Hewitt Blog

My Washington Examiner column explains the mood in half the country.

And NationalReview.com is running a symposium on the day.

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Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole joined me on Friday's show to review what the GOP decided to do in Williamsburg.

The transcript will be on the Transcripts page later today.

Audience reaction was mixed.  The good news is the GOP has a "plan," one that was widely reported, and which is better than having no plan at all. The bad news is that most of the specifics of the plan are either a state secret or not yet worked out.

Cole was willing again to repeat that the real budget problem is entitlements, but that is where the specificity ended.  It was a start, but here is what the House GOP still does not appear to get: It needs to lay out its plans, with a level of detail that inspires confidence.

Check out this schedule.  Remarkable!  We know when all the Tribe's Spring Training games will be played and where. We even know that pitchers and catchers report on February 10.  Opening night is March 31 --incredibly it is the Rangers at the Astros-- and rosters must be at 25 by that day.  (Never understood why the Reds got dropped as the opening day club, but the Rangers and the Astros?)  

The point is MLB has a real plan.  Lots of moving parts.  Lots of trained staff doing lots of small things so that the fans can anticipate and plan.  Hard to build support for and enthusiasm around a secret plan.

The GOP still does not get that it must not only announce it intends to do good things, it must lay out those good things and a schedule by which the House GOP hopes to do its part--in detail!  OK, the House GOP didn't want to try and win with the debt ceiling.  Fine.  It is being moved back to April 15 and the sequester and CR will be the political battlegrounds.  

Buit to what end and by what dates?  What does the GOP want and when does it want it?  Not that tired "$1 in cuts for a $ in spending," but rather incremental though real entitlement reform, though it won't be of the sort that Paul Ryan proposed and Romney/Ryan campaigned on.  Cole mentioned the key factors: raising the age of Medicare eligibility, probably doing the same with Social Security and matching Medicare and Social Security eligibility ages --probably at 70 as Cole noted.  Means-testing for Medicare?  Medicaid block grants?  Whatever the objectives are, the GOP needs to articulate time and a strategy for achieving them.  I pressed Cole on using the CR to do these things and he used the classic that isn't what CRs are for, when in fact CRs can be for anything the House majority wants them to be for via riders.  But I don't care provided the House GOP lays out what they want and how they intend to get it --in detail.

The old House ways resisted specificity because then folks could assess when you had "lost," and in the old days elected officials hated having to say they had lost.

But the times have changed.  Now the political problem is not losing but in failing to try and win.  Being passive is a much greater sin in the face of overwhelming problems than getting beat.  Winning is best by far and the GOP might win, but the only politically disastrous course is not laying out the objectives, the plan by which they will be achieved and then honestly and effectively communicating progress towards those goals or defeats along the way.

Not sure if the House GOP intends to embrace this level of transparency.  If it does, the base will rally around it and support it.  But iif the House GOP turtles up again, the disappointment will become dismay and then contempt and then primary challengers in very short order.  See John Hinderaker's post this morniong for the category the House GOP must avoid. (And thanks to Scott Johnson for pointing me towards Ed Driscoll's very timely post.)

It looks like the GOP leadership made a change.  We will know for sure by the end of next week.  If we can say when and where and for what the House GOP intends to fight, things will be much better than I had expected.

This timing happens to coincide with the National Review Institute in D.C.  Up until the GOP's retreat, the NRI folks were preparing to issue Republican Congressmen bags to wear over their heads at the gathering, especially when Mark Steyn spoke.  But now there is an opening to re-establish some semblance of credibility and the bags can stay on the shelf.  Maybe.

Speaking of Steyn, don't miss his latest.  It is a reminder that even if the House GOP got a clue the past few days, the country hasn't.  And that is the real problem.  A huge one.

But don't despair.  Girl Scout Cookie season is upon us, though it too has a dark side. 

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Suddenly Africa is on the front pages of every American newspaper, specifically Algeria and Mali.

Few American reporters have spent as much time in Africa or reporting on African issues as the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof.  He will join me at the start of Friday's program, and the transcript will be posted below.

After I talk with Kristof, I'll be joined in studio by Sam Bretzmann, the 25-year old executive director of Fikisha.org, an organization he helped found four years ago after a school study trip with students from Concordia University.  Fikisha.org provides scholarships of a few hundred dollars years to the street kids of the Kawangware slum in Nairobi that puts those children into boarding school while connecting them with a local church in the city thus dramatically changing the arc of their lives.

