President-elect Barack Obama will need to work effectively with Congress if he hopes to enact his legislative agenda. (WDCpix)

As President-elect Barack Obama assembles his administration, the final scenes of the 2008 campaign shift to Capitol Hill, where a lame-duck session shadowboxes over economic recovery measures. At the same time, the unresolved races in Georgia and Minnesota, the fate of renegade Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and the Democrats’ quest to construct a “filibuster-proof majority” highlight the crucial challenge for the incoming president: his ability to push legislation through both houses of Congress and appointments through the Senate.

Even with Obama’s party in power on Capitol Hill, that task will not prove simple. Nobody should expect a reprise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first hundred days, when Congress rushed to enact banking reforms without even getting the chance to read the legislation.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Indeed, an electoral mandate and majorities in both houses offer no guarantee of legislative success. President Jimmy Carter could not navigate his energy plan through a Democratic Congress (remember the cardigan?), nor could President Bill Clinton win support for his health-care plan (remember the Health Security Card?).

Republicans have fared no better. Fresh off his re-election victory in 2004, George W. Bush told the White House press corps that he had “earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.“ He staked much of it on a proposal to privatize Social Security that failed to move through the GOP-controlled Congress.

How, then, might Obama avoid such pitfalls? The career of another senator-turned-president suggests some valuable lessons. During the 1960s, Lyndon B. Johnson transformed the relationship between the legislative and executive branches. A former Senate leader, LBJ immersed himself and his staff in all the details of legislation from “the cradle to the grave, from the moment a bill is introduced to the moment it is officially enrolled as the law of the land.”

Johnson visited the Capitol frequently and met constantly with congressional leaders. “There is but one way for a president to deal with the Congress,” he said, “and that is continuously, incessantly and without interruption. If it’s really going to work, the relationship between the president and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous. He’s got to know them even better than they know themselves.”

Johnson ordered his staff to give congressional relations the highest priority. “You are going to get a lot of phone calls,” LBJ warned his White House advisers. “People are going to court you and flatter you because you have access to the president. You are going to find yourself a social lion and a fellow with more charm than you ever thought you had. And you will be all this because of the job you hold.” But, LBJ commanded, “the most important people you will talk to are senators and congressmen. You treat them as if they were president. Answer their calls immediately.”

Lyndon Johnson's relationship with Congress allowed him to pass the Civil Rights Bill in 1968. (Wikimedia Commons)

When Congress was in session, Johnson breakfasted every week with the legislative leadership. As they feasted on eggs, toasted homemade bread and links of the special deer sausage Johnson flew in from Texas, the president worked through a large posterboard sitting on an easel. The poster mapped out all the pending legislation in the House and Senate, plotting its path through the various committees down into a bowl drawn on the bottom of the chart to represent final passage of the law.

As they ate, LBJ applied the “Treatment,” cajoling, flattering and persuading the congressional leaders to move his bills forward. The chart accompanied Johnson to Cabinet meetings and his conferences with influential citizens. During 1965, it seemed to follow him everywhere.

Managing Congress also meant knowing when not to ask for a vote; understanding that allies — particularly in a broad, unstable majority — sometimes could not vote with the president. This is something Obama also needs to know. With more than 50 “Blue Dog Democrats” in the House, including conservative Southern and Western congressmen from districts carried strongly by Sen. John McCain, Obama will have to know when he can count on their votes, and when he must expect (and even approve) their opposition to preserve the long-term health of his majority.

For example, Johnson, who was determined to pass the civil-rights law that had stalled in Congress for decades, knew it was fruitless to apply pressure to Southern senators in his own party. “I can’t make a Southerner change his spots,” he told one civil-rights leader, “any more than I can make a leopard change them.” To shut off the inevitable filibuster, Johnson needed Republican votes — especially the support of the Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

Johnson began a campaign of flattery — praising Dirksen’s statesmanship, asking his “advice” on appointments, granting him small victories against the White House. “You know this bill can’t pass unless you get Ev Dirksen,” Johnson told his floor manager for civil rights, Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.). “You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time.” In the end, they got Dirksen and more than enough Republican votes to end the filibuster and pass the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.

