In Defense of Politicians: Do We Ask Too Much?

By Thomas Griffith

The 94th Congress that assembled last week is sprinkled with bright new members who seem intent on embarking in new directions. Oddly enough, this promising shift is the result of last November's torpid election, in which only 38% of Americans of voting age cast ballots. That apathetic performance confirms a disillusionment with politicians that has been gathering for a long time.

"From the beginning of the Republic," House Speaker Nicholas Longworth once complained, "it has been the duty of every freeborn humorist to make jokes at us." He may have had in mind Mark Twain's crack that Congress is our only native American criminal class. But there have been times in recent years when the entire nation could have been indicted for contempt of Congress.

Politicians have a bad name: a lot of fathers would not want their daughters to marry one, and candidates' wives openly express the wish that their husbands were in some other line of work. But at the very least, politicians are entitled to plead, in the words of the old song: "You made me what I am today, I hope you're satisfied." That plea will probably get them about as much sympathy as the jilted lover gets, but it deserves to be considered. Complacent public discussion usually turns on the poor quality of the candidates up for election. Only rarely are two more pertinent questions asked: In its demands, is the public emphasizing the wrong qualities in a man? And is the public making failure inevitable by entertaining false expectations of what a man can do in office? These questions apply to all politicians, even to the ones who become Presidents.

The very public that asks politicians to be statesmen will not forgive them for failing to look first after that public's narrower interests. The first bleak lesson a young idealist in politics learns is that his idealism may give him an attractive freshness, but his durability in office will be decided on more practical grounds: by a public looking for a public servant. Thus Gerald Ford probably did not think of himself as cynical but as merely plying his trade when he cautioned reporters not to judge how he would act in the White House on the basis of how he had voted in Congress. "Forget the voting record," he said. "The voting record reflects Grand Rapids."

Compare that with Edmund Burke's celebrated 18th century address to the electors of Bristol, in which he promised the voters not obedience to their desires but the free exercise of his judgment. Burke's elevated remark won an enduring place in political history--but he soon fell out of favor with his Bristol electors. America's founding fathers decreed that Congressmen should face re-election every two years to give them "immediate dependency" on the electorate. A public that scorns Congress as a whole usually likes its own Congressman, particularly if he has made it his business to please them. For all the talk of throwing the rascals out, close to 90% of Congressmen regularly win reelection. Often, it is not just that the down-home voters like (or at least tolerate) their man in Washington, but that they recognize that his increased seniority helps him to do better by his district.

Incumbency is thus a politician's most cherished possession.

He will think twice, and then a third time, about any vote that will jeopardize his seat; profiles in courage are rare enough, but a fullface confrontation with danger is what a skilled politician is most skilled at avoiding. Incumbency is also beautiful in the eyes of the giver. As Common Cause points out, the decisive factor in raising campaign contributions is not whether the candidate is a Republican or Democrat, but whether he is an "in" or an "out." Incumbents get three times as much. No wonder Congressmen are willing to reform presidential campaign financing but not their own.

What helps the Boston Navy Yard or Grand Rapids or General Motors may not equally help the nation, but every successful Congressman is a master of specific service. He steers himself to a committee assignment (agriculture, military affairs) where he can best serve the dominant interests of his district, and if he sits there long enough he can become one of those committee barons whom the rest of the nation may deplore but cannot unseat.

In a nation so big that, in European terms, its politics are not those of a country but of a continent, most politicians become knowledgeable in the competing pressures of society, and learn to mediate among them (that is their real specialty). Ella Grasso, the new Governor of Connecticut, says that working in an earlier campaign for Senator Abe Ribicoff taught her "the importance, the integrity of compromise." In Washington, living among interests whose agents are sleepless and persistent (lobbyists for unions, industries, veterans, teachers, doctors), a Congressman rarely hears the voice of the ordinary, unorganized voter--until that voter decides to become angry with him. Often when a Congressman casts his best, most disinterested votes, he does so in defiance of specific interests and to an indifferent silence from everyone else.

A new Congressman may have arrived after a successful career elsewhere, but he must still undergo a humbling apprenticeship. Anxious to make his mark among his jostling peers, he will have ingested Sam Rayburn's advice that to get along, go along; perhaps he has also learned from John Nance Garner that "you can't know everything well. Learn one subject thoroughly." In a place where talk is cheap and oratory poor, his fellow legislators will judge him by whether he has "done his homework" well--and that phrase accurately registers the tedium involved. Going along, getting along, he becomes part of the system; a student of fallibility and a scholar of compromise; a man who nonetheless tries to be guided by, and to act upon, his own convictions as much as he can; in short, a politician. He may still be an honorable man, but is no longer an innocent one.

The process both educates and cripples. And from the most ambitious among such men, the public discovers its Presidents. It may be unhappy with the narrowed choices provided (Nixon v. Humphrey in 1968; Nixon v. McGovern in 1972) but it rarely looks elsewhere. John Gardner, Ralph Nader and half a dozen university presidents or business executives may be estimable men, but never having submitted themselves to the bruising and blooding of the electoral route, they are thought not to have paid their dues. Something is lacking in hard knowledge, in the experience of deferring to the public will, in the despised political art of accommodation, in the adrenaline of ambition. The taste of it, as Lincoln said, must be in your mouth a little. The tradition that the man seeks the office, not the other way around, may explain Gerald Ford's strange lassitude about the potentialities of the office in his first months as the nation's first appointed Chief Executive--though last week's State of the Union message gave him another opportunity to try to rise to the needs of the presidency.

