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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > February > 24
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Martin Gottlieb: Tony Hall knows what Bayh is talking about
Last week, Sen. Evan Bayh, an Indiana moderate, announced he is leaving the Senate, saying he doesn’t love Congress. It’s hyper-partisan and all that.
Even before that happened, I had been wondering how Tony Hall is seeing Congress these days. He represented Dayton in Congress through the 1980s and 1990s, mainly.
He was a mainstream Democrat who was with the Republican mainstream on abortion. And he just wasn’t into the gotcha game of Congress, whereby whichever party is in power uses that power to investigate, embarrass and hassle the other.
His deep religion led him into congressional prayer groups that created strong bonds with certain Republicans, including very conservative ones.
He’s still in Washington, working on hunger and peace issues. He’s director of the Alliance to End Hunger, an umbrella group and political arm for major humanitarian organizations. He deals with Congress a lot.
His own years in Congress were not seen then as a great flowering of bipartisanship and amity. The old bipartisanship on foreign policy had long since disappeared. Newt Gingrich was on the rise, consciously fostering sharper differences between the parties.
The parties were constantly going after — and nailing — leaders like Democratic Speaker Jim Wright and Republican Gingrich on ethics charges. People were lamenting the new hostility.
And yet, Hall says that now when he goes up to “the Hill,” his old colleagues tell him it’s far worse.
“I hear it every day: It’s not the same Congress as when you were here,” he says they say.
The legislators tell him that they don’t know each other socially, and their families don’t know each other, don’t have dinner together as they used to. Everything is business. Everything is combat. Everything is party. And everything is done on the run. Hall believes part of the problem is that, more than ever, the members live away from Washington, meaning they live out of a suitcase, flying in on Monday night and home on Thursday.
Hall also laments that candidates are always chasing campaign contributions. “It seems to be all about money anymore,” he said.
But he particularly laments the lack of contact outside of business.
“You know, when you pray with somebody,” he said, “It’s hard to hate him.”
Over the weekend, Bayh had a piece in The New York Times that makes a lot of Hall’s points and more. He highlighted “gerrymandering of districts, endless filibusters … and a caucus system that promotes party unity at the expense of bipartisan consensus.”
By the latter, he means that all the members of each party meet regularly to plan strategy as a party. One can just picture the troops going out with a hand clasp and a war cry.
Whenever I write about the rigidification of Congress into close-minded blocs, I worry about being seen as one of those old guys who pines for a glorious day that never really existed. Well, what never existed — speaking as somebody who spent almost five years in Washington long ago — was a Congress that was universally beloved and embraced for its high-mindedness.
But Congress really hasn’t always been like this.
Bayh tells of a time when Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen put his arm around the shoulder of Sen. Birch Bayh (Evan’s father), a liberal Democrat who was facing re-election, and asked what he could do to help. Totally unthinkable now.
Why? Bayh doesn’t confront one big reason: Such coziness always drove certain Republicans nuts. The party had, after all, spent decades in the congressional minority. These Republicans asked: How are we supposed to draw the sharp distinction necessary to convince people of a need for change if we’re so lovey-dovey with the other side?
So began a relentless effort to draw sharper distinctions between the parties. It had such leaders as William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.
Once upon a time, there were fair numbers of liberal Republicans and lots of conservative Democrats. That had some downsides, even from the public’s point of view. It resulted in complaints and jokes about whether there was really any difference between the parties.
But it helped keep things civil.
Today we have a system of cleanly different parties. But we haven’t learned how to work it.
The task is sharply complicated by screaming voices on television, radio and elsewhere that consciously foment polarization and make millions off it.
Meanwhile, the overall electorate pursues centrism not by supporting centrists, but by swinging back and forth between the centrist-free parties.
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