Prime Group

I have lived in Washington, DC long enough to have celebrated, survived, witnessed or endured nine Presidential Inaugurations—Jimmy Carter (1977), Ronald Reagan (1981 and 1985), George H.W. Bush (1989), Bill Clinton (1993 and 1997), George W. Bush (2001 and 2005), and now Barack Obama.

January 20, 1977 was at once brilliantly sunny and bitterly cold—with snow and ice on the ground and temperatures in the single digits. Regardless, I was thrilled to be in the audience, seeing my preferred candidate, on whose successful campaign I had worked, being sworn in as the nation’s 39th President. At the time, I had no idea that just two months later I would be working for President Carter, with an office in the West Wing.

Four years later, I left town on January 19th to spend the night at an inn in near Annapolis, Maryland. I just could not bear the thought of being in the Capitol as the opposition celebrated the advent of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency. After all, I had worked in the Carter Administration for the better part of three years, eventually with the title of Deputy Chief of Staff in the White House. I moved to the reelection campaign in late 1979, and was a senior member of the team that lost 44 states to Reagan on November 4, 1980.

To say I was a bit grumpy as the victor’s inauguration approached would be an understatement. I didn’t feel a whole lot better when we said our farewells to President and Mrs. Carter at Andrews Air Force base an hour or so after Reagan took the oath of office.

After two terms of Reagan and one of “Bush 41”, I was delighted to attend all of the festivities associated with Bill Clinton’s 1993 swearing-in. That election cycle (1991/92) had seen me once again engaged in partisan political battle as Executive Director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. We retained our party’s majority in Congress that year, and helped elect a Democratic President; we were more than ready to celebrate once again.

On January 20, 1997 we were in the crowd on the Capitol grounds for Clinton’s second inauguration, but as I recall the occasion, the mood was much less buoyant than four years before, more akin to a kind of “obligatory happiness”.

We watched the 2001 and 2005 inaugurations of George W. Bush on TV from the comfort of our home. And although I have never developed, let alone expressed, the severe animus toward Bush 43 that most of my Democratic friends feel, neither have I felt an urge to celebrate his time in office—to put it mildly.

But the inauguration of Barack Obama was different from all the others.

First of all, it was preceded by the very best presidential campaign anyone in my generation has ever seen, bar none.

Second, it came at a time of enormous difficulty and challenge—-on the international front and here at home.

Third—to state the obvious—the historic significance of America electing its first African American President cannot be overstated. It is simply wonderful and amazing; there is no other way to describe it.

Fourth, I believe Barack Obama is a very special guy—- he’s smart, cool, disciplined, charming and tough. As his close friend, former Senator and now Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Daschle once told me, “He’s the real deal!”

So, early in the morning of January 20th, 2009, Shari and I braved the crowds and the cold (temperatures in the teens), and took our seats on the lawn on the west front of the U.S. Capitol. We were surrounded by tens of thousands of very pleased and deeply hopeful fellow citizens. And, then, as we turned around and looked west—toward the Washington Monument and beyond to the Lincoln Memorial—we were awed by the sight: two million people bundled against the cold, standing shoulder to shoulder, waving small American flags, cheering, clapping, singing.

The ceremony was dignified, as one would expect, and the new President’s Inaugural Address was, again as we’ve come to expect from him, extraordinarily well-crafted and well-delivered. Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” was breath-taking. The Marine Corps band—“the President’s own”, as it is called—was wonderful, and “Hail to the Chief” has seldom sounded better.

But it was the sight of the crowd—-the huge and happy crowd—-that I will remember most vividly. I am so grateful that we were there, to both witness and participate in that historic moment.

With Barack Obama’s inauguration just over a week away, one cannot help but wonder how the new president can accomplish the many changes he has proposed.

I worked in the Carter administration, which sometimes collided with a Congress of its own party over the nature and pace of change, so I am particularly interested in how Obama will fare in this regard. I know from experience that a more robust Democratic majority in Congress does not automatically guarantee success for a new Democratic president.
Today, years of frustration associated with service in opposition have Congressional Democrats pushing for long-desired objectives. Two terms of a Republican administration relentless in its pursuit of a presidency with primacy among the three branches of government has further inflamed sentiments on Capitol Hill. And decades of increasingly bitter, partisan political warfare have made collaboration and compromise unthinkable in the minds of people on both sides of the aisle.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats have an exclusive franchise on the rancor and polarization that plague Washington, D.C., and too many state capitols today. Each party has been guilty of taking the low road when better options were available. From the right, factors that have helped diminish the quality of American politics and government include: the rise of the National Conservative Political Action Committee and negative campaigning against Democrats in the late 1970s and 1980s; Newt Gingrich’s “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” determination to take over the House of Representatives; and the refusal on the part of too many Republicans to accept the very legitimacy of Bill Clinton’s presidency from its outset, an attitude which eventually led to Clinton’s impeachment, a maneuver that produced much of the toxicity which remains in the political atmosphere today.

On the other side, Democrats cannot claim with a straight face to have been totally innocent bystanders. The residue from harsh, personal attacks in the successful effort to block Robert Bork’s 1987 Supreme Court nomination has poisoned the confirmation process for countless administrative and judicial nominees since. Democrats’ dismissive disrespect for Ronald Reagan, from his candidacy for governor of California in 1966 right through four successful statewide and national campaigns and a two-term presidency, was not only counterproductive, it demeaned the offices he sought and held.

Most recently, criticisms of President George W. Bush have often been extreme in their viciousness and recklessness. It is fair and I think accurate to argue that Bush has been largely, although not completely, wrong on policy directions and inept in their execution. However, being wrong is not the same as being evil, as some suggest. This nastiness was first apparent in the wake of the 2000 election, when many Democrats claimed that Bush had stolen the presidency from Al Gore in Florida — while conveniently ignoring the fact that if Gore had carried his own home state of Tennessee, or Bill Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, the Florida results would have been meaningless.

Barack Obama seldom misses an opportunity to guide us away from past battles and outdated assumptions. He has urged us to embrace the “audacity of hope” and to believe once again that America can be a proud beacon to the world. Nevertheless, he needs to do more to encourage the true believers on both sides of the partisan divide to rediscover civility and practice mutual respect. He needs to remind Americans that its leaders can and should disagree, but that political debate must stop short of personal destruction.

If if that isn’t enough, perhaps the new president can point out that last year’s vanquished might well end up next year’s victors. If nothing else, that sobering note might give the more vehement combatants pause to think about the price of bad and unrepentant behavior.