Why isn't Obama doing better?

Another recent dysfunctional element in American politics is the filibuster in the Senate.

The Senate has 100 members. You'll often hear or read things like "It is doubtful that the bill will gather the 60 votes needed to pass", with little other comment. You might find this confusing, as normally in legislatures bills pass or fail based on a majority vote, not a 60% vote.

It's actually a fairly recent development. Since 2006, when the democrats won control of Congress, it's gone through the roof, with the Republicans threatening to filibuster every bill. You need 60 votes for a motion of cloture to shut down debate and move for a vote on a bill, so this has meant that 60 votes is now the effective requirement to pass anything.

The weirdest part might be that they don't actually filibuster anything. They just threaten to do so, and so the Democrats don't bring a bill to a vote.

To the extent that this process is understood, some people use it to make excuses for Obama. "Well, he's trying his darndest, but he needs 60 senate votes, so how can he pass a good climate change bill or a health care bill under those condition?". The democrats currently have 60 senators, so they would have to convince every single one of them to vote for cloture.

I don't think this argument holds water however. The democrats could pass better bills if they really wanted to. I think that they're either wussies, or they simply don't want to. Or a bit of both.

If you think that's far fetched, consider that during George Bush's first four years, he only had 50 Republican Senators in the first two years, and 51 in the last two. Not even and then barely a majority. Yet those four years were a time of sweeping change. They passed massive corporate and upper class tax cuts, they authorized the war in Iraq, they passed the patriot act and they made lots of other controversial changes.

You could blame it on 9/11, and the climate of fear that followed, but that climate fear and the message of "you're with us or you're against us" was something created by the Bush administration to bully their enemies into doing what they wanted. The Republicans are excellent parliamentary tacticians and they used circumstances to get what they wanted

Obama just came into power during a massive economic crisis caused by Republicans. It would have been very easy to use this to bully the Republicans, or at least some more Senate Democrats into giving the administration what it wanted. They have sixty senators, 10 more than Bush had. The fact that they're not doing this suggests that either:

a. They're wussies.

b. They don't actually want things like a health care bill that actually helps people if it means hurting insurance companies or an effective climate change bill, or banking sector reform.*

I lean toward b, but I could easily believe a, or both at the same time. But I'm not convinced the evidence suggests any other possibility.