With the Blue Dogs in the House and fewer than 60 votes in the Senate, Obama will need to build and rebuild a shifting series of coalitions. Even if the Democrats do reach 60 votes in the Senate, that majority will only be “filibuster-proof” if the leadership can deliver every single vote for cloture. On few issues is a caucus that includes Lieberman and Edward M. Kennedy, Virginia’s Jim Webb, North Dakota’s Tim Johnson, and California’s Barbara Boxer likely to find unanimity.

Those ad hoc majorities were central to LBJ’s dealings with Congress. On civil rights, he needed northern Republicans. On Medicare and Food Stamps, he brought together conservative Southerners in his own party with liberal Northerners to overcome Republican opposition.

Sometimes, Johnson made concessions to influential congressmen, like Rep. Wilbur Mills (D-Arkansas), chairman of the Ways-and-Means Committee. Other times he built broad coalitions by strategically larding bills with goodies for key legislators. A number of conservative Southern senators supported the food stamp program, for example, because Johnson made sure it was as generous to farmers as to the poor and hungry.

While Johnson’s White House almost never explicitly traded favors for particular votes, every member of Congress understood that cooperation brought benefits: invitations on foreign trips, influence on appointments, projects for the home district. When they voted against the president, recalcitrant members knew they would pay a price.

Defending a key vote against the administration, Sen. Frank Church told the president that celebrated newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann had endorsed his views. “I’ll tell you what, Frank,” the president replied, “next time you want a dam in Idaho, you call Walter Lippmann and let him put it through for you.”

So President Obama must know when to ease off, but he must also recognize when to push.

Johnson began the 89th Congress, the 1965 legislative session, with a commanding Democratic majority — 295 out of 435 votes in the House. For the first time in decades, the wide margin ensured a sympathetic majority for liberal measures.

Despite his popularity, John F. Kennedy had trouble getting his agenda passed. (Wikimedia Commons)

Even without the support of conservative Southern Democrats, the administration could count on enough votes to enact its reform agenda. As one of Johnson’s congressional liaisons put it, “When we have a fat Congress as we did in the 89th, then we can hike up our demands to fit the situation. When the votes are not razor thin,” he explained, then the administration had not pushed far enough.

The last time a sitting senator moved straight into the White House, familiarity with Congress bred only contempt. John F. Kennedy championed a slew of new programs, but with only a few exceptions the president could not get them enacted. The principal objectives of Kennedy’s domestic agenda — federal aid to education, a tax cut, and civil rights legislation — stalled on Capitol Hill.

The New York Times political reporter, Tom Wicker, described Kennedy’s inability to manage the Congress as one of the “great ironies of American politics. He wondered why “JFK, the immensely popular president, could not reach his legislative goals.” The stubborn opposition surprised Kennedy himself. “When I was a congressman,” the thwarted president mused, “I never realized how important Congress was. Now I do.”

Americans might hope that Obama learns that lesson sooner and better than his role model.

Bruce J. Schulman is the Huntington professor of American history at Boston University. His latest book, co-edited with Julian E. Zelizer, is “Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s.” He is the author of “The ’70s: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society and Politics,” “Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism” and “From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt : Federal Policy, Economic Development and the Transformation of the South 1938-1980.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Wikimedia)

Republicans have unveiled their closing argument. Desperate to prevent a huge Democratic landslide, Republicans warn that one-party government under Democrats would surely mean liberal extremism.

Raising the specter of an “Obama, Pelosi and Reid” government, Sen. John McCain refers to the combination of Sen. Barack Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) as a “dangerous threesome.” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) warns, “Liberals are bent on handing Barack Obama a filibuster-proof Senate majority to rubber-stamp his radical agenda.”

The argument is based on a misreading of American history. For, during periods of one-party government, when Democrats controlled both the White House and the Congress, history demonstrates that they have not shifted radically toward a leftward agenda.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Few observers, other than those on the far right, characterized the New Deal as liberal extremism in action. Most perceived President Franklin D. Roosevelt as an experimenter who tried to please everyone. FDR and his Democratic counterparts did everything in their power to save capitalism from the threat of totalitarianism and communism during the Great Depression.

