Hot Button Blog: A Bipartisan Government Relations Firm

The only immutable law of the universe, political as well as physical, is the law of unintended consequences. History is replete with examples of leaders heading off in one direction only to find themselves elsewhere. It's sort of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applied to human behavior. Once we form a plan its very existence changes the facts on which the plan, is based and sends us sideways.

Witness for example the President's decision to pursue aggressively healthcare reform in the first months of his first term. (Yes, Virginia, there will be a second term). This decision sent Congress home for the summer recess with healthcare the focus of a fierce blowback against Washington that literally roared into the town hall meetings of August. It was in the cauldron of those meetings that the inchoate anger amongst a largely exurban swath of the American public bubbled up into an organized Tea Party movement. In the most American manner imaginable, the Tea Party asserted itself, sent scores of followers to Congress in 2010 and changed Washington in an unintended and consequential manner.

In a confirmation of the immutability of this law of unintended consequences, Occupy Wall Street is now taking the Tea Party's success and challenging its supremacy. Just as the Tea Party arose from the healthcare debate, so too has Occupy arisen from the ashes of the debt ceiling debacle. It is no coincidence that OWS began as a postscript to the August spectacle of the Tea Party caucus holding the country hostage as it demanded spending cuts without revenue enhancement. We were subjected to the sad spectacle of the President's efforts at a Grand Bargain being destroyed by a minority of the Republican majority in the House. Can it be doubted that this pathetic pageantry was a tipping point for those who are now occupying Wall Street and elsewhere?

And so it goes. Plan begets changed facts that beget unintended consequences that beget a new plan that begets etc. Fasten your seat belts, America, as we see what unintended consequences Occupy Wall Street spawns.

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United States Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada recently told Matt Lauer in a televised interview that the Tea Party would fade from prominence and eventual existence as soon as the economic recovery reached a satisfactory level of prosperity. Whether Senator Reid was channeling early American history or not, his prediction about the modern Tea Party movement coincides correctly with the chronology of the original Tea Party in pre-revolutionary times.

The original Tea Party arose in the streets of Boston in response to a succession of British taxes. The rallying cry was, as every elementary school student of history knows, “no taxation without representation.” The Tea Party reached its apogee with the dumping of tea into Boston Harbor to avoid the British tea tax. Although recent historians have questioned the independence of the Tea Party and wondered whether Boston merchants were responsible for its organization and promotion, the Tea Party lore – and the Tea Party facts - is that these men were patriots in the vanguard of the American Revolution.

The colorful history of the Tea Party was in fact very short-lived. Once the level of hostilities between the colonies and the British spread from New England throughout the Atlantic seaboard, the leadership of the American movement steadily evolved into the hands of the men we now know as the Founding Fathers. The Tea Party itself, and its leaders, became less prominent as matters became more confederate and complicated. Without predicting the longevity of today’s Tea Party, the historical precedent from which they look for their name and their rallying cry is that of an important but short-lived movement. This may not be what the Majority Leader had in mind but it is an historical precedent for his prediction.
 

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Women in the workforce with small children at home have extraordinary demands on their time (no matter how helpful their husbands). This fact becomes especially public when the woman in question is a United States Senator. All Senators travel between their states and their jobs in Washington. Further, Senators, unlike Representatives, in theory and in practice represent both their states and national interests. And when in session, the Senate works long hours and places great stress on its members. For a young mother of young children, all of this adds up to a remarkable schedule. I recently had the opportunity to watch such a schedule in operation.

Kirsten Gillibrand, the junior Senator from New York, has been in the news a lot lately. During the lame duck session she was instrumental in the passage of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal and the 9/11 Responders legislation. More recently and more tragically, she is a good friend of Gabby Giffords and has spent significant time at her friend’s side in Tucson. Less visibly, she has all the duties of the Senate and the concomitant need to be constantly raising money. It was in pursuit of this latter objective that I spent some time with Senator Gillibrand in Los Angeles.

She had flown from Washington to San Francisco the day before for events in Northern California. She flew from San Francisco to Los Angeles for our meeting and at least three subsequent sessions. The Senator then got up early the next morning to fly back to Washington to be at her desk during the day and with her family (visiting from New York) at night. This sort of schedule is not partisan. Republicans and Democrats alike in the Senate work this hard. Yes, the prestige and power (although not the pay) that come with a seat in the Senate are exceptional. Nonetheless, the hard work required is enormous and something we should be appreciative of.

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Listening to the State of the Union address two weeks ago, I was struck by the wisdom of my friend Brian’s recent rant about political dialogue in this country. According to Brian, the dominant political figure in the United States today is still Ronald Reagan. We live still, according to the Brian’s school of thought, in the Age of Reagan and we debate our policies and positions in the vocabulary and framework that President Reagan established thirty years ago. I have to admit that he has a point.

While the President’s address was, I believe, dignified in tone and substantive in content, it is true nonetheless that he interwove in his discussion an acknowledgment that we must constrain government, for fiscal and moral reasons, from over-reaching and over-spending. In a manner unthinkable in an FDR fireside chat, President Obama was addressing – articulately and intelligently – the implied question whether government is the problem or the solution, and the President’s answer was that it is both. Remarkable. This is the framework that Ronald Reagan established. You can almost hear the Gipper giving the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union and opening with a “there you go again.”

In one sense, this of course has been the core issue in political philosophy in the western world since the ancient Greeks. Surely, this framework of debate would come as no surprise to the Founding Fathers; indeed, the Constitution itself is a compromise between the two poles of this dialectic. On the other hand, the fundamental legitimacy of the modern welfare state has been a given in western political thought since the time of Bismarck in the late 19th century. To hear this question asked and answered again in the 2011 State of the Union is a tribute to the enduring power of President Reagan to shape the debate.
 

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As the 112th Congress gets down to business and the new arithmetic of the Republican House becomes a fact, President Obama is receiving advice from the pundit class that he should emulate the 1995 “move to the middle” strategy of President Clinton. Like Obama, President Clinton got a “shellacking” in the 1994 mid-terms. Like Obama, Clinton faced a backlash to his healthcare reform efforts (which, unlike Obama’s, did not result in transformational legislation). In the face of this challenge, Clinton is credited with “triangulating” his politics and policies towards the center that anchors the American electorate. In 1996, he defeated Bob Dole and earned a second term.

Without in any manner disrespecting the political genius of Bill Clinton; I suggest that two other factors were as instrumental in President Clinton’s re-election as was his triangulation. First, Clinton enjoyed an increasingly prosperous economy that was in a roaring recovery from the recession that he inherited from the first President Bush. Second, Clinton benefited from his opponents’ choice of an opponent for him. Bob Dole is an authentic American hero and deserves our gratitude for a decades long career of exceptional public service. However, as a Presidential candidate, he was no match for Bill Clinton.

As we approach the 2012 Presidential election, we would do well to consider the Clinton history and its lessons for the current Administration. One can wonder whether President Obama will be dealt a hand of similar circumstances to those that Clinton held: will unemployment steadily sink? Will the GOP offer up an imperfect candidate? If so, then four more years would be quite likely.

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