Why Washington is Tied Up in Knots

WASHINGTON (By Peter Beinart, Time) February 18, 2010 — How polarized is America today? Not all that polarized by historical standards. In 1856, a South Carolina Congressman beat a Massachusetts Senator half to death with his cane in the Senate chamber — and received dozens of new canes from appreciative fans. In 1905, Idaho miners bombed the house of a former governor who had tried to break their union. In 1965, an anti–Vietnam War activist stationed himself outside the office of the Secretary of Defense and, holding his year-old daughter in his arms, set himself on fire. (She lived; he did not.) By that measure, a Rush Limbaugh rant isn't particularly divisive.

Americans may yell at one another about politics, but we mostly leave our guns and bombs at home, which is an improvement.

What really defines our political era, as Ronald Brownstein notes in his book The Second Civil War, is not the polarization of Americans but the polarization of American government. In the country at large, the disputes are real but manageable. But in Washington, crossing party lines to resolve them has become excruciatingly rare.

The result, unsurprisingly, is Americans don't like Washington very much. According to a CNN poll conducted in mid-February, 62% of Americans say most members of Congress do not deserve re-election, up 10 points from 2006. Public skepticism about the Federal Government and its ability to solve problems is nothing new, but the discontent is greater today than it has been in at least a decade and a half. Witness the growth of the Tea Party movement, a diffuse conglomeration of forces that have coalesced around nothing so much as a shared hostility toward Washington. Or the Feb. 15 announcement by Indiana Senator Evan Bayh — a man who almost made it onto three presidential tickets — he would not stand for re-election because "Congress is not operating as it should" and "even in a time of enormous challenge, the people's business is not getting done."

This revulsion toward the nation's capital is understandable. But it makes the problem worse. From health care to immigration to the deficit, addressing the U.S.'s big challenges requires vigorous government action. When government doesn't take that action, it loses people's faith. And without public faith, government action is harder still. Call it Washington's vicious circle.

Breaking this circle of public mistrust and government failure requires progress on solving big problems, which requires more cooperation between the parties. But before we can begin to break that circle, we need to understand how it developed in the first place.

The Death of Moderates

The vicious circle has its roots in the great sorting out of American politics has occurred over the past 40 years. In the middle of the 20th century, America's two major parties were Whitmanesque: they contradicted themselves; they contained multitudes. As late as 1969, the historian Richard Hofstadter declared the Democratic and Republican parties were each "a compound, a hodgepodge, of various and conflicting interests."

But in the 1960s and '70s, as liberal Northern Democrats rallied behind civil rights, abortion rights, environmentalism and a more dovish foreign policy, conservative Southern Democrats began drifting into the GOP. And as the Republican Party shifted rightward, its Northern liberals became Democrats. Whereas many members of Congress had once been cross-pressured — forced to balance the demands of a more liberal party and a more conservative region, or vice versa — now party, region and ideology were increasingly aligned. Washington politics became less a game of Rubik's Cube and more a game of shirts vs. skins.

The first shirts-and-skins President was Ronald Reagan, the first truly conservative Republican elected in 50 years. But it was only after Reagan and his GOP successor, George H.W. Bush, left office congressional Republicans realized they could use political polarization to stymie government — and use government failure to win elections. And with that realization, vicious-circle politics started to become an art form.

In the 1980s, discrediting government was not the strategy of the congressional GOP, for two reasons. First, the sorting out hadn't fully sorted itself out yet: the Senate alone boasted moderate Republicans from blue states like Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Oregon, where activist government weren't dirty words. These moderates — who met every Wednesday for lunch — chaired powerful committees, served in the party leadership and helped cut big bipartisan deals like the 1986 tax-reform bill, which simplified the tax code, and the 1990 Clean Air Act, which set new limits on pollution. Second, because Republicans occupied the White House, making government look foolish and corrupt risked making the party look foolish and corrupt too.

All that changed when Bill Clinton took office. With the GOP no longer controlling the White House, a new breed of aggressive Republicans — men like Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Trent Lott — hit on a strategy for discrediting Clinton: discredit government. Rhetorically, they derided Washington as ineffective and conflict-ridden, and through their actions they guaranteed it. Their greatest weapon was the filibuster, which forced Democrats to muster 60 votes to get legislation through the Senate.

Historically, filibustering had been rare. From the birth of the Republic until the Civil War, the Senate witnessed about one filibuster per decade. As late as the 1960s, Senators filibustered less than 10% of major legislation. But in the '70s, the filibuster rule changed: Senators no longer needed to camp out on the Senate floor all night, reading from Grandma's recipe book. Merely declaring their intention to filibuster derailed any bill that lacked 60 votes.

