Dead and Forgotten?
by Dick Polman
AUGUST 22, 2011 TAGS:
How cruel it is, how symptomatic of our current political dysfunction, that so few living souls ever invoke the memory and legacy of Edward M. Kennedy.
The famed senatorial lion, an impassioned liberal who nonetheless achieved greatness as a consummate bipartisan dealmaker, will be one year dead on Aug. 25, and perhaps it's only a testament to our short attention span that his name so rarely surfaces. But no, it's far worse than that.
As evidenced by the recent brinksmanship over the debt ceiling - a crisis ginned up by uncompromising tea-party Republicans, who threatened to drive America into default unless President Obama and the Democrats agreed to enact potentially draconian spending cuts - the partisan strife these days is so cacophonous that the art of compromise seems as dead as one of its most legendary practitioners.
Ted Kennedy would have been appalled at the recent Republican antics, because, ideological differences aside, the tactic of holding hostage the full faith and credit of the United States - of leveraging the debt ceiling for partisan purposes, despite a bipartisan tradition of raising it, 78 times since 1960 - would have struck him as legislative blasphemy.
For all his rhetorical combativeness, Kennedy never believed that it was either his way or the highway; Senate colleague Alan Simpson, a Republican, once said that Kennedy's implicit motto was "you take a crumb when you can't get a loaf." Whereas, today, the partisans don’t intend to share the loaf with anyone. One can argue that Kennedy's legacy was irrevocably sullied when House Speaker John Boehner publicly boasted, after the credit default was averted, that "I got 98 percent of what I wanted" - and when many Republicans, including Michele Bachmann, insisted that not even 98 percent was good enough.
But that's how they roll these days. They are hostage to the tea partyers who, according to the polls, represent roughly 20 percent of all Americans. They refuse, in any deficit-reduction deal, to accept any revenue increases whatsoever, because all taxes are deemed inherently evil.
In short, they don't believe in the art of compromise - as practiced by the deal-making Founding Fathers, and by hundreds of congressional craftsmen from Henry Clay to Edward Kennedy. Which certainly helps explain why they have no interest in honoring the Kennedy legacy. More noteworthy, however, is that during the crisis virtually no Democrats invoked Kennedy either. So rarely has the phrase "dead and gone" seemed so axiomatic.
So I'll invoke him here. Kennedy's modus operandi went something like this: On the stump, on the Senate floor, and in committee hearings, he would rant and rave about Republican perfidy until his oversized face literally took on the coloration of an electric stove burner on high heat. (I remember; in 1979, I covered one of his hearings.) But afterwards, all passions spent, he would cross the aisle and cut a deal with the same people he'd been assailing - indeed, some of the same people who painted Kennedy as a villain in their fundraising efforts.
Kennedy worked with a number of conservatives, notably Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, North Carolina Sen. Lauch Faircloth, and, most famously, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch. He and Hatch forged legislative deals on dozens of issues, including job training, children's health care, religious freedom, drug research, community health centers, food oversight, service-learning programs, and better jobs and access for the handicapped. Kennedy also worked with George W. Bush on education issues, conferring his bipartisan blessing on the Republican president's No Child Left Behind law, the (underfunded) reform measure that links federal aid to student performance.
He rarely got anything close to what he wanted, much less 98 percent; as former Florida Democratic Sen. Bob Graham told one of his home-state newspapers last summer, Kennedy was "at the core, a very practical man. He understood in American politics (that) things don't happen with a Hail Mary pass, but that progress comes through four yards and a cloud of dust."
To gain that meager yardage, Kennedy would work the Senate cloakroom, or lure his ostensible Republican adversaries into his hideaway office on the west side of the Senate wing. As one former aide, Terry Hartle, recently remarked, the boss was "old school," a senator who cared about the institution and recognized that "at the end of the day," lawmakers had to set aside rhetoric and "do the people's business."
But one big reason why Kennedy already seems as archaic as the VCR is because the new school of politicians comprises virtually a different species.
Ideological polarization has become so pronounced in Washington - with the partisan blogs, the cable shows, and the special interest groups further fueling the distemper - that most members of Congress literally do not even socialize across party lines. They don't golf or drink together; they don't see each other as people. Back in the '80s, Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill would bash each other by day and cut deals over whiskey by night. But today, that kind of routine is unthinkable.
Today, the aim is to settle for nothing less than the whole loaf. This was clear at the most recent Republican presidential candidates' debate, when a Fox News questioner posed a hypothetical question to the eight aspirants on stage:
If you were president, how many of you would refuse to sign a deficit-reduction deal that featured a 10-1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases, simply because the deal contained some revenue increases?
All eight raised their hands.
And Edward M. Kennedy faded further into the mists of time.
