We Can All Do Better (19 page)

In the 1990s, after the end of the Soviet Union, many in Washington had a unipolar moment. We were the single omnipotent superpower. If you read history, you knew that such an idea rested on pure hubris. As if the arrogance weren't bad enough, we then acted militarily on the belief in our omnipotence, and in so doing endangered our long-term interests. If we don't change our views, we will fall further and further behind in our ability to deliver on the promises our leaders have made to promote a pluralistic democracy that takes everyone to higher economic ground. Our nation will become a tarnished example and weaker in the eyes of the world. The choice is ours.

We can all do better.

T
here have been times in American history when our democracy sputtered, failing to address the real issues that faced the nation. Anger rose—occasionally violence exploded—and then there was a democratic adjustment that let our noble experiment in self-government proceed. Frequently the remedy was a broadening of the franchise, thus enlarging the pool of opinion that officeholders had to consider when making decisions.

In our country's early years, the only people who were allowed to vote in America were white men with property. By the 1840s, however, most states had given the vote to all white males (convicted felons excepted). In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution enfranchised African American males (although poll taxes and intimidation just as quickly disenfranchised most of them), but not until 1920 were women given the vote. Native Americans were allowed to vote, at least in some states, after passage of the Indian
Citizenship Act in 1924, and citizens of the District of Columbia were enfranchised in 1961. Ten years later, the voting age was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. Each wave of new voters shook up the system, raised new issues, created new pressures for change, prompted new political coalitions. Each broadening of the franchise reduced the number of people outside the system who, with no stake in the country's future, had provided kindling for the demagogue's match.

Another remedy for the problems of our democracy has been to give people a more direct say in it. Although the Founders created an indirect democracy, in which the people elected representatives to speak for them, there was resort to direct democracy when the need arose and it was deemed workable. From the beginning of the Republic, U.S. senators were selected by state legislatures; the thinking of the Founders was that they would represent the states (and do so free of pressures from the populace), whereas the members of the lower house would represent the people and be elected by them directly. The system worked reasonably well until the decade leading up to the Civil War, when state legislatures deadlocked on a regular basis and U.S. Senate vacancies lasted months or more. In Indiana in the 1850s, the conflict between northern Indiana Republicans and southern Indiana Democrats left a Senate seat open for two years.

After the Civil War, the problem persisted; between 1891 and 1905 there were forty-five deadlocks in twenty states, but now the cause was as often corruption as sectional passion. State legislators were controlled by party bosses, industrialists, and financiers. A Senate seat was often bought—if not directly, then by the offer of a sinecure to the new senator in exchange for his fealty to the particular interest: a bank, a railroad, an oil company. Between 1866 and 1906, nine cases of bribery were brought before the Senate. Senator William Stewart of Nevada symbolized the age. Wallace Stegner, the great writer on the American West, has described him:

Robust, aggressive, contentious, narrow, self-made, impatient of “theorists,” irritated by abstract principles, a Nevada lawyer, miner, Indian-killer; a fixer, a getter-done, an indefatigable manipulator around the whiskey and cigars, a dragon whose cave was the smoke-filled room, Big Bill Stewart was one to delight a caricaturist and depress a patriot. But he was also, in his way, a man of faith: he believed in Western “development,” and he believed in the right of men—himself among them—to get rich by this “development.”
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The negative reaction to congressional corruption was widespread. In the 1890s, the Populist Party, whose members hailed primarily from the West and Midwest, put direct election of U.S. senators in its platform, reminding adherents that Andrew Jackson and his supporters had been early proponents of direct election in the 1830s. Western progressives awoke to the problem first. In 1907, Oregon—and soon after, Nebraska—created popular elections for senator that bound state legislators to select whomever the voters had selected, and by 1912 twenty-nine more states, including Maine, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, had similar provisions. Still there was opposition to the idea. Proposed constitutional amendments were defeated every year between 1893 and 1905 by the Republican old guard in the Senate, the protectors of financiers and industrialists. Advocates of direct election found an unlikely ally in William Randolph Hearst, who hired young muckrakers to report on the wrongdoings of power brokers. A series of articles in Hearst's magazine
Cosmopolitan
by David Graham Phillips called “The Treason in the Senate” accused both Democrats and Republicans of “advancing the industrial and financial interests of the wealthy classes of the country.” The Progressives and the Populists were gaining strength. An aphorism of the day went, “It is harder for a poor man to get into the Senate than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
But it wasn't until the advocates of direct election demonstrated they had thirty-six of the forty-eight states—the necessary three quarters—ready to sign up for a constitutional convention to deal with the issue that the opposition collapsed. Congress passed the Seventeenth Amendment establishing direct election of senators in 1912, and it was ratified a year later.

By the mid-twentieth century, the engineers of democratic reform had returned to broadening the franchise. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ensured that what had been promised to African American men in 1870 and African American women in 1920—the right to vote—was now fully realized. It eliminated the racist tricks that for nearly a century had blocked their attempts to vote in the South. When the poll taxes and literacy tests and blatant intimidation became illegal, black Americans lined up for hours to vote in free elections for the first time. American politics changed for the better.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. believed deeply in the ideals of the Founders, and with courage and confidence he moved America forward, first with civil disobedience and then by widening the vote. President Lyndon Johnson never forgot the lives of the poor Mexican American fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders he'd taught in south Texas. When he became president, he said, “It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have a chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over the country. But now I do have that chance—and I'll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it.”
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The visionary leader and the genius politician shared a dream of what America could become, and together they forced Congress to deal with issues it had so far all but ignored. Even the stain of racism could be washed away by the river of broader democratic participation. Once black Americans saw that they could effect change through the ballot box, all the romantic 1960s talk about “revolution” dissipated and our democracy was strengthened.

