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Journalists clear the way to understanding gridlock
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Published: September 14, 2008
PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE: Profiles in Backroom Power. By John Harwood and Gerald Seib. Random House. 238 pages. $26.
To many Americans, the affairs of Washington don't make any sense.
We have an immigration crisis, yet nothing gets done.
Social Security is in danger. Nothing happens.
There's an energy crisis. Ditto.
It doesn't matter that for most of the first six years of this decade, one party controlled the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court. Still, very little got done regarding the major challenges our nation faces.
Washington is gridlocked. That is, issues headed east to west are blocked by the forces of those who want them to go north to south. And vice versa.
But this isn't how our government is supposed to work, at least not according to our civics teachers. They said that the president and Congress got together, hashed out ideas, formulated legislation that was needed and then made it law.
In their book, Pennsylvania Avenue, veteran journalists John Harwood and Gerald Seib explain that there are many more forces at play in modern Washington than just the people we elect in even-numbered years. And those whom we elect answer to more than just their voters.
In short, there is a complicated web of characters in Washington who make up the system that governs our country. Some of these characters are elected, but many others are not.
For those of us who watch the cable news shows or read Washington think pieces, some of these names are familiar. Ken Duberstein is the fixer. Karl Rove is the strategist. Billy Tauzin is the industry man. Robert Strauss is the chairman.
Most of the other characters, people with significant influence on the system and how it works -- or fails to work, depending on your perspective -- are newcomers even to those of us who take an interest in Washington.
The authors move through each of these characters with one-chapter profiles. They tell us how this person came to power in Washington and how he or she exercises it. In the process, the reader will come to understand why it is so darned hard to get anything done in our capital.
At the heart of this book is the problem underlying all of our government's inability to respond to citizen needs: partisanship. It is out of control. Members spend an enormous amount of time raising money for themselves and their parties. They spend little time in the capital getting to know each other and learning how to work together. They find that the surest path to re-election is to veer to the party's base of indignant warriors. Compromise might get something done, but it can also get them defeated in a primary next year.
Still, the authors see hope that things might change in Washington, that a more practical group of politicians might come to office, that the many influential outside-government forces are also ready to get something accomplished.
For those of us who really enjoy politics, this is a good book. We're introduced to a lot of new people and to many new roles in Washington. It's fairly easy reading, but hard to sit with for a long time because the series of short profiles don't necessarily pull you into the next chapter.
Readers who invest their time in this book will have a better idea of why so little gets done in Washington and who is responsible. That makes it a worthwhile undertaking.
■ Paul O'Connor is a former Journal editorial writer who lives in Raleigh.
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