Is Obama powerless? A lot depends on how much he’s willing to change

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The question of the hour is: How much power does U.S. President Barack Obama still have?

He has two years remaining in his term. The Republicans have taken over possession of the Senate, and the GOP's hold on the House has been strengthened. Mr. Obama is unlikely to win approval of major domestic legislation. He can only contemplate safe nominations to executive offices because the Republican Senate will resist the nomination of liberal activists.

Presidential power comes down to what Richard Neustadt, the Columbia and Harvard student of the presidency, described as merely the power to persuade. Mr. Obama used that power in his first year to push through Obamacare and his economic stimulus, and he calculated that the use of his political capital at that time was worth it, and maybe it was.

There no question that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are going to try to repeal Obamacare again – the GOP House repealed it, or sought to strangle it through funding restrictions, dozens of times, to no apparent effect – and when they do it again next year, the President will simply use one of his remaining powers, that of the veto, to end that. He now has the power to say no, and perhaps not much more. Now, of course, congressional determination to restrict the flow of money to the program has more bite.

All presidents search for ways to extend their power, as they find the restraints of the Constitution frustrating and the dance of legislation on Capitol Hill irritating and distracting. Without congressional approval, President Richard Nixon invaded Cambodia. President George W. Bush transformed the anti-terrorism legislation after Sept. 11, 2001, into an accordion and allowed the Justice Department and FBI and CIA to go into areas earlier forbidden to them, and perhaps forbidden even then.

Now Mr. Obama, denied the power he had when elected, very likely will use executive action, perhaps very soon, to push through changes in immigration law that he could never win from the Congress. The very talk of this last week inflamed the Congress, especially House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio. Expect some hotheads to speak of impeachment, and expect some Democrats to say, quietly of course, that maybe the President has gone too far. At the very least, some members of Congress will sue the President.

Presidents have authority under the Constitution but they win authority from the voters. President Ronald Reagan in his early days had the same constitutional powers Jimmy Carter had in his late days, but no one can equate the enormous power that Mr. Reagan had on Jan. 21, 1981, with the diminished power Mr. Carter had in the early hours of Jan. 20, 1981. They simply are not comparable

Mr. Obama had loads of power in early 2009. He won a Nobel Prize before he even did much of anything. He flew into power on a gust of public support unlike any in recent history – a gust of public support far stronger than the one John F. Kennedy had, on the day he gave perhaps the greatest inaugural address of our time. President Obama was more than a president. He was a phenomenon.

And then it disappeared – the phenomenon, of course, but also the power.

Since winning Obamacare and his economic stimulus, the President has been struggling for power in a system that since the Kennedy years had given so much more power to the executive than to the legislative branch. In 1973, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote The Imperial Presidency, a reaction against the increase in power the presidency had won. It was written the year before Mr. Nixon resigned, four years after Lyndon Johnson left office. It is a work of history but it is also a period piece.

Of course it wasn't so long ago that respected commentators on the American presidency were asking whether the job was so daunting, so antiquarian in its design, that it could not be performed well in the modern age, and that American presidents, like Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush could not be re-elected, and of course none of them were.

We are in a completely different place now, with three consecutive presidents having been re-elected, but with all three of them facing grave challenges in their final term: impeachment in the case of Bill Clinton; economic crisis in the case of George W. Bush; and a collapse of public support in the case of Mr. Obama, who already has fought three wars – maybe more, depending on how you count – and who still faces economic distress and a Congress determined to thwart him at every turn.

The voters delivered a message to the Republicans this month, inviting them to share power with the President. But the biggest message may have come a few days before the balloting, when a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll produced an astonishing finding: that two thirds of voters – not just Republicans, but all voters – wanted a significant alteration in the President's policies and approach.

The voters gave Mr. Obama enormous power. He spent some of that power on his health plan and other legislative measures and then, in both the 2010 midterm elections and again this month, he witnessed the voters take away more of his power. He is not powerless, but the big question now in American politics is whether the President is powerless – personally unwilling or unable – to change.