And after Bretzmann, I'll be joined by one of the savviest economists in the land, Richard McKenzie, who is just about to launch an enormous MOOC ("Microeconomics for Managers"), who can add just a bit of economic theory to the discussion of how best to help a continent.

The problems of Africa are so immense --from the consequences of the AIDS epidemic to the rise of radical Islamist terror in the north and now increasingly in the middle part of the continent-- that there is a danger of simply throwing up hands and declaring there is nothing to be done.

In fact there are incredible opportunities to change the course of a continent. and a lot of very smart people like Kristof and McKenzie have answers and enormous numbers of people with good hearts and great skills are stepping up to make it happen.  Take a moment to read through the transcripts of these talks when they are posted here later today:

HH: This very first hour, I’m devoting to Africa. And I’m devoting it to Africa, because no one talks much about Africa. And as far as I can see and tell, the crux of that continent’s troubles is going to be our crux pretty soon. The person I reached out to today to talk to about this is Nicholas Kristoff, New York Times columnist/reporter extraordinaire. You can read often him talking about many other subjects besides Africa. But at least annually, he is over there. Nicholas Kristoff, welcome back to the Hugh Hewitt Show and thanks for joining me.  

NK: Sure, I’m delighted to be with you, Hugh.

HH: Tell us a little bit, I’ll be joined at the bottom of the hour by a young college graduate in Southern California, who having gone off on a trip with his college, is now throwing in and doing, spending his life trying to help the kids in the slums of Nairobi. You go back and forth, and I know you take young people with you. What is it about this continent that A) captures the imagination of so many young Americans, and B) is so screwed up right now.

NK: Well, you know, I guess there are a couple of things. I mean, one is that in some ways, Africa is really, and we don’t think of it this way, but is really the boom continent of the moment, that its growth rate is actually faster than most of the rest of the world, and I think six of the ten fastest growing countries in the world right now are actually in Africa. And especially at a time with Europe is suffering, and North America is, there are some places in Africa that really have this kind of excitement of development. Now the other part of the picture is the exact opposite, that the places where the suffering is the greatest in the world, where one can make the most difference because there are kids who aren’t even going to elementary school, let alone to college, that’s also Africa. The places where the stakes are the greatest, you know, south Sudan, where a girl is more likely to end up dying in childbirth than to become literate. And so I think that people are drawn both by the extraordinary needs and by this, you know, what is a much more recent phenomenon, this sense of buzz and excitement in some parts of the continent.

I am part of a cast of thousands --well, dozens-- appearing at the National Review Institute next weekend.  I'll be debating what the GOP ought to do about the issues surrounding immigration with Mark Kirkorian and welcome any thoughts you have in the days ahead.  Send them to hugh@hughhewitt.com.  For your background as you shape your arguments/proposals, I opposed California's Prop 187 way back in 1994 (I think Ken Grubbs and I represented the entirety of conservatiev opposition at the time) but also opposed the Senate GOP's big bill from 2006.  

The Institue has a great line-up so you ought to come for the Mark Steyn cabaret act if nothing else.

I have spent most of the past few weeks blasting the House GOP leadership for the incoherent messaging up to, through and now after the fiscal cliff fiasco.  Throughout these weeks I have also had on the program many of the key pundits of the center-right to talk about the message fail, including Mark Steyn yesterday, and Ari Fleischer and Ross Douthat the day before.  The transcript page doesn't even begin to cover how many of these conversations I have had on air.

The good news:  Tom Cole, one of the smartest of the old guard --but very, very old guard-- gave an interview to the Weekly Standard John McCormack in which Cole lays out exactly the sort of message that needs to be done, stating quickly and without embarrassment the modest reforms in entitlements the GOP must have as a down payment on fiscal sanity:

“To me, the logical place to start are some of the ideas that the president himself has put on the table or indicated he’s favorable toward. Chained CPI is one of them,” Cole said, referring to an adjustment to Social Security benefits. “Gradual raising of the age on Medicare eligibility is something that ought to reappear. … I personally think one of the places Republicans are prepared to be pretty tough is means testing for higher income individuals, at least some sort of sliding scale similar to what we have Medicare Part D. On the discretionary front, I would expect some of the sequester to actually stay."

There. Messaging.  Cue the trumpets. Finally.

Now, if he (1) adds "block granting Medicaid" and (2) always, always, always says the party of Reagan will protect the Department of Defense from deterrent-destroying cuts,  and (3) gets all 200 members of the GOP caucus to say the same thing everytime they appear on television or radio, while (4) pushing the Speaker to do an appearance or two a day saying the same thing --ditto the Leader and the Whip-- then GOP will have successfully refocused the debate on the drivers of the debt crisis, the entitlements and the key obligation of the federal government, the Constitution.

