FOOLISH SENATORS, TOUGH CHOICES

Or so it once seemed to the starry-eyed teen. Then came C-SPAN, and the pitiless cameras exposed the senator’s workaday world for what it is: a hell of unrelieved discomfort and tedium. From the earliest morning to well past dusk, the senator is perched in half-empty hearing rooms, with piles of unreadable documents on either side. On the Senate floor he dozes at his desk as a colleague recites tributes to dying financial contributors. In the halls he is pelted with advice from greasy shysters whose salaries are several times greater than his own. As he crosses his offtce threshold he is beset by swarms of Kiwanii and Girl Scouts; the Future Farmers of America grow restless behind them; activists from LULAC and AAUW await him with sheaves of unanswerable demands. And then on Sunday mornings, while his fellow Americans give thanks to their God, he spends his time wishing he could be interviewed by Tim Russert — or worse, actually is interviewed by Tim Russerr.

It does not have to be like this, as the cleverer senators realize before long. There is a way out. A senator can elevate himself above his colleagues. One day he surveys the drudgery around him and resolves: Never again. He grows thoughtful, and instructs his staff to insert quotes from Reinhold Niebuhr in his speeches. He begins, ever so gently, to show disdain for his own party. He cultivates the Washington Post editorial board, and mysteriously acquires a reputation for fearless independence. He decries the sclerosis in government. He speaks of the tough choices that both parties refuse to face. Tough Choices: He folds the phrase into his bosom. He becomes a prophet of tough choices. He issues an ultimatum to his colleagues: Face the hard decisions or I’m gone. And in time he quits. He writes a book. He becomes a Tough Chooser.

We have before us now three recently published books from certified Tough Choosers, two by former senators, one by a current senator soon to retire. The books vary in length. Paul Tsongas’s Journey of Purpose (Yale University Press, paper, $ 16.00), at 112 pages, has the feel of a pumped-up pamphlet. Warren Rudman’s Combat: Twelve Years in the U.S. Senate (Random House, $ 27.50) doesn’t seem much longer, but it stretches out to a seemingly substantive 287 pages, owing to the light touch of a generous typesetter. Bill Bradley’s Time Present, Time Past (Knopf, $ 26.00) is genuinely dense and lengthy, weighing in at 442 pages.

There are stylistic differences among them as well. Tsongas favors single- sentence paragraphs, gnomic in their brevity. Imagine Kahlil Gibran writing position papers for the Brookings Institution:

A global environment in disequilibrium dooms everyone.

A world ruled by nuclear terrorists will know police states, not democracies.

An America overburdened by national debt will compete with no one in the international trade markets.

Rudman, by contrast, is famously bellicose, and the only one of the three to hire a ghostwriter. His ghost has offered him a he-man prose style. Here he contemplates meeting Cap Weinberger, after the former defense secretary had criticized Rudman:

 

It was just as well that Weinberger had skipped this ceremony. At the very least, I’d have told him exactly what I thought of his accusations, and I wouldn’t have spoken in the Christmas spirit.

He’d a kicked his skinny ass.

Bradley, for his part, reminds you that ghostwriters have their uses. If nothing else, they don’t allow their clients to begin chapters with Sominex substitutes like this: “In my years on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, I’ve seen that what happens in Washington determines the future of many small water districts. . . .”

These matters aside, the books are remarkably similar. Each is part memoir, part manifesto. And each is written by a man whom the other two like very much.

Tsongas, writes Bradley, “challenges America to renew its commitment to future generations.” Bradley, writes Rudman, is a man of “unquestioned integrity.” Rudman, writes Tsongas, “is a throwback. . . . Fortunately for America, fate placed him in the middle of the great issues of the 1980s and 1990s.” Tsongas, writes Rudman, is “a champion of fiscal sanity.” Bradley, writes Tsongas, is a man “I admire enormously.” Tough Choosers stick together.

But the esteem they hold for one another is as nothing compared with the esteem each holds for himself. Self-regard is the essential job qualification for the Tough Chooser. By definition he is facing the tough choices our current political system ignores, and who but a remarkable man would assume such a burden? Some men are born to it, others have it thrust upon them. Tsongas tells us he answered the call after his harrowing bout with cancer. ” From this, finally, came an awareness beyond self, a growing awareness of generations,” he writes. “I now think generationally. I now talk generationally. It comes naturally to me. . . .”

