Pacing In Public Affairs

The start of the legislative session is just weeks away and with it the ambitions and hopes of many lawmakers - veterans and freshmen - for policy ideas they would like to see put into law.

The first two years of the Biden administration is also coming to a close and there are big questions about whether the president can accomplish anything in the final two years of this term with a Republican controlled House hostile to anything with his name on it.

The Biden Masterclass

Lessons can be learned from Biden’s steady approach for lawmakers taking their seats in the legislature in our Land of Steady Habits.

The other side is not the enemy. It’s just the other side.

When Biden was asked his view recently of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the president simply said, “He is a Republican leader” and that’s how I view him. In other words, even if I don’t understand him he is representing a constituency. He is representing some segment of the American public, just as I am and I have to deal with him on that basis.

In this view lies the seed or potential for compromise which should almost always be the goal of the legislative process.

Biden also understands the time value of a good idea. The most recent example is the multiple decades it took for Biden to evolve from someone who understood marriage as an agreement between a man and a woman, to his decision ten years ago to step out front on the issue of gay marriage, to his signing of the Respect for Marriage Act in December.

Most new legislative proposals take at least two legislative sessions to go from someone’s big idea to law.

There are no permanent defeats in politics, only goals deferred, and debates left for another day.

Bottom Line:

In public affairs, it is one thing to have a good idea, it’s another to have the patience to turn that idea into reality.