Dick Polman is a national political columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and blogs at whyy.org/polman. You can follow him on Twitter, @dickpolman1.
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ALSO by DICK POLMAN
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The famed senatorial lion, an impassioned liberal who nonetheless achieved greatness as a consummate bipartisan dealmaker, will be one year dead on Aug. 25, and perhaps it's only a testament to our short attention span that his name so rarely surfaces. But no, it's far worse than that.
As evidenced by the recent brinksmanship over the debt ceiling - a crisis ginned up by uncompromising tea-party Republicans, who threatened to drive America into default unless President Obama and the Democrats agreed to enact potentially draconian spending cuts - the partisan strife these days is so cacophonous that the art of compromise seems as dead as one of its most legendary practitioners.
Ted Kennedy would have been appalled at the recent Republican antics, because, ideological differences aside, the tactic of holding hostage the full faith and credit of the United States - of leveraging the debt ceiling for partisan purposes, despite a bipartisan tradition of raising it, 78 times since 1960 - would have struck him as legislative blasphemy.
For all his rhetorical combativeness, Kennedy never believed that it was either his way or the highway; Senate colleague Alan Simpson, a Republican, once said that Kennedy's implicit motto was "you take a crumb when you can't get a loaf." Whereas, today, the partisans don’t intend to share the loaf with anyone. One can argue that Kennedy's legacy was irrevocably sullied when House Speaker John Boehner publicly boasted, after the credit default was averted, that "I got 98 percent of what I wanted" - and when many Republicans, including Michele Bachmann, insisted that not even 98 percent was good enough.
But that's how they roll these days. They are hostage to the tea partyers who, according to the polls, represent roughly 20 percent of all Americans. They refuse, in any deficit-reduction deal, to accept any revenue increases whatsoever, because all taxes are deemed inherently evil.
In short, they don't believe in the art of compromise - as practiced by the deal-making Founding Fathers, and by hundreds of congressional craftsmen from Henry Clay to Edward Kennedy. Which certainly helps explain why they have no interest in honoring the Kennedy legacy. More noteworthy, however, is that during the crisis virtually no Democrats invoked Kennedy either. So rarely has the phrase "dead and gone" seemed so axiomatic.
So I'll invoke him here. Kennedy's modus operandi went something like this: On the stump, on the Senate floor, and in committee hearings, he would rant and rave about Republican perfidy until his oversized face literally took on the coloration of an electric stove burner on high heat. (I remember; in 1979, I covered one of his hearings.) But afterwards, all passions spent, he would cross the aisle and cut a deal with the same people he'd been assailing - indeed, some of the same people who painted Kennedy as a villain in their fundraising efforts.
Kennedy worked with a number of conservatives, notably Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, North Carolina Sen. Lauch Faircloth, and, most famously, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch. He and Hatch forged legislative deals on dozens of issues, including job training, children's health care, religious freedom, drug research, community health centers, food oversight, service-learning programs, and better jobs and access for the handicapped. Kennedy also worked with George W. Bush on education issues, conferring his bipartisan blessing on the Republican president's No Child Left Behind law, the (underfunded) reform measure that links federal aid to student performance.
He rarely got anything close to what he wanted, much less 98 percent; as former Florida Democratic Sen. Bob Graham told one of his home-state newspapers last summer, Kennedy was "at the core, a very practical man. He understood in American politics (that) things don't happen with a Hail Mary pass, but that progress comes through four yards and a cloud of dust."
To gain that meager yardage, Kennedy would work the Senate cloakroom, or lure his ostensible Republican adversaries into his hideaway office on the west side of the Senate wing. As one former aide, Terry Hartle, recently remarked, the boss was "old school," a senator who cared about the institution and recognized that "at the end of the day," lawmakers had to set aside rhetoric and "do the people's business."
But one big reason why Kennedy already seems as archaic as the VCR is because the new school of politicians comprises virtually a different species.
Ideological polarization has become so pronounced in Washington - with the partisan blogs, the cable shows, and the special interest groups further fueling the distemper - that most members of Congress literally do not even socialize across party lines. They don't golf or drink together; they don't see each other as people. Back in the '80s, Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill would bash each other by day and cut deals over whiskey by night. But today, that kind of routine is unthinkable.
Today, the aim is to settle for nothing less than the whole loaf. This was clear at the most recent Republican presidential candidates' debate, when a Fox News questioner posed a hypothetical question to the eight aspirants on stage:
If you were president, how many of you would refuse to sign a deficit-reduction deal that featured a 10-1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue increases, simply because the deal contained some revenue increases?
All eight raised their hands.
And Edward M. Kennedy faded further into the mists of time.
Dick Polman is a national political columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and blogs at whyy.org/polman. You can follow him on Twitter, @dickpolman1.
--
ALSO by DICK POLMAN
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