Matters of Church and State

Washington as High School

         This morning, after finishing the Washington Post and the New York Times, I sat at the breakfast table staring out the window, nursing a third cup of coffee, ruminating over what I had just read.  It was all so dispiriting, and the gray, overcast skies didn’t help.  The front sections were filled with news about the President’s gun proposal and the predictable, mindless pushback from NRA and other gun advocates.  Even the sports pages, normally an oasis for a sports junkie, featured Lance Armstrong’s fall from grace.

          Later, while going about my daily chores still thinking about the gun debate, it hit me.  High school!  It’s all about high school!!!!

          Okay, before you call the men in the white coats, let me explain:  The late Meg Greenfield, for many years Editorial Page Editor for the Washington Post, wrote a wonderfully insightful book, published in 2001, about the culture of Washington, including the people who come here to serve in Congress, in the Executive Branch, or as reporters and pundits.  The book is simply called WASHINGTON.  And, no, I won’t loan it to you, for fear of not getting it back.  It’s that good.  Besides, I have had it for years, consulted it often, and it’s all marked up, making it annoying for anyone else to read.

          In searching for an analogy to capture the Washington culture, Greenfield writes: “The analogy I favor is high school…. And why shouldn’t high school be such a place?  These are the years in which young people first encounter a make-or-break, peer-enforced social code that calculates worth as popularity and popularity as a capacity to please and be associated with the right people (no matter how undeserving they may be), as well as to impress and be admired by the vast, undifferentiated rest…. So far as I have been able to discover,” she concludes, “nobody, regardless of station, gets over high school – ever.”

          It’s brilliant, really, when you think about it.  For me, it helps explains why members of Congress ignore common sense, even public opinion polls, and the huge advantage a recently-elected President enjoys in favorability ratings.  So long as they continue to please the constituency that elected them in the first place as well as their financial backers -- no matter how undeserving both followers and financial backers may be in our eyes -- they don’t pay much to general opinion polls, even ones that put the favorability rating of Congress in single digits. 

          You might think that veteran Congressmen from safe districts might depart from tribal thinking and consider the larger common good from time to time.  Some do, of course, but their numbers are shrinking.  Greenfield writes that Larry O’Brien, former aide to President Kennedy, once told her that in his experience every member of Congress, no matter how safe his or her seat, is perennially nervous and worried about getting re-elected.  Once they get ensconced in this culture, they have a difficult time doing without it.  So, they will do virtually anything not to endanger their position by rocking the boat or moving away from the herd.

          So much for the Congress, but there’s a lesson from high school here for the President, too, I would submit.  I don’t glean this lesson from Meg Greenfield’s book, but from my own high-school teaching experience in the mid-60s.  But, more importantly and more immediately from the experience of my wife Brigitte, who has taught high-school here in Fairfax County for going on 39 years, virtually all of that time on a full-time basis and for the past year as a substitute.  (Did I mention that she was Fairfax County Teacher of the Year for 2009-2010?)

          One of the first thing you learn as a teacher – and hopefully before that as a parent  – is that you don’t keep telling students or your children how stupid or misguided they are, even if they are at the time.  All you do is breed resentment and resistance and get more of the status quo, in spades.  Instead, you try to treat them as if they were already where you and they, in their deeper selves, want them to be.  More often than not, they respond positively.  It’s not a sure-fire step to success, to be sure, but the opposite, the constant hectoring and belittlement is certainly a sure-fire formula for failure, I have found.

          What made think of this was the President’s press conference this week.  For more than an hour, he lectured and hectored and whined about Congress’s failure to meet its obligations.   On the facts, he’s absolutely right, of course.  It’s scandalous, if not seditious, now badly the members of Congress have performed as a body.  But, as a teacher and leader, the approach the President is taking strikes me as counterproductive.  It won’t help us get beyond the gridlock we’ve had for the past four years.  Somehow, the President, brilliant and cerebral as he is – and, ironically, contemptuous of the normal political give-and-take -- must get off his high horse, quit talking down to these people, suck it up, and find some place besides the Oval Office to sit down and schmooze with these fools – er, people.

          The President really needs to take a lesson from his Vice President and not just send the Vice President off to do the dirty work he doesn’t want to do himself.  You may remember Biden’s story he told about himself when he first came to Congress.  After listening to Senator Strom Thurmond, or one of the other long-term Senators, bloviate on the floor of the Senate, Biden turned to Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield and said something like:  How do you put up with fools like that?  Mansfield turned to him and said sharply:  Son, that Senator was elected to this body, just like you, and you have to figure out why and deal with it.  It’s a lesson he never forgot, Biden said.

          As a staunch supporter of the President, I love his intellect, his character, his family value, his life story, and so much more.  But, I fear he puts too much stock in logic and common sense.  Politics is a smarmy business, and its most adept practitioners know how to do it for the greater good without unduly sullying their basic values and integrity, as the movie “Lincoln” brilliantly illustrates.  So does Jon Meacham’s excellent new biography THOMAS JEFFERSON: The Art of Power.

            In so many spheres of life, appealing to logic and common sense gets us only part way there.  Let’s face it:  If common sense were all that common, we would have solved many, if not most, of these problems decades ago.

Jerry