Everybody knows Washington is broken, and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the latest Republican to announce he’s running for president, has an unusual formula for fixing it.
“What’s wrong with Washington is we talk too much and we don’t drink enough,” Graham explains to Yahoo Finance in the video above, recorded during the Milken Institute’s annual conference in Los Angeles in late April. “Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill would have a drink every afternoon. They didn’t yell at each other on cable TV. They had a working relationship.”
Graham’s point isn’t about drinking, of course. It’s about the pragmatism and professional courtesy needed to solve pressing problems, even when Republicans and Democrats must ding each other publicly. Graham is referring to the 1983 compromise deal between Reagan, who was president, and O’Neill, who was the Democratic speaker of the House, to shore up Social Security when it was running short of money. Reagan had mocked the pension program as big-government socialism, while O’Neill and the Democrats he led vowed to defend it. Pundits predicted the two would never reach a deal but they did, raising the retirement age slowly over time, hiking the taxes that fund Social Security, and enacting other reforms that extended the solvency of the program by a generation or two.
Graham fashions himself an old-school compromiser able to solve problems that once again include entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare that will run short of money without cuts in benefits or new taxes to fund them. Graham’s proposals, which we’ve covered before, include scaling back tax deductions and other loopholes, asking wealthy retirees to pay more for Medicare, and raising the retirement age yet again.
Would a few drinks between political opponents actually help straighten out such programs? It might, but only if the tipplers were determined to accomplish something. Thomas O’Neill III, the former speaker’s son, wrote in 2012 that his father and the president both deplored “a country that was so polarized by ideology and party politics that it could not move forward…. It wasn’t the drinks or the conversation that allowed American government to work. Instead, it was a stubborn refusal not to allow fundraisers, activists, party platforms or ideological chasms to stand between them and actions that kept this country moving.”
If it worked in the 1980s, it could work today, Graham insists. But probably best to keep it low-key instead of turning it into a hokey publicity stunt, the way President Obama did during the now-derided "beer summit" in 2009. And given the animosity between parties today, Graham may want to make it a double.
Rick Newman’s latest book is Liberty for All: A Manifesto for Reclaiming Financial and Political Freedom. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman.
