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"The
Press, Politics
and Citizenship"
By David S. Broder Washington is not an edifying spectacle, in terms of politics and government, these days. Last year was, of course, the year of Monica and, in governmental terms, a throwaway year. When the impeachment trial ended in the Senate early this year, I think there was some hope, genuine hope, on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, that now we might actually be able to get some things done. The country is in good shape. There are some problems in our farm sector and some other sectors but, by and large, this country is doing very nicely these days. There is an opportunity, that’s been created by the prosperity and general peace in our unchallenged position in the world, to deal not with crises of the moment, but with some of the structural problems that need to be attended to if the future for Americans is going to be as bright as life is today for most of our fellow citizens. One of those challenges, and I know it’s been very much at the forefront of what you’re talking about and dealing with here in Nebraska, is the question of our public schools. Many of them are wonderful; some of them fail children that go to them. But, that’s a challenge that’s only largely going to be met at the state and local level. That is not one where Washington can, under our constitutional structure, take the lead. But, there are other challenges – Social Security, Medicare, the retirement and health-care costs of that big baby-boomer generation, and the task of defining our role in the world, in a post-Cold War world – where, in these good times, we can usefully try to advance some common understanding. That is, unfortunately, not happening. Instead, the Congress is struggling with the president over the basics of government. The tax bill that consumed much time on Capitol Hill has now been vetoed. The routine appropriations to keep the government functioning are in jeopardy. There are a lot of investigations going on, rather than legislation, and I’d have to say that this opportunity is mostly gone because of the presidential campaign. I just came from Iowa, where it is in full swing, and the rest of the country will be caught up in that campaign very quickly. The opportunity that these good times provided will probably have to be postponed until after 2000. I would make the argument to you that this is not all the fault of the politicians or, for that matter, of the press, although I will come back to both. Some of it has to do with what we, as citizens, have created. We are so closely divided in our partisanship or allegiance to the two parties, whether you look at the public-opinion polls or the makeup of the House and the Senate. This is a historic time in terms of the virtual near-parity between the two parties. And, that would be fine, but what we don’t seem to realize as voters is that there are genuine differences now between the parties. Let me take one of the tools of the humanities – history – and give you a little bit of personal history that I hope will explain the point that I’m trying to make. When I started covering Washington 40 years ago, the Democrats normally had a majority in Congress. They had that majority because the Southern states elected, year after year, people who were quite conservative in their political philosophy but, because of the heritage of the Civil War, called themselves Democrats. Those Southern Democrats were very comfortable voting with Republicans, particularly on fiscal issues, the tax and spending issues. During those years, when the Democrats nominally controlled it, control effectively was held by a conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats. During those years, and I’m talking about the ‘50s and ‘60s, there were also in Congress a lot of people who called themselves, proudly, moderate Republicans or progressive Republicans or liberal Republicans. Elected from New England and the upper Midwest, they were very comfortable voting with some of the northern Democrats, particularly on social policy issues. Indeed, that’s how we got the great civil rights legislation that was passed in the 1950s and 1960s. This is a point that has not been explained very well by those of us in the press, but the seats that were once held by conservative Southern Democrats are now, mainly, held by Republicans. And, the seats that were once held by those moderate or progressive Republicans are now, mainly, held by Democrats. The result of that is that you have much greater cohesion within each of the party caucuses in Congress and much greater distance, genuine distance, between those party positions. So, what we attempt to deal with, and what clearly comes through to the public, as partisan squabbling has a much more serious dimension to it. There are fundamental choices, whether you’re talking about health care or education policy or Social Security policy, between the inclination of most Republicans and most Democrats, which we – the voters – have chosen, at least so far, not to resolve at the polling place. But, whatever the cause, the country is clearly turned off. I’ve been spending the last couple of days in Iowa, talking to voters, and I’ve heard the same refrain that I’m sure I would hear from many of you about the wheels spinning, the lack of action in Washington. The turn-off has really gone to remarkable lengths. There was a poll that came out about a week ago that asked people how closely they were following this incipient presidential contest. More than half the Democrats in his sample could not offer, voluntarily, the name of anyone who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination. More than half the Republicans could not name anyone who was running in their party, except Bush and Dole, the son of the former president and the spouse of last time’s presidential candidate. What this means is that people have just tuned out, as indeed more than half the country tuned out when it came time to vote in the 1996 election. Skepticism about government and about politics and politicians is very healthy. It’s a great American tradition. But, we’ve gone well beyond skepticism, I think, and have a degree of cynicism about politics that is remarkable and, in my view, fairly alarming. People tend to exempt their own representatives in Washington, but if you apply this to the government as a whole, in that same poll by a four-to-one margin people said they believe that the government is run by a few big interests, looking out for themselves rather than for the benefit of all the people – a question of trust in government. In 1964, three out of four Americans said that they thought you could trust the government in Washington to do what is right most of the time or all of the time. Now, that identical question being asked, half as many Americans – about 38 percent – say that they think you can trust the government to do what is right. So, what we have is a kind of vote of no confidence, not in this particular set of people in Washington, but in the whole idea of representative