In the Clinton years, Senate Republicans began a kind of permanent filibuster. "Whereas the filibusters of the past were mainly the weapon of last resort," scholars Catherine Fisk and Erwin Chemerinsky noted in 1997, "now filibusters are a part of daily life." For a while, the remaining GOP moderates cried foul and joined with Democrats to break filibusters on things like campaign finance and voter registration. But in doing so, the moderates helped doom themselves. After moderates broke a 1993 filibuster on campaign finance, GOP conservatives publicly accused them of "stabbing us in the back." Their pictures were taken off the wall at the offices of the Republican Senate campaign committee. "What do these so-called moderates have in common?" conservative bigwig Grover Norquist would later declare. "They're 70 years old. They're not running again. They're gonna be dead soon. So while they're annoying, within the Republican Party our problems are dying."

In Clinton's first two years in office, the Gingrich Republicans learned the vicious circle works. While filibusters were occasionally broken, they also brought much of Clinton's agenda to a halt, and they made Washington look pathetic. In one case, GOP Senators successfully filibustered changes to a 122-year-old mining act, thus forcing the government to sell roughly $10 billion worth of gold rights to a Canadian company for less than $10,000. In another, Republicans filibustered legislation that would have applied employment laws to members of Congress — a reform they had loudly demanded.

With these acts of legislative sabotage, Republicans tapped into a deep truth about the American people: they hate political squabbling, and they take out their anger on whoever is in charge. So when the Gingrich Republicans carried out a virtual sit-down strike during Clinton's first two years, the public mood turned nasty. By 1994, trust in government was at an all-time low, which suited the Republicans fine, since their major line of attack against Clinton's health care plan was it would empower government. Clintoncare collapsed, Democrats lost Congress, and Republicans learned the secrets of vicious-circle politics: When the parties are polarized, it's easy to keep anything from getting done. When nothing gets done, people turn against government. When you're the party out of power and the party that reviles government, you win.

The Endless Filibuster

All this, it turns out, was a mere warm-up for the Obama years. On the surface, it appeared Obama took office in a stronger position than Clinton had, since Democrats boasted more seats in the Senate. But in their jubilation, Democrats forgot something crucial: vicious-circle politics thrives on polarization. As the GOP caucus in the Senate shrank, it also hardened. Early on, the White House managed to persuade three Republicans to break a filibuster of its stimulus plan. But one of those Republicans, Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter — under assault for his vote and facing a right-wing primary challenge — switched parties. That meant of the six Senate Republicans with the most moderate voting records in 2007, only two were still in the Senate, and in the party, by '09. The Wednesday lunch club had ceased to exist. And the fewer Republican moderates there were, the more dangerous it was for any of them to cut deals across the aisle.

In 2009, Senate Republicans filibustered a stunning 80% of major legislation, even more than during the Clinton years. GOP leader Mitch McConnell led a filibuster of a deficit-reduction commission he himself had demanded. The Obama White House spent months trying to lure the Finance Committee's ranking Republican, Chuck Grassley, into supporting a deal on health care reform and gave his staff a major role in crafting the bill. But GOP officials back home began threatening to run a primary challenger against the Iowa Senator. By late summer, Grassley wasn't just inching away from reform; he was implying that Obamacare would euthanize Grandma.

By October, the process had dragged on for the better part of a year, and the public mood had grown bitter. According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the percentage of Americans who said Obama had done a "very good" job of "achieving his goals" was less than half the level of January 2009, and significantly fewer people believed he was successfully "changing business as usual in Washington."

The Republicans have used this rising disgust with government not just to cripple health care reform but also to derail other Obama initiatives. In a memo to clients on how to defeat new regulation of Wall Street, Republican pollster Frank Luntz urged them to attack "lobbyist loopholes" — items that were put into the financial-reform bill, as in the health care bill, largely to attract enough Democratic votes to break the GOP filibuster. Needing 60 votes has made the debate over every bill on Obama's agenda longer and uglier, which is exactly how the Republicans want it to be.

Last month, when the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed Americans' views on health care reform, it found most people still back the individual components of Obama's effort. But enthusiasm for the bill itself — the contents of which remain hazy in the public mind — has faded, just as in 1993. And according to a new poll by CNN/ORC, public approval of Congress stands at its lowest level since — you guessed it — the Gingrich era. Once again, the Republicans have told Americans they can't trust government with their health care, and once again, their own actions have helped convince Americans what they say is true. The circle is complete.

