He said it often. I’ve heard other governors say it, too, so it wasn’t an original saying of Janklow’s. He just said it forcefully, as he said so many things. I’ve also, over the years, seen the quote attributed to other people — so many, in fact, that I have no idea who might have been the first person to actually say it. Whoever it was, they knew what they were talking about.
I’m reminded of that as I watch wrangling the last several years in the Congress of the United States. The other day, a bipartisan group announced a potential compromise to build, rebuild and repair infrastructure across the country. That’s a good deal for citizens, it seems, both in terms of better highways, bridges and other things and in terms of jobs for people. No sooner was the possible deal announced, though, than people began to say it was falling apart, kind of like bridges and roads in the country, I guess.
Everyone had someone to blame for the possible failure of the deal. I guess the corollary to the “government can get a lot done’’ is this: Government can get very little done if everyone cares who gets blamed. It’s come to that in a country where too many of our elected leaders care more about their next election than about making things better for the people they’re supposed to be serving.
As Andrew Shepard, the Michael Douglas character in “The American President,’’ said, “I was so busy keeping my job I forgot to do my job.’’ Boy, there sure seems to be a lot of that going around in elected positions these days.
The thing is, in spite of what those of us who spend a lot of time on social media might come to believe, I’m pretty sure most people who want infrastructure improvements don’t really care who gets the credit. They’d just like a safe bridge and a road free of potholes. They’d figure out for themselves who made it happen.
Looking through some history of the U.S. Senate the other evening, I stumbled on a Washington Post news story from Jan. 7, 2001. It described a power-sharing deal between Republicans and Democrats. The story called the deal unprecedented. Each party had 50 members, so the respective leaders, Trent Lott for the Republicans and South Dakota’s Tom Daschle for the Democrats, worked out a plan that gave each party an equal share of most of the Senate’s operations.
The agreement wasn’t accepted wholeheartedly by some in the Senate, but as I read through other stories from that period, I gathered that a lot of senators figured it was better than gridlock. Gridlock would mean getting nothing done. And the goal of anyone elected to any federal, state or local position should be getting something done, not getting elected again.
It reminded me of 1973 and 1974 in South Dakota, when Democrats had one more vote in the state Senate and an even split in the state House of Representatives. Each party had a handful of mavericks, loose cannons, whatever you want to call them. Gridlock, although the term wasn’t used in those days, seemed inevitable. Yet those were some of the most productive legislatures in the 40 years I covered state government as a news reporter.
This is just my observation, but things got done when gridlock could have easily happened because most of the elected senators and representatives wanted things to get done more than they wanted to score political points. Government can get a lot done if nobody cares who gets a political win.
Don’t get me wrong. Partisan politics didn’t disappear. Those men and women weren’t saints. They argued over policy, approaches, finances and so on. But they tended to argue in an effort to improve the legislation under scrutiny, not to wound the opposing party. Those legislators wanted to do good for the people who asked them to represent them in Pierre.
That’s how it’s supposed to work.