Johnson left office a broken and highly unpopular man. After his heart attack in 1955, his doctors had forbidden him to smoke cigarettes, which he dearly loved, and as president he kicked the habit. Then, on the day Richard Nixon was inaugurated and LBJ boarded Air Force One to fly back to Texas, he lit up a cigarette. He knew there was nothing left to live for. He had squandered his popularity and legendary skills on a war he couldn't win. Nevertheless, he directed that all of his presidential papers be opened to the public, and after his death Lady Bird Johnson granted access to all the audio recordings. The former President and First Lady were willing to entrust his legacy to the fair-mindedness of the American people and let history be his judge. When you listen to the recordings, what emerges is the picture of someone who knew how to get things done. In just the first three years of his presidency, he signed into law nearly two hundred landmark bills. He was a master of compromise. His conversations with Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois are classics. LBJ appealed to Dirksen's patriotism in their discussions on civil rights and to his judgment on Vietnam. He appealed to Dirksen's political self-interest as well, offering him projects for his state while pleading for one or two Republican votes for a particular bill. What comes through in these recordings is the efficacy of horse-trading for a noble purpose.

The recordings also illustrate the trust Dirksen and LBJ had in each other, a trust built on knowing the other as a human being. You couldn't imagine either one blasting the other in the press or making negative insinuations about the other's character. In a collegial body, there is no substitute for knowing an opponent at a deeper level than the political one. When I was in the Senate, there was genuine personal interaction among Democrats and Republicans—though occasionally your view of a fellow senator hardened. For me, it was difficult to give the benefit of the doubt to Jesse Helms of North Carolina. The gay-bashing and race-baiting in his Senate service and his
campaigns turned me off. His opposition to the creation of a national holiday for Martin Luther King was the final straw. I didn't want to talk to him. I thought not only that we had nothing in common but also that he represented a kind of evil that still lingered in the American shadows.

Then one day, out of the blue, I got a call from his wife, whom I had never met. Mrs. Helms told me that their nineteen-year-old granddaughter played basketball in North Carolina and was coming to Washington. Would I be willing to meet her and share some tips about the game? Taken aback, I said, “Sure!” and that if we met at a playground near my house I'd take a look at her shots. Three weeks later, at exactly 6:00 p.m., a beat-up old green Oldsmobile pulled up at the playground. In it were Senator Helms, Mrs. Helms, and their granddaughter. All three got out of the car and proceeded to the blacktop court. We said hello. Senator and Mrs. Helms sat on a bench on the sidelines, and the granddaughter and I took the court. She would shoot, and I'd throw the ball back to her so she could shoot again. I told her to stand and shoot, dribble to her left and shoot, then to her right and shoot. Within about fifteen minutes, I realized she was a very good player indeed; I could tell she loved the game and had spent long hours working at it. Meanwhile, the Helmses sat on the bench smiling and watching their granddaughter swish shot after shot. I showed her some moves, we talked about defense, rebounding, passing. After about an hour, we were finished. Senator and Mrs. Helms got up and thanked me warmly, joined their granddaughter, got back into the Oldsmobile and drove off. From that day on, my view of Jesse Helms was more nuanced and less self-righteous. I could never again see him solely through the lens of his issue positions and related tactics. For me, he would also be a doting grandfather sitting courtside watching his extraordinary granddaughter make shots from all over the court.

In today's Washington, collegiality appears to be dead. Few congresspeople live in the capital. Socializing between members of different parties now occurs infrequently. Members rush back to their district so as to avoid the charge, popularized by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, of being a Washington insider. Anything resembling the Dirksen–LBJ bond seems an impossibility. Pat Moynihan used to have Republicans and Democrats together to his house for dinner. So did I. If you're only in town three nights a week, and each of those nights is a fund-raiser, there's little time for getting to know your colleagues of the opposite party. I often think of Hamilton and Jefferson hammering out the compromise that put the United States on a sound financial footing in 1789. They found a way because they loved the country. Today, too many politicians love their jobs more—and their campaigning never stops. The old four/two rule, whereby you were a senator legislating for four years of your six-year term and a senator campaigning for two, seems so long ago. Its abandonment has resulted in very little progress on the things people care about, like jobs, pensions, education, the environment, deficit reduction, and infrastructure.

Today, as at the end of the nineteenth century, there is a deep and growing animosity toward our government. In addition to the pain of the middle class, the poor believe that politicians are indifferent to their plight. The investor class fears that runaway deficits will ruin the country. The young are skeptical of the whole concept of representative democracy. In times like these, the political extremes attract a wide audience, promoting measures that at best are unlikely to work. The Tea Party and the Occupy movement fit this category. Coupled with ignorance, these movements can produce sentiments that might be funny if they weren't so pathetic: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare,” one Tea Partier roared at a town hall meeting in the summer of 2009.
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If the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional
Convention had been as unwilling to find common ground as today's political class (particularly Republicans), we would never have ended up with a Constitution.