I said to Mark Steyn yesterday,  "I don’t really care so much what the House GOP does. But I do care a lot that they state clearly what ought to be done."  I don't expect them to win.  I expect them to educate the public why they ought to win and why the truly terrible things around the corner cannot be prevented by printing trillions more in hot money.

They can do this.  But they have to try.  Thanks to Tom Cole for doing so.

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Commentary Magazine's January issue is a symposium on the future of conservatism.  Many great essays, some of which are featured at the magazine's website on a rotating basis.

My contribution is up today, just in time for bored GOP Congressmen in Williamsburg to read.

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Dear GOP Members:

This new article from The Hill suggests that you will lose the majority if you fight for entitlement reform in the course of the debt ceiling hike battle.

It also seems to suggest that you can keep the majority by not fighting with the president.

Tom Cole and Tom Davis are messaging you, not the public, that your jobs are endangered --or at least the fundraising pull, the staff and the offices that go with the majority-- are at risk if the backbenches don't quietly get behind whatever it is the Speaker wants to do.

Note that the entire piece is empty of policy prescription.  This is the problem.

You cannot agree on what you haven't debated much less seen.  It is more than a little shocking that 10 weeks after the election you don't have a bill to debate linking serious entitlement reform to a debt ceiling hike.

If the Speaker and everyone in the room was out arguing for (1) raising the age of Medicare eligibility to the same age as Social Security eligibility; (2) pushing up the Social Security age schedule a year or so more; (3) "chaining" CPI and (4) block granting Medicaid and preparing to pass a bill embodying those changes to send to the Senate along with a debt ceiling hike, you'd all be held in high esteem in your districts and by half the country.

Half the country, the liberal half that doesn't care about the red ink for various reasons, would be angry that you were trying to protect the country against bond vigilantes, but you'd be doing the right thing and the people who elected you to address the spending gusher would be content.

You'd also be having a debate about what to do, not about how disorganized and leaderless you are.  The president never talks about process.  He talks about his proposals.  And as terrible as those proposals might be --no matter how disconnected they are from reality-- they appear to be more serious than your Conference because your Conference doesn't talk about anything.  The leadership never appears on air.

If Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers produced a CR that cut non-Defense spending by 5% and zeroed out a few things --small, but symbolic things like NPR or Planned Parenthood funding-- you'd gain some strategic coherence as well.

If you had even one piece of immigration reform/border security legislation ready to go through mark-up, that would also help.

If you come home from Williamsburg with Tom Cole and Tom Davis proclaiming a great victory because the caucus is unified behind the Speaker?  Without any policy to articulate and defend?  Well, that is asking for the primary challenge you are worried about and for another round of media cycle losses to the president. You can't beat something with nothing, and proclamation of a unified caucus is worse than nothing.  It will be the occasion of ridicule.

Looks right now like Williamsburg may be another box canyon into which you all rode without a plan for getting out.  Hope I am wrong, but that Hill piece is a bad, bad sign.

I had a couple of smart guys on yesterday to talk about your collective communications crisis: The New York Times' Ross Douthat and Ari Fleischer.  The transcripts of those conversations are here.  Ari is among you.  Read their points.  Talk to Larry, and Hillsdale's Larry Arnn.

You need to pass some bills that embody your beliefs.  You all believe in the entitlement reforms above as at least a half-way house to a serious entitlement reform that preserves the programs.  Insist on getting a bill introduced on Monday, debated and passed in the next few days.  The debt ceiling endgame is almost upon you and you haven't articulated what you want.

The CR is coming up as well.  No one has any idea what is in the bill that Chairman Rogers is negotiating.  When it is made public and it doesn't slash dsicretionary spending outside of Defense, you are going to get hammered.  Again.  This is all foreseeable.

So enjoy your weekend.  The messengers sent from the Speaker to soften you up have dutifully delivered the message through The Hill.  Incredible as it seems, the plan is to have no plan.  I don't think that is going to work in your districts because it won't do anything for the country.

The welcoming remarks of an unidentified member of the senior GOP House leadership to the assembled Republican conference gathering for a "retreat" in Williamsburg have leaked:

Welcome to Williamsburg, Members of the House Republican Conference.  We hope you enjoy your retreat.

