Washington Monthly - September/October 2012 - (Page 24)

Party Animals Any chance Romney might govern as a moderate? For a clue, look at his senior staff. By Jonathan Bernstein hat would a Mitt Romney presidency be like? At one point over the summer, the candidate was offering, if elected, to “bury the hatchet” with Democrats, and his operatives are stressing how moderate and bipartisan Romney might be, even talking up how much they admire President Bill Clinton’s governing style. That might seem plausible to some, since Romney has proven himself to be quite, shall we say, flexible on his policy positions. But such a thought ignores some powerful fixed realities in Washington— W It seems likely that Romney’s executive office, including White House staff, would be just as tied in to his party’s network as that of any recent president. It is far more likely that a Mitt Romney presidency will be defined by the Republican Party than that he will define his party. realities that will push hard against whatever urges toward moderation Romney might harbor. The most obvious is the growing partisan divide in Congress, driven especially by the GOP’s ideological turn to the right and the Tea Party’s purging of Republican moderates, a trend that the 2012 election will almost certainly accelerate. Also, as I’ve pointed out in these pages (“Campaign Promises: What They Say Is How They’ll Govern,” January/ February 2012), presidents are under im24 September/October 2012 mense pressure from their strongest supporters to fulfill the specific policy promises they made to win the nomination, and Romney has taken positions so far to the right—for instance, not only endorsing Paul Ryan’s budget plan but putting Ryan on the ticket—as to make compromise with the Democrats almost inconceivable. But there’s also a subtler, less noticed change in Washington that for years has been slowly undermining the capacity of administrations of both parties to compromise. Like any human organization, the White House is profoundly influenced by the nature of the people who work there, especially in senior positions. And since the 1970s, the kind of people who surround presidents has changed. In the past, they were more likely to be people whose first loyalty was to the president himself, and only secondarily, if at all, to the president’s party. In recent decades it’s become just the opposite. Consider an illustrative contrast: Karl Rove and H. R. “Bob” Haldeman. Both helped put a president into the Oval Office and then became powerful White House advisers. But Haldeman never worked for any other politician but Nixon, while Rove, long before he went to work for George W. Bush, was an all-purpose Republican operative, having advised, among others, Texas Governor William Clements, Utah Senator Bob Bennett, and Missouri Governor John Ashcroft. What’s happened over the last few decades is that the top people around the president have, like other players in Washington, become more party connected; there are fewer like Haldeman who would not be in politics except for their relationship to the president. And there are more like Rove who are deeply connected to their party, including its wider network of elected officials, interest groups, partisan media, and think tanks, and who are therefore less likely to reach across the aisle for ideas and partnerships. The changing in the backgrounds of senior White House staffers is just one manifestation of the growing role of parties and partisanship in Washington over the last couple of generations. And of course it’s difficult to prove that any particular presidential action is tied to the influence of any particular member of the White House staff. What we can say is that a president like Richard Nixon could press forward with the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, Amtrak, wage and price controls, the first affirmative action programs, as well as a vast expansion of Social Security, without receiving lots of opposition from his top White House aides (indeed, much of his domestic policy agenda was formulated by a Democratic aide, Daniel Patrick Moynihan). Things began to change with Jimmy Carter’s White House. To be sure, Carter had his “Georgia Mafia”; by my count, six of the former governor’s top ten advisers—people like Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell—had a longterm personal connection to him, and all were at least involved in the presidential campaign. But already in that era, half had broader Democratic Party ties. Stuart Eizenstat, for example, had worked in the Johnson White House and Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 presidential campaign before moving to Georgia and then starting to work for Carter; the politics office was head-

Washington Monthly - September/October 2012

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