During college, I interned for my local U.S. representative on Capitol Hill. Since I come from a very politically-red region of the country, my Congressman was of course a Republican. I was unregistered with a party myself (as I remain to this day), but quite interested in politics.
The Congressman’s junior staffers ruled my day-to-day schedule, but I did have occasional interaction with the man himself. For instance, whenever constituents from my region of the district came to visit, I would get pulled into the meeting. Also I convinced the office’s legislative assistants to rely on me for a few things. So I got a small glimpse of what congressional politics includes on a daily basis.
It seemed to me that most politics at this level consisted of one skill, convincing all sorts of disparate individuals and groups that you took their concerns very seriously. Other considerations seemed pretty remote and highfalutin, like political principles, floor debates, actual pieces of legislation (which were forever being “tabled” or placed “in conference” rather than actually being voted on). These obligations were crammed into the brief gaps between constituent meetings during the day and fundraising events — which I rarely attended — in the evening.
The Congressman did possess this one important skill, and quite a bit of it, the ability to meet people and, within seconds, convince them that he understood and appreciated their concerns. No doubt he’d had plenty of opportunities to practice his touch; he’d been a state representative for years before he was elected to Congress. Although he wasn’t completely at ease in every single situation, he was heavily reliant on his scheduler (the youngest member of his staff) to warn him when to steer the conversation toward or away from a particular topic. Her errors were the only ones I saw him become angry at in the office. I wonder what the more senior legislative assistants thought, was it that they weren’t even important enough to get yelled at?
But mostly, people responded well to the Congressman. Constituents, staff, colleagues, even children (can’t forget them). He had a kind of workmanlike, straight-arrow charm. He could summon up a nice twinkle if something really pleased him. He had a touch of absent-mindedness that made you want to help him out, pick up some of the slack since he couldn’t be expected to remember every last obligation of this impossible job. His main enemy was distraction, and the scarcity of his available time. His schedule was everything, and any deviation was cause to hold your breath and hope nothing went wrong.
The Congressman had come to Washington fired with passion for one thing, fighting crime. He’d been a prosecutor before he became a politician, and his most prized achievement in Washington was his seniority on the House Criminal Justice Committee. Republican colleagues frequently sought his counsel on criminal matters. In this way he cultivated working relationships with several other key members of his caucus, including (incidentally) Rick Santorum.
The one issue which drove the Congressman nuts was abortion — an issue which I, an intern charged with sorting and logging the mail every day, knew was ranked either #1 or #2 in its ability to generate urgent correspondence from the district. The other popular issue was gun control. The district, or at least its mail, was furiously and overwhelmingly anti- on both. On this issue, the Congressman called in all his favors so he could discover how key members of his caucus were going to vote. He couldn’t simply vote his conscience on this topic, due I guess to the demands of the district and party loyalty and probably other things as well. I have only a hazy sense of what the Congressman’s conscience told him on this issue, but I can surmise from a few clues (including his religious background) that he was against abortion personally, for anyone who sought his counsel — but that he felt uncomfortable legislating limits on other people’s access to it. I suspect this was a dilemma he was destined never to solve.
When I left Washington at the end of the summer, I came away with considerable admiration for the Congressman’s abilities and his personal dignity. Ever since, I’ve been reluctant to laud congressional representatives for their political stances alone — since I’d come to suspect that taking those stances was just a tiny part of the job. And promoting those stances in public was likely to be simple grandstanding, more often than not. In my view, the job of U.S. representative consists mostly of making a connection with your constituents. And, probably, the related task of raising money, which can’t be overlooked.
But I wonder sometimes what the Congressman would think about today’s GOP. He’s been out of politics for close to a decade now, retired or perhaps still lobbying part-time. Meanwhile, his former colleague Rick Santorum is running for president on a platform that I don’t think the Congressman would even want to listen to very carefully (since he was never strong on social issues, and was easily embarrassed besides). His party has shown bursts of enthusiasm for figures — Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney — whose ability to connect with individual constituents seems extremely hard to gauge, if not entirely hypothetical. And the entire party, House Republicans included, seems locked in a gratuitous death-struggle with a fairly popular president; this is a stance that I like to think the Congressman — this avuncular man who just wanted his constituents to believe that he was fighting to solve their problems, not cause trouble for others — wouldn’t even recognize.
Image by user “MyTudut” via Flickr.