Perhaps we should begin with that age old tradition: Look to your left.  Now look to your right.  Either you or one of those two people won’t be here in two years.  Perhaps two of the three will be gone.  If you are sitting in the wrong row, all three of you could be looking for work with the Potato Chip and Snack Food Association.

Just kidding.  Sort of.  Actually, we don’t have a clue.  Nobody does.  The base may be stunned into despair or it may be ready to go Vesuvius, we can’t be sure.  Feels like Vesuvius most days.

It really could be that dire, and we tell you this simply because if you have only two years as a congressman, you might as well enjoy them.  Play some golf while you are here.  Catch the glass blowing exhibit.  Your kids will love the guys in the funny hats with the muskets.

Had we been on top of things –big “if,” that one—we’d have gotten you all copies of Jon Meacham’s new bestseller  Jefferson: The Art of Power.  So much of it is set in Williamsburg, and so much of it describes genuine political leadership that it would really have been a good thing to suggest you read it before arriving here.  But which Congressmen read anything these days.  We are passing out a transcript of a long interview Meacham gave.  Perhaps your staff could summarize it for you, and you can pretend you have read the whole book when you get back home

As I was saying, welcome.  We have a pretty full agenda, and you have no idea how difficult it is to fill up this much time and avoid talking about the real issues.  Our reputation for folding like old beach chairs and the disarray in the leadership are painful to discuss much less fix, however, so we won’t be doing much of that.  We do have some fine talks coming up, but we can usually count on our speakers to do their best to ingratiate themselves to you and avoid uncomfortable subjects like the promises you made in getting here.  We do note Dr. Larry Arnn from Hillsdale College is on the agenda, and we aren’t quite sure how that slipped by the program committee of the Speaker’s Office, but that could be interesting and memorable.

Some of you would like to have a long conversation about the next month which, after all, will do much to define the 113^th Congress and almost certainly determine if you are drawing a primary challenger funded by The Campaign for Primary Accountability.  (Our apologies to Spencer Bacchus.  Didn’t mean to make him twitch that way. )

If you haven’t yet had a chance, do read the Jim VandeHei's and Mike Allen's piece from Politico earlier in the week if you’d really like to know what the Speaker’s team thinks about most of you.  We’d like to apologize for some of the blunter, loose talk in the piece, the stuff about how you need to be “pacified,” how you need to stage a show for your constituents, and how there will be a lame deal at the end of the shouting that basically agrees to enormous amounts of new unfunded spending and zero meaningful entitlement reform. 

That was a little blunt, and the Speaker has talked to his team about rounding the edges of their contempt for you and the conservative base.  On the plus side, it was candid, right?  That is what will happen, and then you’ll roll over on what the appropriators want, and then come May you have to go home and start raising money to fend off the primary challenges because nothing changed except the size of our astronomical debt.

Just bottom-lining it for you.  We may get something rolling on immigration to try and draw off some of the heat from our impotence on spending.  Paul Ryan, who we all know rose in the nation’s esteem because he made tough choices and defended them in public, is willing to do so again on immigration, working with Senator Rubio, so you may or may not be able to talk about something other than our serial collapses when you get home for the summer, but let’s face it, the president has stolen another march on us there as well.  Still, thank you Paul for trying.  Having a member who is known to be thinking about big issues is a great boon to all of us.

Now, we know there is grumbling.  We fully expect some Oliver Twist among you to approach the Speaker and say “Please sir may I have some more,” or the 2013 equivalent of an abject plea for basic necessities.  But we aren't in the business of fulfilling your needs this cycle.

Some of you would like to know where we have been since November 6 or even since January 2?  Why don’t we have a draft bill to actually discuss that ups the debt ceiling in exchange for a raise in the age of Medicare eligibility, block granting Medicaid, even a raise in the age of Social Security eligibility another year or so, and of course which tinkers with the CPI?  Why don’t we have actual draft legislation on immigration to discuss?  Why can’t we pass out the secret deal Hal Rogers has cooked up on appropriations?  We know.  We hear some of you when you make the mistake of appearing on talk radio.  (We’d like to talk to you about that, offline by the way.  Those people are not your friends.  You really shouldn’t go on those shows.  Try developing a relationship with someone from Politico or MSNBC.)

Look, actual draft legislation, that’s not how this works.  We have hunkered down.  Every time we appear anywhere we get blistered by the MSM and by our so-called friends in talk radio.  If we stay on the golf course and away from governing or even trying to govern, no one gets hurt.  Well, we don’t get hurt. 

