Behind Closed Doors - By Todd S. Purdum

You hear a lot about openness and transparency—and the disinfecting power of sunlight—as keys to effective government. But let’s summon at least two cheers for the occasional usefulness of the backroom deal.

The most encouraging news in Washington in ages was the word that Barack Obama and John Boehner were talking—by themselves, and to each other—about how to avoid the series of automatic tax increases and spending cuts that could send the country over the so-called fiscal cliff. Boehner went to see the president at the White House last Sunday for their first solo meeting since the November election.
It’s about time.
Because it’s a truth universally understood—if not universally acknowledged—in the capital these days that absolutely nothing important gets done in public. If, as Emerson said, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” transparency has become the mortal enemy of legislative achievement. The fetishistic, post-Watergate notion that the public’s business must always be done in public has produced a lot of fine-sounding preachments (from Obama, among others) but also a lot of governmental paralysis.

One of the cardinal mistakes of Obama’s first months in office was ceding too much control to House Democrats.

Watch just five minutes of Steven Spielberg’s gripping new Lincoln, and you’ll get a vivid sense of just how much can and should be done in the shadows—and at no real cost to a virtuous result. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was hammered out in private talks over plenty of bourbon between the Senate Republican leader, Everett Dirksen, and Democratic Justice Department aides; it had to be, because the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee was one of the law’s chief opponents. In 1990, congressional negotiators and aides to the first President George Bush began the process of hammering out a budget deal in marathon closed-door sessions at Andrews Air Force Base. The deal helped spark an economic recovery (albeit not in time to save Bush from defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton).
Obama’s and Boehner’s House Republicans are still miles apart on how to reach a deal, and both sides continue to strike intransigent public postures that only make compromise harder. All the more reason why the two key players should keep talking as often and as quietly as possible. Boehner, who’ll have a hard job selling anything that smacks of reasonableness to the hot-headed Tea Party freshmen in his Republican caucus, needs all the running room he can get. He feels he’s been burned by leaks from past talks when too many people were in the room (but probably just as often by his own antsy lieutenants like Eric Cantor).
For the president’s part, he has no business getting the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, or the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, involved in the talks one minute before he has to. One of the cardinal mistakes of Obama’s first months in office was ceding too much control over the composition of his fiscal stimulus package to House Democrats, who larded it with pent-up partisan paybacks that made it ripe for Republican criticism and public opposition. Even an unshakable, ironclad agreement between Obama and Boehner might not guarantee a deal, but such an agreement must be the first step. There’s simply no alternative.
The outlines of a potential deal are clear to anyone conversant in elementary-school math. The president wants $1.6 trillion in new taxes over the next decade; Boehner and the Republicans have offered to raise $800 billion in new revenues (though they remain resistant to Obama’s insistence that the highest marginal tax rates for the wealthy go up). Doesn’t a tax/revenue increase of $1.2 trillion sound about right?
Republicans are demanding $600 billion in savings from federal health programs, and another $600 billion in other spending cuts. The White House’s opening offer was about $600 billion worth of cuts in all. Wouldn’t reductions of about $900 billion seem reasonable?
O.K., so my suggestion is crude and simplistic, but once upon a time—and not so long ago—splitting the difference was the American way. The voters themselves effectively did as much last month, returning both Obama and the Republican Congressional majority to power. As John F. Kennedy once sagely noted in another context, “There’s always some poor son of a bitch who didn’t get the word,” but must the folks in Washington always be the last to get with the program?
The prospect of a deal by year’s end seems dimmer and dimmer. But there are still hopeful signs. The second best bit of recent good news in Washington was that Boehner’s leadership group deprived four obstreperous House members—who had taxed his stewardship, griped in public, and generally caused him needless heartburn—of their plum committee assignments. The Washington Post reports that even the most hard-core members are giving Boehner new room to maneuver. So it’s no accident—and it might just be a boon—that the cigarette-loving Boehner’s office remains about the only room in the Capitol that is still actually smoke-filled. Obama has (we’re told) finally given up his own nicotine habit. If they can’t both keep on puffing, they can at least keep on talking.

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