Policy Glossy

Where are the giants of yesteryear? Gone to their reward making policy no doubt.

And the giants of today are no doubt reading Seneca the Younger every night. "It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare," he wrote sometime in the first century. "It is because we do not dare that they are difficult."

Seneca, a Roman philosopher and policymaker under the Emperor Nero — whom he later plotted to assassinate, an occupational hazard among those who employ policy wonks — is one of history's official "great men." We know this because Senaca was written about by other official great men, including Dante (who placed Seneca in the First Circle of hell — not too bad a place, as Dante's hell went), Chaucer, Petrarch, Calvin, Emerson, Montaigne and eventually ending up where all great men end up: Wikipedia.

The theory that history is shaped by great men (women were added later) was developed in the mid-19th century, but has come under attack by many, including Marxists, who view individuals as largely irrelevant and dynamics like class struggle and economics as the true shapers of social change.

No matter. We know great men and women still exist and still make great changes — when they are allowed to, which is rarely.

In the first century, Seneca dared us to do the difficult, and by the 20th century, Robert Kennedy was daring us to dream new dreams. "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" he said in one of many formulations he used from the stump in 1968.

(That this was borrowed, almost word for word, from George Bernard Shaw did not become a scandal, because among great men such things are called "homages" and not plagiarism.)

The thinking behind the quotes of Seneca and Kennedy could be said to be the inspiration for great policymaking: Dare take on the difficult, dream a different dream, and then get to work.

There are modern examples. The policy achievements of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal are too long to list, and even though some were struck down by the Supreme Court and others later abandoned, they made an impact: Think Social Security, the largest government program in the world.

Implementation of executive policy does not always require the cooperation of Congress — President Obama is certainly counting on this — but it helps. In his first and famous Hundred Days, FDR simply got whatever he wanted from Congress.

Lyndon Johnson used the grief and shock that followed the assassination of John F. Kennedy to pass much of Johnson's Great Society legislation. From 1963 through 1968, LBJ got more than 20 major pieces of legislation through Congress, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act of 1964, the war on poverty, urban renewal and national beautification.

Not counting urban riots and the Vietnam War, those were the days.

And today? Well, the major record of our current 112th Congress amounts to passing the 2011 federal budget in April, the temporary fix to the debt-ceiling crisis in August and the passage of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act in September, a major change to the U.S.

patent system.

Doesn't exactly makes one's heart take flight, does it? The administration is doing whatever policy it can do on its own, while trying to avoid the "small ball' label of v-chips and school uniforms. (You do know how to enable the anti-violence chip embedded in your TV set, right? Yeah. Sure you do.)

But President Obama is frustrated and stated his frustration clearly on — where else? — "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" in October. "I think the things that folks across the country are most fed up with," Obama said, "is putting party ahead of country or putting the next election ahead of the next generation."

In other words, almost nothing is getting through Congress, an institution that can only be changed around the edges since virtually all incumbents are re-elected.

Since 1964, the lowest re-election rate for the House was 85 percent (1970 and 2010), and the highest was 98 percent (1986, 1988, 1998, 2000 and 2004). In the Senate, the swings are greater: The lowest re-election rate was 55 percent in 1980, but that was unusual. The highest rate was 96 percent in 1990 and 2004. But with only one-third of the Senate up for re-election at any one time, it is difficult to make sweeping changes in that body, although the majority can teeter-totter when the Senate is closely divided, as it is today. Yet with the creaky, but effective, filibuster rule, the minority is usually guaranteed the ability to frustrate the majority.

Policy? Congress is where policy goes to die.

Still, some Obama policy has become law. Obama can claim health care reform; SCHIP, which provided health insurance to 4 million children; the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell; the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; the bailout of the auto industry; the Car Allowance Rebate System (i.e., Cash-for-Clunkers); and the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

Obama also won a Grammy and a Nobel.

Obama no doubt would like to add new policy achievements to his list before November 2012 — and reducing unemployment wouldn't hurt, either. But this will require the cooperation of many at a juncture in our history when cooperation is in extremely short supply.

Still, policy to some extent is always about dreaming the dream. As John F. Kennedy said of his policy goals at his inaugural: "All this will not be finished in the first hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."

So let us begin. Again.

To find out more about Roger Simon, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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