GOVERNINGWorks (GWorks)—[00:00:40:23] How would you describe It’s Even Worse Than It Looks?

Tom and I have been working together on analyzing and studying American politics, especially but not exclusively Congress, for 40 years—even a little bit more. And we’ve collaborated on a number of projects to try to both monitor and improve different elements of the political system—internally in Congress, election reform, problems with the permanent campaign and governance, campaign finance, ethics and a whole series of other areas. And we’ve written a number of books together on elements of this subject, the most recent before this one in 2006 called The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How To Get It Back On Track.

In that one, we lament a Congress that has gone off the rails: not doing any oversight; not fulfilling its fundamental responsibilities. We put a lot of blame on Republicans who took over the reigns of power while they had a President but behaved in a more supine fashion instead of being an independent branch. But we also faulted Democrats plenty for their era in the majority.

Six years passed. We did, in the mean time, an update of the book after the Democrats re-captured control, saying that things were a little bit better but this was far from a cured Branch. And then an editor who had worked with us originally on The Broken Branch called and said, ‘Don’t you think it’s time to do something that would bring the political process up to date?’

And, after some thought about whether we could actually fit it in, given our time commitments, we both decided that we wanted to go ahead and do it and do it on an expedited fashion and drop a lot of other things because we were increasingly alarmed at what had happened in the political process. Things that were bad in 2006, modestly but not wonderfully better in 2008, had taken a very serious turn for the worse. And a Congress which at one point captured a nine percent approval rating showed that the American public was at least as unhappy as we were and happened to be on target.

So, we wanted to do something that was broader than just looking at Congress, that looked at the culture more generally that had been corroded and really devastated more broadly but also in politics, look at many different elements of the process, and that would pull no punches. And that’s the result that we got.

It was not an easy book to write for us because we have tried meticulously to be straightforward, cast blame where it belongs. But, we retain a lot of friends on both sides and we’re not seen as partisans in any way. We’re still not. We haven’t changed. But, in this case, saying where blame lay meant putting a lot more of it on the Republican party, which we call in this book, ‘an insurgent outlier.’

[00:05:17:03] You share some experience and some views. Are there contrasting interests or foci that help make the book successful?

[00:05:22:03] Well, I think, implicit in your question is a model of ‘Crossfire.’ That is, the root to truth is through the confrontation of opposing ideological viewpoints. We actually reject that and think that’s a perverse aspect of our politics.

Norm and I disagree on matters occasionally but we agree on much more. We were both trained at the University of Michigan. We have our Ph.Ds from there. We came to Washington at the same time. We had a chance to work inside the Congress for a year. We’re both deeply respectful of our Constitutional system. We’ve spent a good deal of our careers explaining and defending that system and talking about the importance of the first Branch of government.

[00:06:35:21 Do you each bring a focus or interest to this book? Or does it begin and end with a shared faith government and your desire to see it continue?

[00:06:42:21] I think it really does. And to look for contrast is probably to sort of mischaracterize who we are and what we do.

We’ve worked together on a dozen projects in the past. They’ve all tended to be, ‘How can we better understand how our political institutions are working and not working? And what are the avenues for improving those institutions?’ That’s what characterizes us.

I think it’s also the case that Norm and I have each developed very unusual careers. We have one foot in Washington in the policy and political world and the other foot in academe. Norm has been a full-time professor; I never have. But, I was quite active in other ways in the scholarly community. And so, that’s what’s distinctive about our partnership.

I mean, if you look at our writings before we came together to collaborate, I probably wrote more on Congressional elections early on. That was my initial focus. Norm wrote more on decision-making within the Congress itself and the early reform movements.

So, we’ve...But, I think on every chapter in this book, one of us took the lead in drafting part or all of it and the other then re-wrote it in some ways. But, you couldn’t say, ‘Well, this is Norm’s chapter and that’s Tom’s chapter.’

[00:08:36:00] Let me offer a couple of sort of twists on this.

One is, this book got an enormous amount of resonance when it first came out [in May 2012]. And, it was kind of amusing because there were a number of liberal blogs, left-wing blogs that complained that they’d been saying similar things for years and nobody paid any attention. So, how come now this gets attention? And, I think, we believe a good part of the reason is that together we’ve spent 40 years building up capital as people who don’t start with an ideological or partisan edge. And saying this caught people’s attention. So that’s one part of it.

The second part that makes the book distinctive is not only that we provide some historical grounding and perspective but also half the book is about, ‘Where do we go from here?’

It starts with something that is not usually done in these cases which we call...is a chapters we call, “Bromides To Be Avoided,” things not to do. But, then we go into some detail in a whole host of areas where changes might occur.

It’s easy to throw up your hands and say, ‘This is horrible. Or the end of the world is coming.’ It’s harder to look at what you can do about it.

Now, we do this with a health does of reality and some skepticism. This is not something where there’s a quick fix or where there’s some panacea, you can turn a switch and all is going to be better. Partly because it’s deeply embedded in the culture now. And what we have is a tribal politics where the country is divided into tribes. And in some ways, that’s getting worse, the nature of this Presidential election.

One is what Romney advisors are talking about much more openly which is, while they’re not abandoning the idea of focusing on the economy, they’re turning to a sharper cultural attack on [President Barack H.] Obama and that’s going to provide an even further division. We have a lot of political science research that shows that ads on Welfare, for example, tap into racial resentments. And if the ads themselves, as Ezra Klein of The Washington Post suggests, are not overtly racial in nature, they have that effect and that’s why they’re running them.

So, fact’s mean nothing now.