The period between 1933 and 1938 witnessed a dramatic expansion of government. But with each and every policy, Democrats were careful to constrain the ability of government officials to control capitalist institutions and to protect the power of state and local government.

The economic regulations passed in the 1930s allowed private economic institutions to maintain power and profit. Wall Street regulations primarily curbed dangerous and unethical transactions, while the Securities Exchange Commission was set up to monitor wrong-doing. This left the basic decisions to investors.

The major effort to manage pricing and production was the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933. In the worst economic moment of the nation’s history, the legislation essentially asked businesses to voluntarily adhere to codes that would be enforced through voluntary compliance combined with public pressure. The program collapsed by the end of 1934, before the Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional, because so many business leaders were not living up to their promises.

The farm programs, created in 1933, subsidized agribusiness as opposed to taking it over. The New Deal offered the agriculture industry financial incentives to make decisions that benefited the larger economy. The government paid for crops. The Communist Party leader, Earl Browder, lamented that Roosevelt was “carrying out more thoroughly and brutally than even Hoover the capitalist attack against the masses.”

Social Security, passed in 1935, only covered a limited portion of the workforce — excluding farmers, domestic workers, professionals and others — while relying on a regressive, self-financed tax to pay for benefits.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (Wikimedia)

Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democratic Congress in 1964 and 1965 were also quite timid. The War on Poverty received meager funding. Democrats had given priority to passing an across-the-board tax reduction to stimulate the economy, rather than spending on the poor.

Congress allocated $500 million for the Community Action program, a figure that paled in comparison to what Washington spent on Social Security, agricultural benefits or defense. The War on Poverty focused on developing self-sufficiency among the poor, a far cry from socialism, and the programs relied on civic organizations and local government rather than centralized control in Washington.

The civil-rights bill that Democrats passed in 1964 emphasized the protection of individual rather than group rights. The more aggressive program of affirmative action would not emerge until a Republican was in the White House, in 1969, and then there was divided government.

When Democrats controlled the White House and Congress, in 1964, they insisted on civil-rights legislation that focused on the more moderate goal of eliminating racial discrimination against individuals. This, they said, respected American principles. The government remained reactive under their plan, responding when individual rights were violated, rather than proactively combating institutional racism.

When it came to health care, the Medicare bill of 1965 was a watered-down version of the far bolder health-care proposals that Democrats floated in the 1940s — unsuccessfully. To avoid another defeat, Democrats decided to narrow their ambitions with a limited program to provide hospital insurance coverage just to the elderly. Medicare was created within Social Security to bolster political support, using its regressive self-financed tax system. The government refrained from regulating the prices hospitals could charge. Blue Cross and Blue Shield handled the insurance.

Even when Southern Democrats lost their power in Congress, united government did not result in a dramatic swing to the left. President Jimmy Carter struggled with the various factions within the Democratic Party over energy independence, welfare reform, defense spending and more. United government did not help the president overcome horrible relations with legislators in his own party. Carter’s concern with inflation trumped his worries about unemployment.

Conservative grass-roots activists took advantage of these problems by allying with the GOP congressional minority in the Congress to stifle measures like SALT II.

Bill Clinton (Flickr: World Economic Forum)

President Bill Clinton did not fare much better. Democrats controlled Washington, but Clinton decided to start his term with deficit reduction and free trade. When he proposed health-care reform, it was a far cry from the single-player, national health insurance models that had been championed by Democrats like Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. And even that legislation did not make it through Congress.

The best case for Republicans to show how one-party government produces extremism comes from the period of GOP rule between 2002 and 2006. One-party government allowed Republicans to pass a massive tax reduction in 2001 that severely cut into the coffers of government and provided significant tax relief to wealthier Americans. After 9/11, the Bush administration authorized a huge expansion of the national security state.

Yet much of what George W. President Bush actually accomplished still relied on executive power and secrecy. Signing statements, covert national-security programs, executive orders and misleading information were all instrumental to how Bush achieved his goals. Bush has continued to rely on these tactics under divided government as well.

