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The Legend of Socially Lubricated Legislating

The Washington press corps just adores stories about presidents socializing with legislators. It’s bonhomie and backslapping—and not partisan dominance or economic tailwinds—that make it possible to Get Stuff Done in Congress. It’s Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill putting aside their ideological differences after 6 p.m. It’s Tom “The Hammer” Delay extending the vote on Medicare […]
alshepmcr / Flickr.com
alshepmcr / Flickr.com

The Washington press corps just adores stories about presidents socializing with legislators. It’s bonhomie and backslapping—and not partisan dominance or economic tailwinds—that make it possible to Get Stuff Done in Congress. It’s Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill putting aside their ideological differences after 6 p.m. It’s Tom “The Hammer” Delay extending the vote on Medicare Part D and bribing members of Congress—wait! Wrong script! That’s Spielberg’s archpragmatist Lincoln and What He Can Teach Obama.

And so President Obama’s recent dining with Republicans, his “charm offensive,” is all the rage. (“Frankly, I wish he’d done more of that over the years,” remarked Sen. Mitch McConnell.)

The backstory is that President Obama is “aloof.” I know this because I googled “Obama” and “aloof.”

Obama, at least in this sense (his detractors say in many others), has a Nixonian streak:

Nixon didn’t like senators or congressmen at any rate. He thought of them the way he thought of the press: they had the luxury of criticism without responsibility. His own party’s congressional leadership got information on his legislative strategy on a strictly need-to-know basis (Congressman Jerry Ford thought Haldeman and Erlichman treated them like “the chairman of the board of a large corporation regards his regional sales managers”). A new president’s first-year State of the Union address was where he traditionally unveiled his legislative program; Nixon didn’t even give a State of the Union Address. He didn’t know the name of some of his congressional liaisons. … Nixon didn’t invite a single congressman to his daughter Tricia’s White House wedding in 1971.

Still, Nixon, despite resigning in the middle of a second term that he won in landslide fashion, managed to cobble together a fairly significant domestic legacy, including the desegregation of Southern schools and environmental measures like the Clean Air Act and the EPA. This is, by contemporary standards, a decidedly liberal legacy—but then, Nixon had to deal with a solidly Democratic Congress throughout his presidency. No amount of backslapping and bonhomie, even if Nixon were capable of it, could have changed that.

For his part, Tip O’Neill’s son insists “it wasn’t the drinks or the conversation” that allowed his father to hammer out compromises with a Republican president even more conservative than Nixon.

Instead, it was a stubborn refusal not to allow fund-raisers, activists, party platforms or ideological chasms to stand between them and actions — tempered and improved by compromise — that kept this country moving.

In this telling, Reagan and O’Neill had a good working relationship because they were able to tune out the doctrinal enforcers who, since the early 1980s, have become exponentially more influential. Today, personal connections between lawmakers and presidents are no match for Rush Limbaugh or the SEIU or Fox News. I’m going to assume drinking and dining that’s paid for by lobbyists isn’t what the Reagan-O’Neill sentimentalists have in mind when they lament the decline of collegiality in Washington. And Lord knows the Obama administration is not shy about consorting with lobbyists.

But, sure, it’s obvious that gridlock in Washington is the result of His Aloofness’s preference for the company of ESPN.


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