You can make him decide, but don't blame him for the decision.

The Passive-Aggressive Presidency

You can make him decide, but don't blame him for the decision.

By JAMES TARANTO

The Obama administration today denied a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring crude from Canada's tar sands to Texas' refineries. But as National Journal reports, that doesn't mean the pipeline will never get built. "The Obama administration has said it simply could not adequately review the proposed project in time to meet a 60-day deadline for a decision on the permit imposed by Congress in the payroll-tax package enacted in December."

This looks to be a reasonably effective parry. The administration had initially said it would delay the decision until after the election for what critics took to be political reasons. On the one hand, the pipeline would create thousands of jobs and increase the supply of energy--and labor unions, which would fill some of those jobs, like it. On the other hand, environmental fundamentalists hate it. Thus either a "yes" or a "no" would carry risks for a Democratic president seeking re-election.

Its hand forced, the administration formally rejected the permit request. But by attributing the decision to a lack of time and leaving open the possibility of a reversal, it blunted Congress's ultimatum. Things now stand pretty much where they did before the payroll tax deal.

Congress's aim was to force Obama either to approve the pipeline or take the blame for rejecting it. He has managed to do neither, and the Hill reported yesterday that Republican lawmakers, anticipating a rejection or a punt, have been exploring options to force approval of the pipeline. But such a measure would be "highly unlikely to clear the Senate." Thus it appears the president has escaped the trap the Republicans laid for him.

Associated Press

No decision and that's final.

One way of thinking about the administration's approach is that it reflects a passive-aggressive attitude.

Congress obliges the president to make a decision, so he makes one, but he also makes clear that it isn't really a decision and he doesn't appreciate being rushed. The administration's approach to the economy has been consistently passive-aggressive. First it was "we inherited this mess." Then, as time passed and that claim became decreasingly plausible, the bad economy became the fault of the "do-nothing Congress."

Obama's supporters in the media likewise try to shift responsibility away from the president. And while they sometimes have a point--the president's power over the economy is limited--the passive-aggressive approach is even used to explain away Obama's policy decisions. In an editorial today, the New York Times tries to absolve Obama for the dramatic increase in food-stamp dependence, which GOP candidate Newt Gingrich has been emphasizing. Amid a lot of racial cant is this paragraph:

The fact is that Mr. Obama has "put" no one on food stamps. People apply for food assistance, known officially as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, because they're poor or out of work and their families are hungry. The number of people using the program, which is now at a peak, began rising with the recession, in 2007, and continued through four of the toughest years ever faced by the poor and near-poor in modern history. Mr. Obama eased the eligibility requirements as part of his stimulus program, a desperately needed measure that helped struggling families and the economy.

The last sentence contradicts the first, unless the Times editorialists construe "put" in a ridiculously narrow way. (An analogous argument would be: "The fact is that George W. Bush did not 'go to war' in Iraq. He did not so much as set foot in Iraq until November 2003.") If Obama eased the eligibility requirements, then his decision (for which the 111th Congress presumably shares responsibility) did indeed put some number of people on food stamps.

Another example appears in a CBS story, which seems to have come from a reporter at the White House:

For the most recent month with available data, October 2011, 46.2 million people were enrolled in the food stamp program, which is formally known the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Since Mr. Obama took office, the percent increase in enrollment has been 44.5 percent.

However, that percentage increase hardly makes Obama the "best food stamp president in American history," at least when you look at the question proportionally. The percent increase in beneficiaries during Mr. Bush's presidency was higher than it has been under Mr. Obama: The number of beneficiaries went from 17.3 million in 2001 to 28.2 million in 2008--an increase of 63 percent in years that are mostly considered non-recessionary.

Although that 63% increase is nothing for Bush to be proud of, CBS presents these statistics misleadingly to make Obama look better. First, given CBS's numbers, the rate of increase in food-stamp enrollment has been almost twice as great under Obama than Bush. A 63% increase over seven years works out to 7.2% annual growth. A 44.5% increase over three years is an annual rise of 13.1%.

Second, this is arguably a case in which the increase in numbers means more than the increase in percentages. In the three-year period CBS ascribes to Obama, the food-stamp rolls have increased by 18 million people, or 6 million a year. In the seven years attributed to Bush, the increase was 10.9 million, or 1.6 million a year. Almost four times as many Americans have gone on food stamps every year during the Obama years than during the Bush years, and the percentages are not increasing as quickly precisely because the numbers are.

Perhaps it's good to have more people on food stamps, but if the administration and its defenders really thought that was a compelling argument, they wouldn't go to such lengths to try to minimize the numbers and the president's responsibility for them. More broadly, we're not sure the passive-aggressive approach is a good way to win re-election. It strikes us as the opposite of leadership.

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