Now, some of you might get hurt, but you are all from new districts.  If you can get past the primary, you are for the most part golden. Unless we get another 2006 or 2008, which isn’t likely because, after all, November of 2014 will be the president’s “6 year itch” election, and we should do ok just by breathing.  Unless we really and truly do have a debt crisis where the bond vigilantes start forcing up the cost of our debt and the red ink explodes.

Heh.  As though any amount of red ink more than a trillion matters.  Can’t even believe I said that.  Sheesh.  Sorry.  We are supposed to pretend like a trillion here and a trillion there adds up to real money.

Bottom line: The senior members of the caucus have got theirs.  They can retire out on comfortable pensions to good company town jobs regardless of what happens.  Sure, we’d like to keep the majority.  The offices are bigger and the staffs are larger.  But we aren’t going to do anything to sacrifice our positions in D.C., no matter who holds the gavel in a few years.

Most of you have the same sweet deal ahead of you.  Those of you who last ten years at least.  Try thinking of it that way: Your goal is to make it ten years.  No one gets there by bucking leadership.  That’s the bottom line. 

Some of you have some qualms about this sort of realism, and I don’t mean the show-boaters who actually voted against Paul Ryan’s budget because it didn’t balance and who are just adopting a different career path.  No, I mean the genuinely conscientious among you who believe the country is in an honest-to-God crisis.

Let me get a little existential on you for a moment.  A country isn’t in a crisis until a country believes it is in a crisis.  Some of you want us to try and persuade the country it is in a crisis, but we just don’t think that can be done.  That is why we don’t argue our case in public, why we think Meet the Press is the sum total of our out-reach duties.  We aren’t cynical, just experienced.  We can’t “message.”  We don’t know how to use Twitter or social media.  We are old white guys.  If you cut us, we do bleed, but nobody cares and nobody thinks we care, so we are resigned to this.

Some of you, and God love ya, you think you have a duty to do something. Well, we all used to.  It is the common denominator, at least for most of us: Why we got into this business.

But now is not the time to encourage you in the rekindling of that passion.  Go pick an issue and work it.  Do a little good, don’t rage against the dying of the light.  Raise some money.  We’ll arrange some votes you can take to hold off the primary challengers.  We care, we really do.

But please, for all of our sakes, stop pretending we can beat the president and his pals in the press.  Maybe if we get the Senate in 2014 we can do something.  In the meantime, we will stop any new nightmares from arriving at his desk, and we will spend $4 trillion we don’t have and pray the world believes we will fix it in 2017.

Enjoy the weekend

After the president’s Monday press conference, the House GOP has two choices to debate in Williamsburg: to play to win now or to win the 2014 elections.  Either is respectable.  They are potentially –probably—incompatible.  Either is preferable to the drift of the last 11 weeks.  GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and his colleagues will almost certainly support any reasonable strategy adopted by the House, so the action is in Williamsburg.

If the House GOP decides to play to win now, it will fully articulate the serious reforms of entitlements that are necessary to win a hike in the debt ceiling, those being a hike in the eligibility age for Medicare to match that of Social Security, a raising of that same Social Security retirement age, a block granting of Medicaid to the states with an annual cap, and the dreaded “chained CPI.”  Each innovation being worth a half trillion in debt ceiling authority.  The president can buy debt ceiling peace for serious entitlement reform, or he can have a government shut-down with all of its real or imagined chaos.  He doesn’t have to negotiate.  He simply has to chose. 

An alternative is to simply refuse to engage in this absurd debate over whether the president is a responsible man --he isn't, no matter what the Beltway protectors of him say-- give the president 2 trillion in debt authority, assign him the consequences and begin the campaign for 2014 now with a focus on the Senate and remind the public again and again that the president would not negotiate so that the debts are his and his alone.  Adopt my pal Levin's charcaterization of the president as an "Imperial President," and refuse to induldge the junior high school theater of yesterday's presser's "they say bad things about me on the floor," even though no one has in fact called the president a socialist on the floor.

I prefer the first course, but the second course is not irrational.  What makes no sense is endless bargaining over nonsense slogans like “$1 in cuts for every $1 in debt authority.”  This means nothing to an average voter.  So EPA gets $1.1 billion instead of $1.2 billion and the president can borrow $100 million more.  The size of government does not change and there is no path laid out to fiscal responsibility.  

The GOP has got to go up the hill or run down it.  Charge the president or retreat.  But it cannot mill around half-way up the hill holding a pretend debate until the Speaker yells retreat.  The political casualties of that course will be enormous.

