Kimberly Emerson

When I finished writing my first book, I wanted someone to read it.  I’m funny that way.  I printed out all 160 pages of it (almost a novella, really, but it felt like a book) and gave it to a couple of friends.  I expected, as with everything else I’d ever written, that they’d hand it back to me in a week or so, unable to fully express how much they loved the whole thing.

Instead, for some odd reason, they seemed to think I wanted feedback on it.  (Probably because I said things like “I’d love to get your feedback on this.”)  When one friend asked me how honest she should be (“do you want to know about everything I find, or just the big things?”), I began to see that it might not be quite as simple as I thought.  Really, the fact that they looked at my story as something worthy of critique was a huge compliment.  They knew I intended to get it published (still hoping), so they set out to help my book be the best that it could be.  While it wasn’t easy to hear some of the comments (“unless he’s an English major, he wouldn’t talk like that”), they were right in almost every case. I produced better work because I had the good sense to incorporate other people’s views.

Evidently, I am alone in that.

In 21st century America, compromise is an admission of political failure.  Sign the pledge.  Don’t back down.  Stick to your guns.  These are the rallying cries.  Honestly, I understand the appeal.  It’s tempting to plant yourself in the middle of the road, John Wayne-style, and make everybody else back away.   Anybody who ever had to deal with a bully in elementary school heard the same advice.  “Just stand up to them, they’ll leave you alone.”  This only works, however, if the problem is one-sided.  They want to do something, and you don’t want them to do it.  As a tactic when you are actually trying to get something accomplished, it leaves a lot to be desired.

In the current debt negotiations, we encounter just such a dilemma.  Presumably, everyone has the same goal – balancing the budget.  For the whole of my life, our country has run in the red.  For the whole of my mother’s life, our country has run in the red.  For the whole of the life of that 130-year-old tortoise that just died the other day, our country has run in the red.  (You can check the stats here.  We were on track to pay off our debt a couple of times, but that’s different from not having any debt, period.)  Evidently, years ago, someone lost the national checkbook, and we have never managed to get our finances straight since.  In less than a month, August 2 to be exact, our country runs up to the limit of debt we are legally allowed to carry, known as the debt ceiling.  Now, we’re legally allowed to do this because Congress voted that we were, and they can vote to change it again, if they so desire.  For some reason, the rest of the world is more than willing to lend us their currency in order to pull this off.  I don’t know how we do it, with so many decades of debt on our record, but we have a great credit rating.  Of course, now our sterling credit (I’m not kidding, that’s really what one of the agencies calls it) is in jeopardy, because our top politicos can’t agree on how exactly we want to raise the debt ceiling.  A couple of folks have planted their feet in the road and are resting their hands atop their six-shooters, daring someone to draw.

In the westerns, it would be the black hats versus the white hats.  That doesn’t apply here.  Frankly, it probably didn’t apply in the Old West, either – I can’t imagine every ill-intentioned person that wandered into town actually favored the Frontier Goth look – but I’m talking about more than color palette.  (Total non sequitur, but kudos to George Lucas for messing with the color standards.  Okay, Darth Vader was still all about the black, but those legions of storm troopers?  They were white.)  In the scenario of the moment, we don’t have a hero and a villain, no matter how much posturing all the politicians do.  We have a problem, and different angles about how to solve it.

A couple of months back, Obama commissioned a bi-partisan task force to figure out how to lower the deficit.  (Stop rolling your eyes, no matter how much of a gut reaction it is to the term “task force.”)  They did what they were asked.  They came back with a very long document that could basically be summed up by saying, “Raise taxes and cut spending.”  This group, made up of people on both sides of the aisle, agreed that neither approach could work by itself.  You needed both.  It makes sense – you want to lose weight, you need diet AND exercise.  Neither one of them will solve the problem alone.

Along these lines, President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner started negotiating well in advance of the August 2 deadline.  Word on the street said they were close to a deal.  Mr. Boehner would get something like $4 trillion (that’s not a typo, it’s trillion with a “t”) in budget cuts, and Mr. Obama would get to close some loopholes in the corporate tax code.  It involved a possible raise to the retirement age, probably Medicare reform, and fewer, lower tax rates.  It sounded like Mr. Obama was getting the short end of the deal, and to put it mildly, Democrats were not thrilled.  Color me surprised, then, when it was the Republicans who flatly rejected it.  House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s name suddenly popped into the discussion, and he wasn’t having it.  They had signed Grover Norquist’s “no tax hike” pledge, and darn it, they were sticking to it.  (At this point you could be forgiven for asking “Who on earth is Grover Norquist?”  You can check him out here.  Suffice to say, he’s someone all Republicans seem obliged to make happy – the godfather of tax reform, if you will.)

…And here’s the point where I find myself completely mystified.  This deal was good for the conservative goals: balancing the budget, trillions of dollars worth of spending cuts, and no real new taxes, only the closing of some dodges in the IRS code that are hard to say out loud without blushing.  (Who wants to stand in the average town hall meeting and defend a slower depreciation rate for corporate jets?  Show of hands?)  This was a deal that Mr. Boehner helped to craft.  Suddenly, it’s an unacceptable deviation from conservative principles?

A quick look around told me I was not the only one puzzled by the change in stance.  David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, called this deal “the mother of all no-brainers.”  (Read the article for yourself.)  The Economist magazine, in the same piece that labels Mr. Obama “deplorably insouciant” about deficit negotiations early on, calls the Republicans “economically illiterate and disgracefully cynical”  (I’d rather be insouciant, myself) for not accepting a deal that is 83% spending cuts versus 17% revenue increases.  Just today, Quinnipac University released a poll stating that by a 54-27% margin, Americans believe President Bush is responsible for the current economic blight and will blame the Republican party if an agreement is not reached in time.  Yet, Brendan Steinhauser, spokesperson for the Tea Party-affiliated FreedomWorks, has warned that any conservative voting in favor of this Grand Compromise (I’m not kidding, that’s really what they’re calling it) will “face serious challenges” come the next election cycle.

I wonder how well any politician that doesn’t vote for the package will do in the next election cycle, should no agreement be reached.  I’m thinking not so well.  People have long memories about things like not getting their social security checks.

In the end, of course, all this talk is just political posturing.  I’m 90% – okay, maybe 83% – sure an agreement will be reached in time.  Hitting the debt ceiling will, most analysts agree, weaken the dollar.  Thus, should the worst happen, people with a lot of dollars have a lot to lose.  Since dollars have long since gained the power of speech in Washington, chances are good they will talk the politicians into some kind of deal. In the meantime, those of us who don’t possess that kind of influence get treated to a weeks-long game of chicken, DC style.

If I could say one thing to all the folks involved in the debt saga, it would be this: compromise is not a sin.  It’s what grown-ups do to get things accomplished.  Give it a try.  True, some militant folks might not vote for you if don’t hold out for every last thing you want.  But some others – including all those independents that you lust after – may notice that you got something done, and vote for you because of it.

There’s also the off chance that America might get better legislation out of it…whoops, better wrap this up.  Now I’m just talking crazy.

If Kimberly could say a second thing to all those politicians, it would be “Hey, are any of you involved in book publishing?”

Tags: Barack Obama, compromise, David Brooks, debt ceiling, deficit, Grover Norquist, John Boehner, Quinnipac University, The Economist