Enter Pelosi, Stage Left

I don’t get up to the Capitol building for reporting trips much anymore, having entered that late phase of a journalist’s professional life when he forgoes the mundane gathering of facts and embarks instead on flights of pure, helium-filled speculation and theorizing. My mental image of the legislative branch is thus stuck in the 1980s and early ’90s. And oh what a dump it was. Forty years of uninterrupted Democratic rule had imposed a Soviet-style squalor on the physical environment. Trash piled up like tumbleweed in hallways. The cops were surly and heavily armed. Blown lightbulbs could go weeks without being replaced. Urinals gushed in sluices across tile floors. The shelves in the few convenience shops were surreal in their economic illogic: a stack of last Thursday’s New York Times would sit next to several hundred pair of laces for children’s shoes and eight boxes of Mentos, but if you wanted a copy of that morning’s Washington Post or a double-A battery, you were out of luck.

Yet there was nowhere else, within walking distance, for a customer to go. The suffocating effects of one-party monopoly were felt most painfully in the food service. Deep within dim, airless, subterranean cafeterias, a bolus or two of mystery meat would twitch and swell in sumps of watery gravy, stirred now and then by mental defectives wearing smocks. Sometimes the servers offered cold hamburgers as an alternative, or a litter of iceberg lettuce leaves wilting under a blanket of French dressing to satisfy the occasional health-food enthusiast. You could order any kind of soft drink so long as it was Coke, which arrived in smudged glasses, fizz less. You got an ice cube if you acted nice.

Then Newt Gingrich and his Republican Revolutionaries arrived to sweep it all away.

So here I am, almost twelve years to the day since Gingrich’s ascendancy, in the Food Court of the Longworth Office Building on the House side of Capitol Hill, and I am stunned by the transformation. What was once the “Longworth Cafeteria” now dazzles and gleams and pops with light and color, as though someone from the private sector, and not a patronage worker kept in place by the partisan oligopoly, had put it together in hopes of pleasing customers. And that’s what happened. The Gingrichites took power and turned the food services and concession stands over to people with a profit interest. And now we have the kind of cornucopia only a free market can create; an array of foods named after places we all wish we lived in instead of Washington: A Santa Fe Chicken Special from Malibu Wraps, Carolina Brisket from Austin Blues. And the drinks! Starbucks coffee and Melon Smoothies! Endless cups of Diet Sprite–with ice! Freshets of Mr. Pibb!

It is fashionable these days, especially among disaffected conservatives, to say that the Gingrich Revolution amounted to next to nothing and ended in failure. Let those doubters come here. Let them come to the Longworth Food Court.

Yet now, undeniably, the Revolution is over. In two days Nancy Pelosi will be sworn in as speaker of the House while the Senate once again will fall into the hands of Democrats. I’ve decided to see as much of this spectacle as I can handle over the next couple days, and I thought I’d find the Capitol bustling in anticipation.

But it’s oddly subdued. The 100 Hours of frenetic legislative activity that the new majority had promised has been delayed. Instead of celebrating Democrats, the nation is now in its seventh day of an eight-day mourning period for a Republican, Gerald Ford–roughly one day of mourning for every four months of the Ford administration. (By the same calculation, Bill Clinton’s funeral will last nearly a month.) Congressmen are filtering into the food court from the memorial service up at the National Cathedral. They grab a cup of soup and take a seat at a table and thumb their BlackBerries, while their long-suffering wives chew quietly, staring into the middle distance.

I’m in a reverie, too. The last time I was in the Longworth Cafeteria was that day in 1995 when the first Republican majority in forty years was sworn in. The most telegenic event of the many festivities was held here. It was meant to confirm a cherished belief of the Gingrich Revolutionaries: that the popular culture, from which conservatives had so long been ostracized, and with which they were supposedly so out of touch, was at last turning in a rightward direction. “Hollywood is moving like crazy,” the activist David Horowitz announced in the New York Times. “The liberals are all fed up with Clinton. Clinton is over. It’s happening.” To demonstrate the point, Horowitz said he was soon going to stage a Hollywood extravaganza starring Delta Burke and Gerald McRainey.

