I don’t know about the rest of you, but this makes me cringe:

President Obama set a new record last year for getting Congress to vote his way, according to an annual study by Congressional Quarterly.

In his first year in office, Obama won 96.7 percent of the votes on which he had clearly staked a position.

That was a bit less than 4 percentage points higher than the previous record, set by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.

...

In the House, Obama won 68 votes and lost four.

...

In the Senate, Obama won 78 votes and lost one.

I don’t care who the President is, what party he is, etc. I didn’t like it when Bush had a rubber-stamp GOP Congress, I didn’t like the idea of Obama having a rubber-stamp Congress, and I sure don’t like the results. I strongly disapprove of single-party rule, and stand by my Vote For Gridlock mantra. The Executive and Legislature are supposed to be checks and balances on each other, not rubber-stamp.

This analysis of the Congressional Quarterly data includes a chart going back 50+ years. Clinton and Bush had 80-90% rubber-stamp from their single-party-rule tenures; Obama looks to be 10 points higher than Bush’s highest (I can’t find the raw data, so that’s from eyeballing the chart).

Given how much of his party disagrees with his positions (he’s too conservative for the far-left wing, too fiscally-free for the “blue dogs”, etc), what we see here is the effect of partisan politics. It’s more important to vote with your party than to vote your own positions, it seems. Such partisan orthodoxy serves the country ill.