If the GOP retreats on real entitlement reform and gives up the debt ceiling, they can chose to spend the next two years defending defense and the military, crafting immigration legislation and doing so responsibly (See Jen Rubin's post on Paul Ryan's support for Marco Rubio's plans) and holding hearings on the president’s various insanities like Fast and Furious and Obamacare, all the time pointing out the spending and debt crisis the president wouldn’t fix and preparing to win the Senate in 2014 so the president can be confronted by real choices not covered for by Harry Reid.  It is true that a bond crisis could intervene, but if so, the president will own it and the GOP will have articulated how it could have been avoided.

Whichever way the GOP goes, it does have to choose, it has to articulate and defend its choice, and it does have to stick with its choice if it wants to avoid a blowout in 2014.  Republicans and conservatives have the patience for a long fight, but not an incoherent one.

The weekly column from Clark Judge:

Leader of a Country or a Faction?

By Clark S. Judge: managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc.; chairman, Pacific Research Institute
 
In his press conference yesterday, the last before the inauguration, President Obama spoke in a tone remarkable – actually unprecedented -- in the post World War II era, perhaps in the history of the nation.  He presented himself as the leader, not of the country, but of a faction.
 
Again and again, the president wasn’t simply confrontational toward the opposition in Congress but contemptuous.  In place of the normal ritual at the beginning of second terms, speaking of going forward together, muting the more divisive rhetoric of the campaign, talking of finding common ground for common purpose with leaders in both houses of Congress (one of which is firmly in the hands of the opposition party), the president took exactly the opposite course.  
 
Several times he repeated a list of those who in his telling would suffer if government spending were cut or we went through a shutdown – children, the elderly, our troops, the list went on.  After a point, I wondered if he was going to accuse Republicans of drowning puppies next. He offered no acknowledgement – none – that the GOP leadership has put one offer after another one the table, compromising on key principals of taxes and economic growth, to come to the most recent deal.
 
Instead, when pressed on his own failure to reach out, to socialize, to take on the simple wooing of legislators that is an essential element of presidential leadership, he offered the gratuitous – and to my knowledge incorrect – observations that many Congressional Republicans are such political cowards that they won’t come to White House cookouts, for fear of a backlash at home.
 
There is a great deal of talk in the media at the moment about American government being broken. I don’t share that view.  We are confronting a major turning point and, as it has historically in all such moments, our political system feels as though it can’t decide to go one way or the other.  
 
In a National Review Online column yesterday (http://tinyurl.com/cbfytfx) Michael Barone addressed national turning points, asking, “Is the Entitlement State Winding Down?”  He suggested that our history runs in, as he put it, “the American-sounding interval of 76 years, just a few more than the Biblical lifespan of three score and 10.”  Washington’s first inaugural to Lincoln’s second was 76 years, as was that moment to the attack on Pearl Harbor.   Now are just four years away from the 76 anniversary of the entry into World War II.
 
Barone suggests that the mark of the present turning point is that the “welfare-state arrangements that once seemed solid are on the path to unsustainability.”  If so, many hard negotiations lie ahead.  Among the roles of president’s at such moment is seek national unity even as they seek to advance their agenda.
 
We hear a great deal about Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill.  Nothing the current president has faced in terms of opposition attacks compares to what Reagan faced during Iran-Contra.  It was clear that the Democrats in Congress wanted to close down the Reagan presidency.  During this period, Ted Kennedy and his allies in the Senate, who included the current vice president, launched the first and to date one of two most extreme and personal attacks in American history on a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court (the other being against Clarence Thomas, of course).
 
Yet it was also in this period, the Reagan and O’Neill launched a major move in support of the Afghan resistance against the Soviets (http://tinyurl.com/a49ogqq).  Mr. Reagan saw his third pick for the Court confirmed.  Indeed, in the last months of his administration, President Reagan was even able to shame a full set of budget bills out of Congress. 
 
The reason wasn’t that Congressional Democrats then were cooperative in a way that the Congressional Republicans are not now.  Instead, they set new standards for venom and partisanship that no fair-minded person could say have been exceeded in our time.  Rather, it was that the president worked at transcending divisions.
 
Reagan exemplified all the qualities of charm and courtesy that Mr. Obama seemed to disparage in his press conference. His humor made him a pleasure for even adversaries to be around.  And while it is true, as the current president suggested yesterday, that the ultimate sources of our divisions are substantive, much more can be achieved – and have traditionally been achieved -- when the presidents have worked the room. 
 
The sad fact is that President Obama appears incapable of reaching in any serious way beyond his faction.   It is going to be a long four years in Washington.