As if that weren’t proof enough, here in the Longworth Cafeteria, at a “Family Reception” on that chilly afternoon in 1995, the lights dimmed and, in a sudden burst of music and fire, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers appeared! Across a makeshift stage they kicked and leaped and angled their arms in semaphores of their miraculous power. Popular culture was ours. Dozens of congressmen and staff members had brought their children and grandchildren. The noise was overwhelming, and it only grew louder when the ultimate power ranger, Newt Gingrich himself, appeared behind them.

Thinking back to that halcyon day, as I lazily watch the congressmen ignore their wives, two discordant notes disturb my reverie. One was Gingrich’s speech. It was as impossible then as it is now to keep Gingrich from giving a speech, and what he said that afternoon, once the Rangers stopped leaping and the children stopped screaming, foreshadowed a shift in the conservative sensibility, an accommodation that suggested less that the popular culture was becoming more conservative than that conservatism was becoming more like the popular culture. The presence of the Rangers, Gingrich said, “was personally empowering.” His praise was extravagant.

“We wanted them here,” he said, “because they’re multiethnic role models in which women and men play equally strong roles.”

The other discordant note involved a portly fellow grinning off to the side of the stage as Gingrich delivered his ode to multiculturalism. The fellow vibrated with a kind of proprietary pride. Now I know why. I dug up a press release the other day. Dated December 29, 1994, it announced that the Power Rangers “are appearing at the Capitol courtesy of motion picture producer and conservative Republican political leader Jack Abramoff.”

Wednesday, January 3, 2007, 10:00 A.M.

In further evidence of their move to the political center, the Republicans long ago abandoned the idea, first suggested by an aide to President Nixon on one of the Watergate tapes, that they firebomb the Brookings Institution. It was a stupid idea. As the premier think tank of the “sensible center”–which is to say, moderate liberalism–Brookings is thoroughly inoffensive. If you doubt it, look at the sign up above the podium here in the Falk Auditorium at the Institution’s headquarters on Massachusetts Avenue. It says “Independent Research Shaping the Future.” What could be more anodyne? “Independent,” in this context, means “liberal, but not so liberal you need to worry.” It means “Trust us, we’re not going to nationalize the banks.” It means “Please don’t firebomb us.”

There are many gray heads in the audience, survivors most likely of the long-ago days of the Nixon Terror. We’ve gathered to hear a panel of Brookings experts discuss “The First 100 Hours: A Preview of the New Congress and its Agenda.” I decided to come to the panel after I downloaded from her website speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi’s “new book,” A New Direction for America. They call it a book but it’s really just a thirty-page PowerPoint presentation, the Democratic version of the famous Republican Contract With America in 1994. The Republicans vowed to vote on the provisions of their contract in the first 100 days of the new Congress. A New Direction promises, pointlessly, that Democrats will vote on their proposals in the first 100 hours of their Congress. If things continue this way the next time the Republicans win an election they’ll have exactly one hour and forty minutes to pass everything. I think I speak for the American people when I say we’re sick and tired of this partisan one-upmanship.

The experts assembled on the stage seem to agree with me and the American people. Hurry, rush-rush, urgency–all this is anathema to liberals of the sensible center, who value deliberation and consensus above all, so long as the deliberation arrives at a consensus that is sensibly liberal. And the experts are the cream of the Brookings crop, the institution’s all stars, making for a kind of think-tank Concert for Bangladesh: There’s the fiscal expert Alice Rivlin, the education expert Lois Rice, the foreign affairs expert Bruce Riedel, and, serving as moderator–as though these guys needed moderation!–the congressional expert Thomas Mann. If you’re a veteran Washingtonian like me, you look at a panel like this and you think: “Wow.” And then you think: “Wait. Where the hell is E.J. Dionne?”

I’ve been checking my watch, and we’re only four minutes into the discussion before Tom Mann says, “The devil is in the details.” The reason think tank experts use this phrase so often is that they themselves are detail people. They are mad for minutiae, they are nanonerds, and emphasizing the details is, as the economists say, a way of raising barriers to entry, a strategy for keeping out non-detail-oriented competitors who might think that sometimes the devil is not, in fact, in the details. If details are the most important thing, then detail people rule. And these guys rule.

