More than anything else, Barack Obama will need grownups to help him govern the country. He is in a position to choose some of them with Cabinet picks and Executive Office staff, but he is constitutionally bound to work with the Congress, which is not a target-rich environment in the area of maturity and reasonableness. But there are some hopeful signs.
Obama's daily prayer at this point should be that the Senate -- now solidly Democratic -- begins moving toward the lofty constitutional aspirations present at its founding. A "Great Compromise" from its very beginning, the Senate is where any residual, lingering impulse for compromise and deal-making resides in Washington. The founders tried to build in a certain maturity to the Senate by imposing a higher age requirement on senators than on representatives in the House and by making it impossible for the Senate to act impulsively. In The Federalist Papers, Madison imagines that the job of senator requires "greater extent of information and stability of character, requires at the same time that the senator should have reached a period of life most likely to supply these advantages."
These advantages have been in short supply on Capitol Hill latetly, and there is little prospect that the House of Representatives will be a saner institution than it has been in recent years. Already, the expanded Democratic majority there is feuding with itself: Rep. Henry Waxman's challenge of John Dingell for chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will be a bullfight between the bulls. It is a war between two old wings of the party, without any generational or policy differences, and thus in no way holds out hope for progress. It'll be a raw fight for power, and it is exactly what you'd expect in the House. Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who won re-election with nearly 80 percent of the vote last week, once described the Senate's biggest problem to me as "too many former House members."
This new class has only two former House members, the Udalls of Colorado and New Mexico. Neither has been an ideological firebrand in the House, and both come from states that insist on moderation. More important, the new Senate has two former governors -- Mark Warner of Virginia and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire -- who bring with them to Washington the sense of urgency for accomplishments and the willingness to deal that the governor's mansion requires.
For all these reasons, Obama may be able to count on the Senate to help him get some tough things done. He will have the largest Senate majority of any president since Jimmy Carter's 58-seat majority after the 1978 midterm, in which Democrats lost three seats.
Even the big 1980 Reagan victory with the GOP's 12-seat pick up only put the Republicans at 53 seats. And in the re-election landslide of 1984, when Reagan won 49 states and 525 electoral votes, Republicans lost two seats.
Obama's world will be different. Democrats will have at least 57 seats with a chance at two more in Minnesota and Georgia, and that majority is an Obama majority; both the classes of 2006 and 2008, a group of 15, so far, were elected on the same themes and by the same voters as Obama, and they have every incentive to work with him. He is also the first president in two generations to have come directly from the Hill, where personal relationships can make the difference between steady progress and open warfare. The buzz that Obama may want one of his closest confidants, Valerie Jarrett, to replace him in the Senate may be one sign of how important he thinks the Senate will be to his success.
There was no one on Capitol Hill whom George W. Bush could call in times of trouble to relate the states of play and then help him press his advantages. Not that he was ever interested in that kind of governing. The Bush decision to install Bill Frist as majority leader after the Trent Lott implosion in 2002 may be the best example of that shortcoming; neither man understood the institution enough to know exactly how disastrous an idea that was from the very beginning.
Obama has friends, some of them Republican and very conservative. Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn will vote against Obama more than 90 percent of the time, but if the president wants to understand the thinking in the Republican caucus and how he can affect it, Coburn will give him an honest read.
A bigger concern is whether ambitions to move the Democratic agenda, the now famous "pent up demand" for action the pundits keep yammering about, could force the president's hand on issues he'd rather not deal with and could eventually derail his agenda. But the economic and political realities of this new world have reduced the "agenda" to one, maybe two items: fixing the economy and getting the troops out of Iraq. With unemployment at a 14-year high, there may be enough pain to focus everyone on those two items.
An even more promising sign is that politically, Democrats have very recent and very unhappy memories of not being able to meet expectations. In 2006 they rode into Washington on a promise to end the war and then saw their efforts frustrated at every turn by a stubborn minority in the Senate. They are desperate to avoid a repeat of the last two years. And they have also seen what happened to the Republicans when they simply played politics with their control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Majority Leader Harry Reid is sounding all the right notes. Watching his majority grow on election night, Reid took the modest, maybe grownup, approach: "This is a mandate to get along, to get something done in a bipartisan way. This is not a mandate for a political party or an ideology."
And as euphoric as Democrats will be to have one of their own in the White House, sooner or later everything in Washington becomes about the next election: Reid is up for re-election in 2010, as are two of his chief deputies, Charles Schumer and Patty Murray. Demonstrable accomplishment will be Job No. 1.
Republicans must defend 19 Senate seats in 2010, six of them in states won by Obama. Democrats must defend 15 seats including ones in Illinois and Delaware, but most of them seem safe re-election bets at this point. Indeed, Reid may be the most endangered of them all. While there are historical reasons to believe that Republicans will pick up seats in 2010 -- midterms often function as a check on the party in the White House -- the precedents working against the White House incumbent is no longer as predictive as they once were. The GOP might want to get a few things done as well; that will require them to act like grownups, too.