As President, Ford at least had the earlier advantage, in common with all Congressmen, of a weary familiarity with most of the topics--missiles, farm subsidies, taxes--that beset the Oval Office. Hours of debate and committee meetings, even if only fitfully attended, give any Congressman a shrewd awareness of the flash points of contention on any subject. Governors lack that schooling, though they get better training as administrators. Theirs used to be a well-trod route to the White House until the overwhelming importance of world affairs made any state capital seem too parochial a preparation for the White House. With the public demanding a wider range of presidential choices, though, the rejection of Governors as candidates in recent years may be changing--as indeed it should.

For just look at them, these presidential hopefuls, all men of some worth, as they strive for attention, climbing the ladder of national familiarity--Meet the Press, appearances on the Today show--until their very fluency becomes a tic. (How easy at this stage to underestimate their potentialities, as Walter Lippmann famously did Franklin Roosevelt's, considering him an amiable fellow with a queer desire to be President.) Habitually the public measures presidential candidates for Superman's costume, and almost inevitably finds them lacking. Could it be the Superman costume that is one of the problems?

Great Presidents who are still popular on the day they leave office make a very short list. Often it is not until much later that the public retroactively admires men like Lincoln and Truman, who were widely condemned by their contemporaries. The British political scientist Harold Laski had a relaxed theory about the elasticity of the U.S. presidency and the kind of Presidents accordingly to be sought. In times of crisis, as in the wartime presidencies of Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt, Presidents uneasily wielded the powers of dictators; authority that had been skillfully diffused throughout Government was concentrated in one person until the crisis was surmounted. But to Laski the "whole genius of the system" was against the continuation of such power, if only because, in James Madison's words, "the accumulation of powers in a single hand is the very definition of tyranny." Besides, once the danger has passed, other interests, in and out of Government, want their power back. Throughout most of American history, the public has thus been satisfied with what Theodore Roosevelt called "Buchanan Presidents."

In his classic 1888 study of American politics, Lord Bryce titled one chapter "Why Great Men Are Not Chosen Presidents."

Between a brilliant and a safe man, he thought, parties would invariably mediocrity," choose the thought safe. Bryce; "The he likes a ordinary voter President does to not be object to sensible, vigorous and magnetic, but "does not value, because he sees no need for, originality or profundity or a wide knowledge. Great men are not in quiet times absolutely needed."

Yes, but who lives in quiet times any more?

For four decades, ever since 1933, America has been living with a presumption of continuing emergency. A vanity in crisis survival has developed. Eisenhower, that least energetic of Chief Executives, talked about crusades; Johnson declared a war on poverty; the Kennedys thrilled over the technological gadgetry of crisis situation rooms that made macho solutions more tempt ing. The public has come to demand outsize Presidents, and then to be disappointed with them. Think of it: this man might have to press the button -- though for nearly 30 years no one has pressed the button. Summit meetings have been dramatized as if the drawn-out process of wary reconciliation can be achieved only by one particular, indispensable President.

The gap between the public's expectation of Presidents and the reality has grown so great that it can only be bridged, if at all, by a public relations campaign of pretense and concealment.

Television has given an unsettling emphasis to a certain kind of publicity skill. George Washington would have made a dull TV performer. As the first effective television President, Kennedy proved how important it was to be fast on his feet. This helped to set a demanding new standard that elevates flash over sub stance. The effect of television -- which in one year can make an unknown face tiresomely overfamiliar -- has been to disqualify able but uncharismatic men, and to make others (Humphrey and Muskie come to mind) glib parodies of their once more impressive selves.

In the present atmosphere, no one seems good enough to be President. Perhaps one difficulty comes from a public confusion about what kind of crisis, or combination of crises, the country faces and therefore the kind of qualities it seeks in the man. The romantic longing to rally behind bold leadership, as if this were a wartime emergency with a simple, patriotically accepted goal to be personified in one man, is too simplistic a remedy for that messy complexity of economic, moral and social problems we all struggle with. The time has come to de-emphasize not the of fice of the presidency but the myth of the omnipotent President, reigning from the Oval Office, glorified for being lonely in his or deals when he should be judged by whether he can inspire in dependent men around him, can listen to divergent advice and make clear choices, and can then invoke the strengths of the na tion as a whole.

To recognize the complexity of problems that defy facile, masterly solutions is to reintroduce those qualities in which a politician should excel: an ability to discriminate between conflict ing arguments and pressures, a sense of the public mood, a gift for articulating issues and rallying support, an egotistical confidence in decision. Presidents with healthy egos learn to recruit minds better trained or more specialized, as Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy pre-eminently did. They borrow ideas but reserve to, themselves, as experts in the art of mediating, the prag matic political judgments of how far they can go and when.

Roosevelt more than Kennedy had a confident sense of the na tional direction. When this essential ingredient of leadership is combined with the practical knowledge of the feasible, the utilitarian art of politics finds its moments of nobility, and the craftsmanship of the consummate politician justifies his demeaning apprenticeship. Greatness? That is a description only to be be stowed stowed afterward. afterward.

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