government, the founding idea, the root idea of our Constitution. That disillusionment is expressed in many ways. Here in Nebraska and in other states, it takes the form of support for term limits. It takes the form of using the initiative process, rather than the cumbersome legislative process, to settle large questions. I suppose the fair question for you to ask me at this point would be: “Are the politicians getting what they deserve? Are they, in fact, as unworthy of public trust as most Americans seem to think?” The answer I would give will strike you, perhaps, as naïve for someone who has been in Washington this long, or perhaps you’ll just say, “Well, Broder’s just been co-opted.” I would not expect it would be the majority opinion in this room, but I would tell you, without being able to prove it to you, that I think the people in public office now are better than they were when I started covering politics 40 years ago. They’re better than the public thinks they are. I think they are men and women who are trapped in a bad system and can’t find their way out. Let me tell you why I would argue that they are better, in terms of ability and seriousness. Let me start with the governors. There was a wonderful book published about governors, a historical look at governors. The title of the book was “Goodbye to Good-Time Charlie.” What the author was saying was, in essence, that for a long time governors didn’t have to do much more than hand out road contracts and cut ribbons on projects. I can tell you, as one who’s been covering the national governors’ meetings for years, that those meetings, in the early years, were great parties. They would schedule just enough business or speeches to make it look legitimate for them to be traveling out of the state, but it was party time, on the golf course or on riverboats. One governors’ conference I covered, they literally put every governor in the country aboard the S.S. Independence in New York harbor, sailed the ship down to Puerto Rico and back, and that was the governors’ conference. At the big state dinner on that ship, which was, of course, instantly named “The Ship of Fools” by the press, the speaker at the dinner was Art Buchwald. I can’t do Buchwald’s wonderful Brooklyn accent, but Buchwald began his speech to the governors by saying, “If this ship sank tonight, there would be 50 of the happiest lieutenant governors in America.” It’s not like that anymore. When you go to a governors’ conference now, they have these working sessions through lunchtime. It is very serious stuff. They’re talking about trade missions. They’re talking about education policy. They’re talking about law enforcement and penal policy. This has become a serious job, and the people who are in these governorships, and I don’t say this on a partisan basis, these are people who have been tested and have been found, by their own constituents, to have high levels of ability because they are, in almost every case, the most popular politicians in their states. I’d make the same argument about the Congress. The House of Representatives tends to be the point of entry to national office for most people. Some can vault right into the Senate, and some are even trying to vault right into the presidency, but most people, when they move to national office, start in the House of Representatives. I will tell you that in the House that I started covering back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, you didn’t have to know most of the members of the House because if you bothered to hunt them up in their offices, they didn’t have much to tell you. They weren’t sent there to think for themselves. They were sent there to vote the way the leader told them to vote, whether it was a leader in Washington or the party leader back home. Now, whether you agree with their views or not, people who come into Congress in recent years are people who come with ideas. They have objectives. They have things that they want to accomplish. The money problem, the campaign finance problem, is a real problem, and I wouldn’t want to disguise that at all. But, even in that area, things have changed much, for the better. In those days we had, literally, black bags full of cash being carried around to finance campaigns. Whether you think there’s too much money in politics now or not, we know where that money’s coming from, and we know who’s giving it, and we know who’s receiving it, and we can establish the connections between them. In terms of ethical standards, there is virtually no outside earned income allowed now for members of Congress, virtually no gifts allowed to members of Congress. All of this has changed. But the reputation of Washington politicians is still bad. Why? Because the country does not think they are productive. They don’t think that they are working effectively on the things that people think they ought to be working on. And, they are right about that. But there are a couple of systemic problems that we don’t think about that have contributed to this permanent gridlock in Washington. For one thing, our political parties have gotten much, much weaker. This is an old story, a familiar story. It has something to do with the shift of population from the old ethnic neighborhoods in the cities to the suburbs. It has a lot to do with television, where people see the candidates in their own living rooms. It has a lot to do with our conceit, if you will, as voters, that we’re a lot smarter than our parents were, and so we don’t have to make that simple-minded choice that I’m going to vote for this party label or that party label. We pick the candidates one by one, almost as if we were ordering from a Chinese menu, one from column A, one from column B. The result of that is that everybody who gets elected to office gets there on his or her own. And, when somebody says to members of Congress, “You owe it to the party to help us on this vote because it’s really important,” or when a president says to members of his own party, “You owe me some support on this,” they are inclined to say, “Look, I got here on my own and I’m going to make up my own mind about how I feel about this issue.” Much of the power that used to be in the hands of political parties has shifted now to interest groups. Interest groups are as American as apple pie. They are important in our way of governing ourselves because there are all kinds of issues that arise between elections, where we want to have somebody speaking for us. And that’s what interest groups attempt to do. But interest groups, almost by definition, have a narrower agenda than a political party does. And the other great difference between a political party and an interest group is that our strong presidents, whether you’re talking about Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, have also been strong party leaders. They have been able to use their party to overcome all of those institutional barriers that are built into the Constitution, the checks and balances that we all learned about in civics classes, and bring about real change, important change. Interest groups, on the other hand, by