Bill Bradley shouldered the burden after an unexpectedly close reelection. ” It freed me to share what was in my gut as well as in my mind,” he tells us. Now he tries “to get beneath the continuous hoopla and reach for people’s brains and hearts.” Warren Rudman was chosen to be a Chooser from birth: ” Hard-nosed, I have been called, or even pugnacious. . . . I was by nature . . . someone who made things happen.”

But what things are those? The tough choices that Choosers face and the rest of us ignore most often have to do with the budget deficit. “Everyone knows that tough choices had to be made to get our economic house in order,” Tsongas writes. “Unless we make those choices soon,” Rudman adds in his own book, “all our resources won’t be enough to save us.” The solution is ” leadership,” and “facing reality” — both euphemisms for “raising taxes.” When Rudman recounts President Reagan’s agreement to raise taxes following the 1987 market crash, he writes: “The president was finally showing signs of leadership.” Then came President Bush: “Bush, like Reagan, failed to show courage on the deficit” — which is to say, he waited too damn long to raise taxes.

The courageous, and incessant, call for tax increases is of a piece with tough-choice ideology. Tough Choosers are invariably “moderates,” members of the “passionate center,” in Tsongas’s phrase. They call themselves “fiscal conservatives.” This has the potential to sound harsh, so it is pleasantly balanced with their self4dentification as “social moderates.” In particular, this means they favor — in addition to tax increases — the right to abortion, federal intervention on behalf of environmentalists, gay rights, and preserving the vast array of social services, from AFDC to the Legal Services Corporation, that constitutes the welfare state.

The rest of us might see in this set of policy positions an agenda quite close to that of liberal Democrats — identical, in fact. But we would be wrong. For Tough Choosers are . . . well, different. They’re just different. They disdain both parties. Rudman, a nominal Republican, is especially courageous in denouncing the GOP and the “uptight right-wingers” who threaten it from within. Democrats fare somewhat better under the witheringly independent glare of Tsongas and Bradley. “Rather than redefine our national circumstance,” Bradley notes, “or admit the validity of some of the Republican criticism about the debilitating effects that impersonal bureaucracy had on the people it was supposed to help and then fight hard against the greed and self-centeredness of Reaganomics, Democrats hid.” This sentence is typical, and not merely because it’s so exhausting.

The message, writes Tsongas, “is a pox on both your houses.” Republicans are bad because they want to destroy the country. Democrats are bad because they aren’t trying hard enough to stop the Republicans.

Tough Choosers despise partisanship. Petty political wrangling obscures the issues, and as Rudman explains, “I like people, and I like issues.” Bradley describes a scene from the health-care debates of 1993-94:

 

Senator George Mitchell summoned a bipartisan group of senators known as the mainstream group to his offce overlooking the Mall. . . . Senators for much of the twentieth century had sat in this offce to hash out tough decisions behind closed doors. On one wall was a painting of FDR . . . [on another] a portrait of Harry Truman. . . . “I get five or six ultimatums every day,” Mitchell said. “Drawing a line in the sand is the new senatorial tactic.”

It is a poignant scene, pregnant with the frustration of today’s nonpartisans: A group of senators, mainstreamers to a man, are stymied in their efforts to nationalize the country’s healthcare system, so they gather under the gaze of the patron saints of nonpartisanship, FDR and Harry Truman, to hear George Mitchell complain about partisan zealots.

The mainstreamers failed to nationalize the health-care system, of course — yet another example of our avoidance of tough choices. But Rudman offers a tale with a happier ending. The successful Supreme Court nomination of David Souter was a triumph of the nonpartisanship that Tough Choosers hold up as ideal. Rudman is Souter’s professional mentor and closest friend. When the vacancy opened with the resignation of William Brennan, he pushed his pal into President Bush’s line of sight: “! suspected that the president was less concerned with how his nominee eventually voted on [Roe v. Wade] than that he or she be nominated without a fight.” Rudman suspected right. No one knew how Souter would vote on anything. He was deliriously nonpartisan. Bush met with him briefly and then announced his nomination at once. “A remarkable example of presidential decision-making,” RudmaD writes. “On an incredibly important, potentially explosive decision, George Bush didn’t blink.” Or think. He made the hard decision.