And, of course, it’s been kind of amusing because Governor Romney himself lamented what’s happened and said, you know, ‘If there are ads that fact-checkers say are false, they should be taken off the air.’ But, apparently, that means, ‘Their ads and not ours.’

If you live in a world and a culture where lying is celebrated, changing some of the structures is not going to be enough.

[00:11:58:25] Are you and your book in part an example of the solution you advocate?

[00:12:03:25] It sounds inviting to pick up on but I don’t think that’s the case at all.

Neither of us is an ideologue. But, ideologues are driving our politics right now. So, it isn’t clear to me that the success the two of us might have coming together and working on this, even though we come from two institutions that, out there in the real world, have a reputation as being divided ideologically. In reality, we don’t well represent the political world.

Norm was talking about this before with the ads running and the absence of truth value to much of what is being said. And his examples came from the Republican side. That was not an accident.

One of the assertions in our volume is that the parties, while neither are angels—is an angel—, differ really quite a bit on this. I mean, the respect for, appreciation of facts, evidence, science is much more rooted in the Democratic party than the Republican party. There is a contempt for much of the scientific enterprise and really a contempt for what has evolved as our policy regime over a century, really going back to Teddy Roosevelt, and a determination to turn around.

There’s a new interpretation of what the Constitution means, of how it was divinely inspired. There are a sort of whole host of bits of evidence that suggest that in that respect as well as in other respects the Republican party today doesn’t fulfill the expectation that we have about our two major parties that operate right of center and left of center but basically in the mainstream of American politics.

We don’t have a conservative party anymore. We have a center-left party and a radical party and there’s nothing conservative about that radical Republican party.

[00:14:51:10] Yeah. That’s I think a very key point.

Our book is not a celebration of Liberalism—or even center-left politics—or even center-right politics. It’s really a look at and a lament at what’s happened to problem solving.

You know, The Broken Branch we dedicated to two great lawmakers: Barber Conable, who was a quite conservative Republican from New York, and Pat Moynihan, who was an iconoclastic but basically liberal Democrat in the Senate from New York. And we dedicated it to them not only because they were wonderful human beings but their goal in coming to public service was to solve problems and that meant you looked to build coalitions and you looked at facts and you looked across lines.

We got a ringing endorsement of this book from Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a long-time Senator who was a very conservative law maker. We’ve gotten a lot of praise from Mickey Edwards, who served in the House [of Representatives] for 16 years and was Chairman of the American Conservative Union. We use as an example Bob Ingliss, a very conservative Republican from South Carolina, who lost in a primary because he was not willing to say that Barack Obama was a socialist pig but who’s now gone on to found an organization from a very distinctly  free market view point on what to do about climate change that starts with an understanding that it’s a serious problem. And, he’s being vilified by a lot of people.

The big difficulty that we have is, I think, two-fold: One, it’s become tribal. So, it’s not what the idea is; it’s who’s expressing it. And you see that very clearly in the health care debate where we have a Republican convention that is going to just slam ‘Obamacare’ as ‘socialism’ and a government take-over of healthcare when it is extremely close to what [Mitt] Romney has not only been behind in Massachusetts but now apparently is getting back to saying positive things about along with a Republican alternative to the Clinton plan in 1994. This is not a single-payer system or even a public option. So, it’s because he’s behind it.

And, at the same time, if you are a problem-solver, if your goal is to find solutions, and that means working across party lines, in today’s Congressional Republican party, and it’s true in state legislatures in increasing fashion across the country, you are almost certain, first of all, to face a challenge in a primary, probably financed by the Club for Growth and you’ll be vilified and ostracized. That’s not the conservative Republican party that we know from the days of Ronald Reagan or moving forward. It’s a very different party. And, I think Tom is spot-on in saying, ‘This is not a conservative party; it’s a radical one.’

—End of Part One—

GWorks Interviews:

Thomas E. Mann & Norman J. Ornstein

Part One: We Are Not Hegelians

The book, the Republican party as

“insurgent outlier” and the value of

faith in government over conflict

Part Two: Ideology or Bust

The power ideology has over

politicians and the political process

Part Three: End Games

Race, political opportunity & what

Republicans are playing for

Part Four: Inflections

Is this a make-or-break moment

and is there cause for hope

GWorks Interviews:

Thomas E. Mann & Norman J. Ornstein

(Complete)

The one-hour interview in its entirety

For more interviews,

please visit GWorks Interviews

EDITOR’S NOTES

GWorks Interviews: Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein was filmed Tuesday 28 August 2012 in the offices of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, DC. GWorks would like to thank Mssrs Ornstein and Mann for their generous participation; AEI—in particular, Michael Pratt; and Caitlin Graf of Basic Books. Please note: Basic Books provided a Reviewer Copy of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.

Photo: Thomas Mann. Photo credit: Ralph Alswang. Courtesy Basic Books.

Photo: Norman Ornstein. Photo credit: Peter Holden. Courtesy Basic Books.

Photo: It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. Courtesy Basic Books.

1 Noted Congressional scholars and political observers, in Washington, DC for more than 40 years, Thomas E. Mann is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution; Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI. In addition to It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, Mssrs  Ornstein and Mann are co-authors of The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How To Get It Back on Track (Oxford University Press, 2006).

GWorks Interviews is a series dedicated to exploring governance issues of interest with persons given to thinking about and having relevant experience. GWorks invites a GWorks Interviewee to respond in depth to questions. GWorks does not edit the substance of what an interviewee says. GWorks edits GWorks Interviews only for editorial and technical considerations including style, length and productions issues. For more, please visit GWorks Interviews.