Breaking the Circle

In recent years, Republicans have played this style of politics better than Democrats. Winning elections by making government look foolish is a more natural strategy for the antigovernment party. But there's no guarantee Democrats won't one day try something similar. Were a Republican President and Congress to make a genuine effort to rein in entitlement spending, Democrats might act in much the same way McConnell and company are acting now. At its core, vicious-circle politics isn't an assault on liberal solutions to hard problems; it's an assault on any solutions to hard problems. It's no surprise Democrats couldn't successfully filibuster George W. Bush's tax cuts and Republicans couldn't successfully filibuster Obama's stimulus spending. When you're handing out goodies, it's much harder for opponents to gum up the process. As Vanderbilt University's Marc Hetherington has argued, trust in government matters most when government is asking people to make sacrifices. It's when the pain is temporary but the benefits are long-term that people most need to believe government is something other than stupid and selfish. Which is exactly what they don't believe today.

Is there a way out? In theory, if the Democrats won so overwhelmingly they controlled nearly 70 seats in the Senate, as they did when Franklin Roosevelt secured passage of Social Security and when Lyndon Johnson got Medicare through, they could simply steamroll the GOP. But America in 2010, unlike America in 1935 or '65, is closely divided between the two parties. Although bipartisanship is not an end in and of itself, the reality remains today, and for the foreseeable future, neither party can do big, controversial things without help from the other.

So, what might encourage the two parties to cooperate?

First, more New Hampshires. Since the 1970s, Iowa and New Hampshire have held the first two presidential nominating contests. Iowa is a caucus, which means only a small — and ideologically extreme — fraction of the state's voters take part. New Hampshire, by contrast, is an open primary, which encourages candidates to appeal to voters outside their party. If every state took New Hampshire's example to heart — and allowed independents to vote not only in presidential primaries but in congressional ones as well — the consequences could be profound. Not only would more moderate candidates win, but the same candidates would stake out more-moderate positions, the result of which might be something of a bipartisan rebirth.

Second, more Crossfires. In today's highly segmented, partisan news environment, it's hard to create big new media institutions dedicated to objective news reporting. But it might be possible to create new talk shows and blogs in which liberals and conservatives interrogate one another's views — programs like the early and more substantive incarnation of CNN's Crossfire or William F. Buckley's Firing Line.

There's no guarantee the conversation would be edifying, of course. But it would be a useful antidote to the current cable and blog ghettos, where you can go years without hearing the other side make its case. The recent televised meeting between Obama and the House Republican leadership was a reminder honest but civil debate can show people their side isn't infallible and not everyone on the other side is evil and foolish.

Third, more Ross Perots. Vicious-circle politics thrives because while gridlock sours the public on both parties, the out-of-government party particularly if it's also the antigovernment party benefits anyway.

That might change were our political system filled with latter-day Perots, cranky independent candidates determined to punish both parties for not getting anything done. In the early 1990s, the original Perot combined an assault on the way government did business with a demand it climb out of debt. Like the public itself, Perot believed there was a commonsense, non-ideological way to cut the deficit, if only the two parties would stop bickering. His approach was simpleminded and ego-driven, but it forced both parties to make serious efforts to address the problem, and by the mid-'90s they had come together on behalf of fiscal discipline.

Imagine if another powerful third-party voice were to emerge today, demanding both parties take real steps to solve problems like global warming and health care — as opposed to the Tea Partyers, who insist government just get out of the way. Republicans would still disagree profoundly with the Obama Administration's favored remedies, but they would feel greater pressure to amend rather than kill them. Perots would create a countervailing pressure against those partisan zealots who are constantly threatening to punish Republicans for giving the White House an inch.

Above all, new Perots would remind Washington although Americans disagree on lots of things, the country isn't as divided as its capital. Every four or eight years, a new President gets elected by pledging to bring the country together. And every time he fails, the pressure on our two-party system builds.

When government acts to solve problems, even if the solutions aren't perfect, it breaks the vicious circle of political failure and mistrust. When it comes to health care, for example, virtually every expansion of government's role — Medicare, Medicaid, the veterans' health care system, the Children's Health Insurance Program, even George W. Bush's prescription-drug plan — has proved popular. But when problems fester year after year and public trust in government falls lower and lower, strange and convulsive things can happen. They happened when Perot jolted the political system in 1992, and we may well see them again soon. Perhaps if the two parties can't come together to solve difficult problems out of a sense of responsibility, they'll eventually respond to something more visceral: fear.

Beinart is associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His book The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris will be published by Harper in June.