Reagan And O'Neill: Bipartisanship Or Seduction?

Over the past several weeks, as the shutdown debacle wore down and the people's government got more or less back to work, we have, as part of the op-ed coverage of these events, been treated to a wave of nostalgia for the good ol' days of the Gipper and the Tipper.  Ah, those halcyon days of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill would go at each other in the press, then knock off at 5:00 p.m., have a beer and negotiate the future of the Republic.  Why, oh why, can't things now be more like THAT?  After all, it was all good, right?

Wrong.

As a general rule, I try not to speak ill of the dead; after all, by definition, they are not in a position to stand up for themselves.  But when the American people are subjected to this level of revisionist history, and it's history I lived through, fidelity to the truth leaves me with no other choice.

Perhaps it was ethnic, in that both men were Irish, and knew more than a little bit about throwing around the blarney.  But I am one-half Irish, and I know more than a little bit about not only blarney, but flattery.  And Reagan was susceptible to it; after all, that was how he began his journey from New Deal Democrat to Goldwater Republican.  His second marriage exposed him to money, and its seductive power.

But O'Neill, for all of the accolades heaped upon him in his lifetime and posthumously, was no better.  When he became Speaker of the House in 1977, at the same time Jimmy Carter became President, and operating in a post-Watergate environment where the institution of the Presidency had been weakened and that of Congress had been elevated, O'Neill envisioned a political world where, with the help of Robert Byrd in the Senate, he would be in charge.  The buck, he thought, would stop at the Speaker's chair, especially with the White House occupied by Carter, whom he regarded as the proverbial hick from the sticks.

Carter, as it turned out, intended to act as though he had been elected with his own mandate for change and power, whether O'Neill liked it or not.  To me, then and now, that was one of Carter's pluses.  Unfortunately, he had a minus that more than cancelled out this plus--the giving of flattery was not part of his skill set.  Whether for reasons of religion or temperament, Carter was about as adverse to schmoozing as it was possible for a human being to be, especially for a human being who is also a politician.  It is the primary reason that his Presidency was in free-fall even before the Iranian hostage crisis and even despite his Camp David successes.  Carter refused to flatter in a town that runs on flattery.

And O'Neill treated that failure as the moral equivalent of treason.  He and other Congressional Democrats took great delight in sabotaging Carter's initiatives simply because they were his initiatives, and the interests of the country be damned.  Had they given Carter one-tenth of the cooperation that they would end up giving to Reagan, it is at least a possibility that Reagan would never have reached the White House.  But they ended up with Reagan, who had been given an Electoral College landslide--and who was more than willing to flatter them.  What was the result?  The beginning of the end of Social Security, union power and progressive taxation, three of the most important linchpins not only of the New Deal, but also of post-war prosperity in America.

And Tip O'Neil was right at Ronnie's side, having those beers, making it all happen for the sake of "bipartisanship."  All because Reagan knew how, in political terms, to scratch his belly and make him purr.

O'Neill himself wrote in his memoirs that the fact of Reagan's presidency was sinful.  Mr. Speaker, no less so was your own leadership of the People's House.  For the sake of being loved, you helped your opponents trade away the future of your constituents, your party, and your county.  Your partnership was ultimately not one with a President, but with forces of economic darkness that, even now, are only inches away from sealing the Banana Republican fate of the nation.  You were not part of a golden era; you were part of one that tarnished everything you allegedly stood for.

God spare us from that kind of bipartisanship, now and in the future.  Otherwise, there may be no future at all.  And, in the interval, God spare us from the nattering of the professional chattering class, who flatter themselves by viewing Reagan and O'Neill as their creations, and have much invested in giving them the protection that neither deserves.