Mr. Barry Popularity

It may not look like it, it may not feel like it, and it may not actually be true, but according to Congressional Quarterly we have just witnessed the most successful year ever for a President getting what he wants from Congress. Oh yes, higher that Bush post-9/11 with a Republican Congress, higher than the year Lyndon Johnson kidnapped the children of every House member and held them in a White House subbasement, and higher than the time Grover Cleveland used one of the first motion picture cameras in existence to secretly record the dark rituals and blood orgies that the 55th Congress thought would keep them in power forever.

How did a Marxist Kenyan manage to pull of this unprecedented success in moving this country into the death grip of socialism? By CQ and President Obama defining "success" and "getting what he wants" so broadly as to be near meaningless.

All presidents demand specific action by Congress — or at least they ask for it. But when you look at the votes of 2009 in which Obama made his preference clear, his success rate was unprecedented, according to John Cranford of Congressional Quarterly.

"His success was 96.7 percent on all the votes where we said he had a clear position in both the House and the Senate. That's an extraordinary number," Cranford says.
...
But Sarah Binder, a congressional analyst at the Brookings Institution, says there's another key reason he scored so well. She says he only took an official position on issues that were really important to him — those that he knew he had a very good chance of winning. He picked his battles carefully.

Ah, they only count battles where he expressed a clear position and, like the President, didn't grade the quality of a bill or even if it contained large parts of what he campaigned on, only that "something" was passed. And boy, did we ever see a lot of "something" get passed this year.

So in the end, it doesn't matter that Obama campaigned on a public option and that one is nowhere near a final health care bill or that the bill is a compromise loaded excrement sandwich that only barely does something positive. The President wanted something that could be called a health care bill, the Congress has just about reconciled something that fits the legal definition of a health care bill, thus it's a win. Same for bank bailouts and stimulus, something was wanted, something was passed, let's all not get too bogged down in the details or merits.

So yes, while you may have thought that you were kind of getting screwed hard as your elected betters just started willingly ceding ground on a host of issues while not learning any of the lessons of the financial apocalypse, but what you were witnessing was some sort of unprecedented win streak. Hope you enjoyed it.

According to CQ 2009 was also the most partisan year on record, with party line votes hotting an all time high. So keep that in mind: it took record partisanship from an almost impossible to squire majorities that will no longer exist past 2010 in order to churn out a few bills worth of stunning mediocrity in Congress. Doesn't that just fill you with optimism for 2011? Nothing being done is a realistic possibility.