BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
My neighbor looked across the dining room table. “I would vote for anyone on either side…if they had solutions,” he said. “I feel helpless. What can we do?”
His wife had a suggestion: “If we voted them all out would that help?”
“You just did that a year ago,” I said. “You can’t just keep voting them out and voting them back in again.”
“Then what?” she asked. “What about term limits?”
“We’ve tried that already.” I said. “We went through a binge of term-limit pledges decades ago. The honorable politicians kept their promises and left Congress. The ones you didn’t want there in the first place, broke their promises and stayed.”
I suspect there are millions of conversations like that going on all around the country, among people of all political stripes and all walks of life, who are scared, angry, frustrated and fearful they are losing control over their own lives.
This conversation was about the months of political bickering and gridlock in Washington, culminating last week in Standard & Poors (S&P) downgrading the U.S. credit rating, followed the next day by a 617-point, 5-percent drop in the stock market, throwing the country into a state of economic purgatory, enroute to hell.
Standard & Poors (S&P) blamed the downgrade the “political brinkmanship of recent months” resulting in “America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective and less predictable.”
Oddly enough, immediately after this historic repudiation of our system of governance, Republicans and Democrats, launched another round of partisan attacks on each other, rationalizing their own righteousness, with excuses for, rather than explanations of, what happened and why. No one that I know of pointed the finger at themselves and said: “It was partially our fault. We could have done better.” When they tired of pointing at each other, they turned on Standard & Poors, probably deservedly so, but totally beyond the point and utterly irrelevant.
Merriam Webster defines brinkmanship as: “the art or practice of pushing a dangerous situation or confrontation to the limit of safety, especially to force a desired outcome.”
That is what both sides in this debacle have been doing for months, pushing their own agendas beyond the point of return, doing what they may have thought was right, but reaching a very wrong and dangerous outcome, just the same.
In the end, brinkmanship produced neither victory nor defeat for either side. The debt-ceiling legislation that ultimately passed doesn’t even deserve to be called a compromise; it was a capitulation to the only thing the leaders did right; they kept their promise to avoid default on the nation’s financial obligations. For that they deserve credit.
What brinkmanship did do was worsen the economy, perpetuate unemployment and inflict on hundreds of millions of Americans more anxiety, more disillusionment and more fear of the unknown ahead of them.
News analyses of the stalemate suggest the brinkmanship could have been avoided on July 22. House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama apparently reached tentative agreement on a $4.5 trillion deficit-reduction package that would have met the basic objectives of most of the combatants and thwarted the crisis.
I am not sure why that plan broke down. News accounts indicated that Speaker Boehner walked away when President Obama tried to up the ante on more revenues one last time. I doubt it was that simple. Whatever the reason, the result was inexcusable. The desired outcome was there, sitting on the table. It appeared to be a real a courageous compromise, a credible debt-reduction plan that had a chance of passage.
The breakdown of that deal may go down in history as one of the worst failures of governance since Warren Harding.
“What do we do now?” he asked me. What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know,” I said limply.
A whopping 82 percent of the American people, like the people at dinner, have no confidence in Congress. Vast majorities have no faith in either Republicans or Democrats to free the country from the clutches of crisis. Eighty percent think politicians do what they do not for the good of the country, but for their own political advantage. The President enjoys more confidence, but not enough to govern. In other words, our leaders have lost the consent of the governed. Our governance is dysfunctional.
The worst of it is, we haven’t seen the worst of it. As my brother reminds me, the continuing resolution battle in the spring and this battle over increasing the debt ceiling are little skirmishes compared to the battles we face ahead over even higher mountains of debt, financing of health care, retiring the baby boomers, stimulating job growth, reaching energy independence, and restoring civility and rational thought to our political process. Do we have the political leadership and the political will to do what needs to be done now, or do we wait until unemployment is at 10 percent and the Dow drops another 600, and Spain and Portugal default? What will it take?
It’s time we rethink the way we govern, from the way we apportion congressional districts, to the rules under which we create public policy; to the way we treat each other in the public arena. Maybe it’s time to demand reformation of the media, particularly the carnival barkers who foment anger, misinform their audiences, promote polarization and then exploit the product of their work for fun and big profits. Maybe it is time for the public, all of us, to rethink what we want from government and what we are willing to sacrifice to get it. Maybe it is time for the public to vote on the basis of outcomes, rather than promises and cast their lot with political movements that are inclined toward consensus rather than combat. All of us, the policy makers, the media and the public, must recognize that there is really only one principal and one practice of good governance that will get us through this crisis. It is compromise. But it takes courage.
If I were to place confidence in anyone to bring us back from the brink, it would be Speaker Boehner. He knows how to govern. He stays cool in a crisis. He has common sense. Most importantly, he’s got courage. Boehner has the potential to become one of the best speakers since Sam Rayburn, who believed that the art of governing was not in burning down the barn, but building it. Boehner is a builder.
Editors’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is a member of the board and co-founder of the Congressional Institute. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.
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Mike Johnson