Thus all four of them find much to disapprove in Pelosi’s New Direction for America, which is a soufflé of focus-group generalizations. One of the 100-Hour agenda items is cutting the interest rate on federally guaranteed student loans in half. “Lowering the cost to students increases the cost to the government,” Ms. Rice says sagely, “and there are no decent cost estimates for that.” Who will come up with those details? Ms. Rivlin worries that fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax–at the mention of this think tank favorite, a shudder runs through the room–might complicate new “pay-go rules,” thus putting into doubt the practicality of two more Democratic priorities. Riedel mentions that another 100-Hour item–instituting the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission report–is complicated by the fact that almost all of the major recommendations of the 9/11 Commission report have already been enacted. And by Republicans.

“What I’m taking away from this,” Mann says, “is we need a more deliberative process in the Congress.”

It’s interesting that these Democratic experts find so little that’s compelling in the Democratic 100-Hour agenda, but to be honest, the discussion is pretty boring. Yet I refuse to leave until Mann uses the phrase “eight-hundred-pound gorilla.” No panel, indeed no think tank, can go for long without mention of “the eight-hundred-pound gorilla,” anymore than it can move forward without referring to “the elephant in the room” or, on special occasions, the “eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room.” If I’ve heard Mann say it once I’ve heard him say it a hundred times, and it never fails to delight.

This morning it is the Iraq war that is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla, Mann says. And the minute he lets this metaphorical cat out of the bag the other people in the room grab it by the horns and kick it through the goal posts.

“The problem,” says one audience member, “is that this big gorilla over there in the corner is using emergency supplementals”–a special kind of appropriation bill–“to scoop all the hors d’oeuvres off the table.”

Riedel says he thinks the “big gorilla in the room should pay for all its hors d’oeuvres, its entrée, and its dessert all at the same time in one place.”

By the time Ms. Rivlin mentions the “donut hole” in Medicare Part D, I’m starving. It’s lunchtime.

January 3, 2007, 12:45 P.M.

And who better to have lunch with than Congressman Barney Frank? To mark his rise this week to the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee, he’s been chosen as the luncheon speaker to a crowd of reporters at the National Press Club ballroom.

How to describe the NPC ballroom? Well, let me quote Eric Sevareid, the famous CBS newsman. “This room is the sanctum sanctorum of American journalism,” Sevareid once said. “It’s the Westminster Hall, it’s Delphi, the Mecca, the Wailing Wall, the only hallowed place I know of that is bursting with irreverence.”

The quote is on a plaque at the entrance to the ballroom. It’s baloney from start to finish, of course. The ballroom is neither hallowed nor bursting with irreverence, and Frank could be guaranteed a warm reception from the hacks as they picked at their grilled salmon. Even though the mainline press has been relatively tough on the Democrats this week–running concocted stories on how they’re reneging on their promises of bipartisanship, for example–the coverage is nothing like what Gingrich received. In the month before the ’94 election, the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that every single story about Gingrich on the nightly news was negative: a clean sweep unmatched before or since.

And it was simply taken for granted. Waiting in line with other reporters to attend a Gingrich press conference the day he became speaker, I found myself next to the revered columnists Mary McGrory and Murray Kempton.

“You’re a Republican,” McGrory said to me suddenly. “So I’ll ask you. What do you think is the most despicable thing Newt Gingrich has ever done? That we know about, I mean.”

Before I could answer, Kempton intervened.

“Leave him alone, Mary dear,” Kempton said. “There’s too much to choose from.” But he ventured a guess anyway, and before long the others in line, all of them beat reporters, had joined us in a spirited analysis of the general despicableness of the new speaker, before we were ushered in to his first press conference.

Neither Nancy Pelosi nor Barney Frank will face anything remotely like this, needless to say. “Our speaker is known for his quips,” says the reporter who introduces Frank after lunch. “He has said, for example, that conservatives are people who believe life begins at conception and ends at birth.” Hearty laughs! But Frank has his serious side, too: “He has fought for affordable housing and for equal rights for gays and lesbians.” And as the new chairman of financial services, “he has promised not to be reflexively anti-business.”

By the sound of it, however, he will be reflexively busy. Over the next forty minutes, Frank calls for instituting a single-payer national health care system, guaranteeing the mortgage of every house up to the median home price, forcing Wal-Mart and other retailers to unionize, reducing the president’s trade authority, and regulating excessive corporate compensation.

But in the Congress, he says, there’s an institutional bias against getting anything done. “In any fight,” he says, “whoever wants not to do something starts off with about a 25 percent advantage.”