The historical record is clear. One-party government does not lead to political extremism — and a look at the past contradicts GOP claims that Democratic control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue would produce a dramatic shift to the left. Democrats will face all sorts of pressures, from internal factions to budgetary restraints to the 2012 election, that will serve as a powerful check on what the party can accomplish.

Disappointment, not extremism, is a more realistic prediction of what the party could ultimately face.

Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. He is the author of “On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and its Consequences, 1948-2000″ and the editor of “The American Congress: The Building of Democracy.” He is finishing a book on the history of national-security politics since World War II and another on the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

John Nance Garner (Wikimedia Commons)

Despite Vice President John Nance Garner’s notorious description that the vice-presidency as not worth a pitcher of warm spit,” the fact is that the office, and who holds it, matter enormously.

That was true in Garner’s time and even more so today. Nine vice-presidents before him had advanced to the presidency, six by succeeding a deceased president.

Five more men have been added to that list since Garner’s day, three because of the death or resignation of the elected president.

And recent vice-presidents have been granted considerably greater responsibilities than their predecessors while holding the No. 2 office. Consider, for example, Lyndon B. Johnson and the space program; Al Gore and environmental policy, or Dick Cheney and national security.

Warm spit indeed.

What follows is a capsule account of the 46 vice presidents.

* Total number of presidential terms since 1789: 55

* Number of persons who have served as president: 43 (Grover Cleveland is usually counted twice — as both the 22nd and 24th president — so the actual number is 42)

* Presidents who died of natural causes in office: 4 (William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt)
their average age at death: 63
average length of elected term before death: 12 months

* Presidents assassinated: 4 (Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy)
their average age at death: 52
average length of elected term before death: 12 months

John Tyler (Wikimedia Commons)

*President who resigned: 1 (Richard M. Nixon)
age at leaving office: 61
length of elected term served before resignation: 20 months

*Political party of presidents who died in office or resigned: Whigs: 2; Democrats: 2; Republicans: 5

*Average age on leaving office of all presidents who died or resigned: 58

*Average length of elected term served before death or departure: 13 months

*Percentage of elected terms interrupted by death from natural causes: 7.3 percent (4/55)

*Percentage of elected terms interrupted by assassination: 7.3 percent (4/55)

*Percentage of all presidential terms served in part by vice presidents: 16.4 percent (9/55)

*Number of persons who have served as vice president: 46

*Number of vice presidents who became president: 14 (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Tyler, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, George H.W. Bush)

*Percentage of vice presidents who became president: 30.4 percent (14/46)

*Average length of term served by vice president who assumed office on death or departure of the president: 35 months

*Number of vice presidents who completed the term of a departed president and were later nominated in their own right for the presidency: 5 (Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford)

*Number of vice presidents who completed the term of a departed president and were later nominated for the presidency and won: 4 (all but Gerald Ford)

Chester Arthur (Wikimedia Commons)

*Number of vice presidents who completed the term of a departed president and were not nominated by their party for a full presidential term: 4 (John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur)

*Number of vice presidents who assumed the presidency on death or resignation of the president, and their highest office achieved prior to vice presidency: 9

o John Tyler: U.S. senator and governor of Virginia

o Millard Fillmore: congressman (chairman of Committee on Ways and Means)

o Andrew Johnson: U.S. senator and governor of Tennessee

o Chester Arthur: Collector of New York customhouse

o Theodore Roosevelt: governor of New York

o Calvin Coolidge: governor of Massachusetts

o Harry Truman: U.S. senator

o Lyndon Johnson: U.S. senator (Senate Majority Leader)

o Gerald Ford: congressman (House Minority Leader)

*Percentage of terms of persons elected originally to the presidency not served by those so elected: 17.6 percent (9/51)

*Percentage of vice presidents who became president due to departure of originally elected president: 19.6 percent (9/46)

David M. Kennedy is Donald J. McLachlan professor of history at Stanford University. His book, “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945,” won the Pulitzer Prize for history. Sarah Anzia is a doctoral candidate in political science at Stanford.