The rest is history. Even the most ideological Republicans rallied round their president’s nominee. Democrats were thrown by Souter’s blankness, and only nine voted against him. As we know, he has since proved himselfa man of the left, easily the equal of the ideologue he replaced and perhaps the most left-wing justice in memory, a sure vote against every professed principle of the president who nominated him. Rudman couldn’t be more pleased. This is the way nonpartisanship is supposed to work. “After David began to cast votes,” he writes, “all of the senators who voted against him came to me and said they’d been wrong.” No doubt.

Such happy episodes notwithstanding, politics is a low, mean business, and Tough Choosers are largesouled men, as they themselves readily volunteer. Both Tsongas and Rudman cry at least twice in their respective books. Rudman is a veteran of Korean combat, but when Souter was nominated “we went into my office and embraced and we both wept.” And shortly after the announcement of Souter’s famous pro-abortion decision in the Casey case, Rudman glimpsed Joe Biden amid a crowd of commuters in a railway station. The scene, as he describes it, sounds like a shampoo commercial filmed in hell: “We started running through the crowd toward each other, and when we met we embraced, laughing and crying.”

Bradley, too, is given to such discomfiting confessions. He painfully describes his failed delivery of a keynote speech at the 1992 Democratic convention. His refrain was a lofty but not entirely understandable injunction borrowed from Langston Hughes: “Let America be America again! Let it be the dream it used to be!” It was drowned out by jeers from Jerry Brown delegates, and as Bradley delivered the line, over and over again, you could almost see it fall like the Hindenburg. To this day he confuses his theatrical failure with a larger failure of the press and public to prize his message. For Tough Choosers, the personal really is the political.

Is it any wonder, then, that men of such deep yearnings should sooner rather than later shrug off the tedium and unpleasantness of elective offce? When a Tough Chooser retires, saying he fears the American people will never face the tough choices, he receives from editorial writers near-universal praise, along with their lamentations about a system that could not tolerate a man of such pure intent. Jim Lehrer invites him on the NewsHour for a solo interview, another irresistible perk. “To be perfectly frank about it,” Rudman told Lehrer during his farewell debriefing in 1992, “I’m angry at the entire government and to some extent I am unhappy with the American people for accepting the simplistic answers politicians are giving them. . . . Frankly, Jim, I’m tired of it.”

In his book, Bradley reduces their shared frustration to a kind of syllogism: “The times call for radical reform — in our economy, our politics, and our social interactions — and only government has the power to effect those reforms. To deny that fact is to be blind. Yet how to effectively use government eludes us.”

Cynics may quibble. You could point out, for starters, that it isn’t at all clear that “radical reform” is necessary. And even if it were, the government hasn’t proved itself terribly good at such things, given its handling of, for example, the Cabrini-Green housing project. One shudders to think how all those government guys would rejigger the economy, not to mention our “social interactions.” When they move from the general to the specific, from the moralizing to the politics, Tough Choosers often run into problems of coherence. If you listen closely, in fact, they can sound as incoherent — evasive, even — as the vote-grubbing politicians they have risen above.

The Tough Chooser scolds Democrats for shortsheeting economic growth. Then he scolds Republicans for their reluctance to raise taxes, which they oppose because taxes might hurt economic growth. A Tough Chooser favors deregulation but wants to increase federal regulation of business in the name of environmentalism. He deplores the past generation’s slow rates of growth and praises the increasing governmental oversight that drags the economy down. He blasts Democrats for slighting entrepreneurship, while berating Republicans for wanting to cut taxes on entrepreneurs. And all this blasting, berating, and scolding is delivered in terms of the most unforgiving moralism.

It is a lovely world the Tough Chooser inhabits. For in it — the irony is delicious — he never has to face the tough choices! There are no trade-offs. In fact, there are no politics. There is only the scolding. He has left politics behind, to sit on corporate boards and cash checks in a law firm and corral concerned citizens into grassroots organizations. He will tell you that his dedication to public service burns like an unquenchable flame. But at last he is free of the “hard decisions,” far from the committee hearings and droning colleagues, the Kiwanii and Girl Scouts. A Tough Chooser finds himself, by choice, removed from anything that might distract him from the contemplation of his own rectitude, and from his poetic and meaningless desire to let America be the dream it used to be.

By Andrew Ferguson