It’s the most reassuring thing I’ve heard all day.

January 3, 2007, 3:30 P.M.

Chairman Frank told us that the chief problem we face as Americans is the widening gulf between rich and poor. “Only a small segment of the population is benefiting from economic growth,” he said, “while the vast majority is not.” Looking around here at the Mellon Auditorium, in the Commerce Department on Constitution Avenue, I know exactly what he means. Tuxedoed waiters carry champagne flutes on silver trays past gilded columns. Under the coffered ceiling, tables are laid out with pink petit fours and strawberries in cream and–I’m serious about this–cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Floral displays six feet high are spaced about the parquet floor. This is a “Women’s Tea,” sponsored by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the chief fundraising apparatus of the Democratic party, and these women, hundreds of them, are loaded.

Tomorrow Pelosi will take the chair as the new speaker of the House, and her picture will be taken as children swarm about her to touch her gavel, and she’ll say once more that this fulfillment of her personal ambition has been an event of great historical importance, but never could her message be more forcefully expressed than it is here, surrounded by wealthy women who have been invited to share in her success because they have donated generously to her political party. They have all been given copies of Ms. magazine as party favors, along with buttons showing a version of the old Rosie the Riveter poster from World War II, with Pelosi’s face Photoshopped over Rosie’s. “A Woman’s Place is in the House . . . As Speaker!” it says.

Master of ceremonies is the congresswoman Rosa DeLauro.

“When Nancy takes the gavel tomorrow,” she shouts, “she takes it for all of us–for every little girl who wondered what they could be when they grew up. And tomorrow we’ll find out the answer: anything you want to be!”

She introduces a slide show covering the career of the late Texas governor Ann Richards, which plays out over a recording of “Don’t Fence Me In.” She piles praise on Richards’s daughter Cecile, now president of Planned Parenthood. And she introduces Pelosi’s 8-year-old granddaughter Madeline to talk about her “Mee-Mee.”

“I love to be with Mee-Mee because she takes me to fun places like the Capitol building,” the little girl says, reading haltingly from a sheet of paper. Sighs rise from the crowd. The kid is incredibly cute. But coached. “My brother Alex made a wish that Mee-Mee would become speaker so that the world would be in better hands. I’m glad his wish came true.”

Then another slide show, this time of Pelosi’s career, under the ’70s tune by Helen Reddy, “I Am Woman.” And then the speaker-to-be herself takes the microphone. She mentions Ann Richards again. “That was Ann’s favorite song–‘Don’t Fence Me In’–and that’s women’s message: Don’t Fence Us In!”

She goes on to offer “praise for famous women”–for Molly Yard of the National Organization for Women “who was there for me for everything I ever did”; for the suffragettes, and for Sala Burton, the congresswoman who, on her deathbed, pushed Pelosi to run for Congress.

“And let’s hear it for my mother,” Pelosi says. Her mother was the wife of the mayor of Baltimore. “She lived at a time when options were limited,” Pelosi says, yet she managed to drag her children into every facet of political life, walking precincts, stuffing envelopes, entertaining the swirl of cronies who moved in and out of the family home–a life she, the new speaker, hoped to bequeath to her own children and grandchildren, and by extension to all children, yours and maybe mine, on whose behalf her labors are undertaken.

“This Congress will be about the children,” she says, “We will ask, ‘Where’s the child care?’ We will recognize that when we women are at work, we need to provide quality child care for our children. Everything we do –everything we do–will be done with an eye to its impact on our children.”

The cheering among the women in the audience, dressed in elegant pantsuits and wreathed in pearls and gold, soars as Pelosi calls to the stage every Democratic member of Congress. They take turns embracing her and then fan out behind her. Glancing across them one by one, I catch a disheartening picture. For all the talk of how the rise of women in politics will transform America, this is just another collection of professional pols, not much different from the guys and gals who gathered behind Gingrich and then Denny Hastert, with the same ratio of nutters, ideologues, incompetents, egomaniacs, and borderline crooks spread among the usual mass of grinning mediocrity.

And I realized that here was the real message of this week. The Democrats aren’t celebrating the triumph of women in politics, not really. They’re celebrating the triumph of politics over everything.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. His Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America (Atlantic Monthly Press) will be published this spring.