OPINION

JOHN BRUMMETT: Looking for the adults

There are four kinds of politics to be considered in the shutdown tit-for-tat.

Let's begin with the politics of adulthood. We can dispense with it quickly because it's rarely practiced.

In this system, everyone in a position of authority and responsibility behaves pragmatically to achieve first the most basic task, which is facilitating a functioning government.

After all, the partisan argument should be about what government does, not whether government does.

You can find the adulthood system still applied in remote places like Arkansas, where recent governors Mike Beebe and Asa Hutchinson kept practicalities as their priorities.

But then there is the politics of the extreme partisan bases, of the hard right and the hard left, which despise each other--and which, being bases, provide the foundation upon which success must be built.

This kind of politics is currently controlling Washington.

Money, energy, trends--these essentials come from the extreme bases.

Democratic leaders don't see things entirely Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's way, but they know she is an emerging force to be blended into the equation.

Donald Trump, self-obsessed and without any ideology, doesn't see things exactly Ann Coulter's way or Rush Limbaugh's. But he knows that whatever they shout to their cults becomes his marching order.

In other words, our leading government officials are hostages of their least compromising supporters.

On Friday, Pelosi and the Democrats could rightfully claim resounding victory in this round, having held smugly to a no-negotiation stance because, by the politics of the extreme bases, "negotiate" means "cave."

Meantime, Trump struggles with a polling slide and a new dynamic by which Democrats control the House. Lately he has been venturing clumsily out of character to try to dip a toe into adulthood.

He said he'd do a nice turn for immigrant children if the Democrats would let him have his wall. He conceded to wait and give his State of the Union speech when the boss lady says that he may.

Pelosi sees that she has the faux tough guy right where her extreme base wants him--at sea, trying unnaturally to do a grownup thing or two for which he is ill-suited, risking fatal contempt from his own extreme base.

When pragmatic centrists in her party urge negotiation, Pelosi counsels that they should stand down. She thinks she has a chance to cast the big bully into the utter personal humiliation he so richly deserves, and, in so doing, send the base into ecstasy.

She also has had one genuinely substantive reason not to negotiate. It's one in which her allies say she is playing a "long game" while Trump plays the only game he knows, which is purely transactional, a "short game," only in the moment.

That substantive reason is that, if Pelosi gives anything to Trump now, then he might be emboldened to pull the same stunt again when the federal debt limit must be raised to avoid forced government shutdown, likely sometime between March and July.

Ideally, the solution to that would be the politics of adulthood. It would mean negotiating all of that at once in good faith. It would mean giving Trump whatever increment he gets for steel posts on the binding condition, witnessed by Mitch Mc-Connell and the American people and the Lord above, that he wouldn't ask again this year.

But, in the continued absence of adulthood, the politics of the extreme bases prevails. And it is a playground seesaw.

With all the weight on the extremities, those ends will inevitably go up and then back down. You might be soaring euphorically at the start of recess, but you could well be back on the ground when the bell rings to go back to class.

That's unless the children gain control of the playground and stay at recess permanently, forcing the closing of the school.

There are two more kinds of politics, mostly subsets of the late and lamented politics of adulthood.

One is the politics of righteousness, which holds that the point of political party membership ought to be to do the right thing. Party should be for country, not simply for party.

By that standard, a party position that places tactical party discipline over the good of the government defeats the point.

If your party membership dictates that you close government as Trump and Republicans did, or that you keep it closed absent negotiation as Pelosi and the Democrats did, then your party membership is about something other than the right thing.

This episode is not about a few miles of border wall. It's about one-upmanship that will be forgotten in a week by new "breaking news."

Finally, there is the politics of mutual dissatisfaction.

Rather than a negotiation from which Trump and Pelosi would emerge crowing of victory, we need a negotiation from which they emerge to whine equally about an imperfect solution.

The sounds of high-level whining steadily drowned out by the happy sounds of government doors reopening--that's what we need.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 01/27/2019

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