revenue increases, they would have to accept massive cuts in services they value, like, say, educating their children. That helped Democrats win two-thirds of the seats in the state Assembly and Senate last year, giving them a filibuster-proof majority. Voters also passed Proposition 30, which raises taxes on the wealthy to improve schools.





In Washington, Obama and the Democrats have a mixed record of exposing Republican obstructionism. When they have avoided a big fight, as they did with the budget in 2010, they have gotten blamed for stalling the economy; when they have risked the unpleasantness of a showdown, while appearing reasonable, even conciliatory, the public has rallied to them. That happened after the fiscal-cliff showdown last December. Democrats aren’t going to win two-thirds of either chamber of Congress any time soon, but as their counterparts in California showed, over time, enough people will eventually tire of the Republicans’ shenanigans (see what happened with the recent farm bill) and expand the Democrats’ hold over the electorate—which is a precondition for keeping the presidency, winning back the House, and being able to get their bills passed and nominees confirmed.