Aide

This past Christmas Eve was spent at my brother-in-law's house. The bride and I had a very good time, as he and his spouse are excellent hosts.
At the party was the son of a friend. This person was about 30 years old and for his entire work career, since college graduation, been an aide to Senatorial office. We discussed among many things, the personalities of the presidents he had met and to a greater degree the interaction between aides and elected officials. It was intriguing to get such a first hand account of the machination of Congress. To say the least my wife and I were impressed were the very qualities that surely helped him get the position.

This person suggested that amongst politicians there can be grouped into about three character types.

• Salesmen
• Consensus builders
• Ideologues  

He also suggested a different grouping that basically broke down governance into two styles.

• Emotional and reactive
• Policy adjustment

Naturally the emotional bent is easy understand and typically assigned to the likes of groups with single issue focus, amongst those can be the Tea Party, OWS, Pro-Life and Pro-Choice.  These we were told are dangerous issues with regard to primaries but not so much on the national scale. The mode of operation is to play to the group that can injure your chances and then in open election and move center wards for appeal to independent voters.

This young man suggested he was part of the 'Policy' class that concentrated on legislation as a matter of achievable adjustment.  Naturally it was his position that this was the more statesmanlike course of action.

The discussion stuck with me, so as I am here today, having what amounts to acknowledgment of reality and followed with complaint.  Because of 50+ years of Democratic Congressional control (30's-80's) there was initiated in the Federal government an inertial tilt towards Un-Constitutional expansion, usurpation of States rights. The examples are so numerous it would be silly to enumerate. That tilt was crated by the people voted into office and they acted within their perceived right. 

The problem that I wish to talk about is the misguided preference for 'statesmanlike' policy corrections.  If new legislation is considered achievable only an adjustment to old because incremental steps are easiest to get approved, then it is by default tied to the faulty legislation. To place in an simple equation, if y = mx + b, where y is the output, m is the rate of change and b is point where the function crosses an axis. Policy people believe that adjustments to the equation are best handled by tweaking 'b', while any intuitive person knows that only changes the timing. The term 'm' is built by years of consistent political ideals such as the Democrats possessed after the start of the Great Depression.

For the last 30 years, the Republican party and the Democratic party have been trading places of control.  There has not been a consistent powerful force to impose a new 'm'.  I would argue that many elected Republicans are RINOs because of positioning required to be elected, and the Congressional opportunities have been squandered by Republicans who accept the current mode of operation, which is governmental expansion.  The practice of policy adjustment  ties us to what we know has failed and threatens to bankrupt us.

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