and large, have at the top of their agendas protecting whatever advantages and benefits their particular constituency has already achieved at this point. For example, AARP (American Association of Retired Persons), my generation’s biggest interest group, has as its first commitment: “Don’t let them take any benefit from our senior citizens that we now receive.” The National Federation of Independent Business, the small-business lobby, has as its first principle: “Don’t let them add any tax or regulatory burden to small business, for whatever purpose.” Well, each of these is a perfectly legitimate agenda. If you multiply it a thousand times, for all of the different interest groups and constituencies that are now represented in Washington, what you get is something that another reporter in Washington, a man named Jonathan Rauch, called in a book with the wonderful title “Demosclerosis,” the clogging of the arteries of our system of government. What he meant was simply that the number of groups that now have veto power over any change that would threaten their part of the status quo has grown so great that it becomes virtually impossible for a president or a strong congressional leader to bring about significant change. My business does not help very much in this kind of a situation. We concentrate on personalities, the more vivid the better. I expect that everyone in America now knows that Jesse Ventura, the ex-wrestler, is the governor of Minnesota. Hardly anyone in America knows that there is a second-term independent governor in the state of Maine who has had a very successful tenure as governor in that state, because he isn’t an ex-wrestler. He’s just an ordinary, smart politician. So, we don’t write about him, and the television networks don’t put him on television. We love fights in the press. Reporters are fight promoters at heart. When Congress works, which it occasionally does, it works by process of compromise and consensus. Compromise and consensus does not make news. We love scandals more than probity. There was, when I started covering politics, a bright line between the public and the private life of public officials. We dealt with what those officials did in their public responsibilities, and we didn’t worry much about what they did after five or six o’clock in the evening. I have to say there was a cost for this because if a United States senator showed up on the floor of the Senate too drunk to manage the bill which he was supposed to be managing, we would either use some kind of wonderful euphemism about the “florid-faced senator” saying such-and-such, or we would just ignore it. So, people did not know that some of their public officials were impaired in the performance of their public duties. But now we have moved so far in the other direction, probing every possible area of private life, and I have to say with not just this current case but many other cases. With the Internet and tabloid television and the supermarket things, the barrier between what used to be called the serious press – the establishment press – and the scandal sheets, electronic or print, has come down. Now it becomes almost a matter of any rumor is as good as any established fact. We watch what’s going on with Governor Bush, and I don’t say this as a partisan of Governor Bush. But this whole story about the cocaine rumor has one big thing missing from it – facts. Without facts, the continual questioning of Governor Bush on this subject strikes me as a form of press harassment of a public official. We could publish a much more interesting paper every day in Washington if we just published all the tips that come in to the newsroom of The Washington Post, but, unfortunately, our editors are old-fashioned enough, and they’d like some confirmation before they put it in the paper. The biggest problem that we have is that we very rarely look at a system. We look at an individual. We look at a particular anecdote. You’ll see it next week, when the Congress is debating the patients’ bill of rights once again. Ask yourself, as you watch the coverage of that, “How many individual anecdotes are you hearing and reading and seeing? How much are you seeing about what the trade-offs may be between increasing patients’ appeals rights and cost containment in a managed-care system?” This country is extraordinarily resilient. All of us know that from our own lives and from our reading of history. The humanities teach us that. This country will overcome these difficulties. There is no question about that. How do we come back? How do we begin to restore that bond of trust between the public and the government, between us as constituents and our elected officials? I think there are, basically, two ways that it might happen. It might happen from the top down. It might happen that we elect a president who is so compelling and sets such a marvelous example of public service that the whole country begins to feel better about government and politics. The other way in which we’re going to do it, and probably the better way in the long term, is to rebuild that connection from the ground up. The good news that I can tell you – without sentimentalizing – is that as I travel the country, the further down you go in American government, in American politics, in American society, the healthier things look. The states are doing better than Washington is doing. The local communities are doing better than they have in the past. Particularly heartening to me is the neighborhood level, including some of the most blighted neighborhoods in some of our big cities. I go back to my hometown of Chicago often, and what’s happening there, in neighborhood after neighborhood, is local people taking on the responsibility and saying, “We’re not going to let the drug pushers have this block. We’re not going to let the pimps and prostitutes operate in this community. We’re going to sit in the offices of the school board until they give us a school that is a magnet school for our community because our kids deserve as good an education as any other kids in this city.” That’s happening in neighborhood after neighborhood, and that’s why I’m confident that we will make it, despite all of these difficulties.
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David
S. Broder is a columnist and national political correspondent for The Washington
Post. His syndicated, twice-weekly column covers a broad range of American
life and is carried by more than 300 newspapers worldwide. In May 1973,
Broder won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. Before joining
the Post in 1966, he covered national politics for The New York Times,
The Washington Star and Congressional Quarterly. He has covered every national
election campaign and convention since 1960, traveling up to 100,000 miles
a year to interview voters and report on the candidates. He is a regular
commentator on CNN’s “Inside Politics” and makes regular appearances on
NBC’s “Meet the Press” and PBS’s “Washington Week in Review.”|
Phone 402-474-2131 or e-mail nhc@nebraskahumanities.org |
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