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Dear Editor:
In his book On the House: A Washington Memoir, former House speaker John Boehner captions a photo of him walking between then-VP Joe Biden and President Obama, writing, “I usually didn’t agree with either of these guys on policy, but they weren’t bad people. Photos like this didn’t endear me to some members of my party – most, really – but somebody had to be the adult in the room, find common ground, and get things done.”
Reading this left me somewhere between hope and resignation. Hope in that such cordiality existed as recently as a decade ago, and resignation from seeing so little of it lately.
Much has been written about President Ronald Reagan and then House speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill working together on the 1986 Tax Reform Act.
Despite their contentious 1996 presidential campaign, former Kansas Senator Bob Dole and President Bill Clinton became good friends and worked on several projects together.
Sometimes politicians fail to seize the moment. President Carter couldn’t pass a tax bill even with a heavily Democratic Congress. President George H. W. Bush, with sky-high ratings after the Desert Storm victory, couldn’t beat Bill Clinton in 1992. Nobody’s perfect.
Yet Bush’s leadership during the first Iraq War was surehanded and restrained, and Carter coordinated a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. In each case, there was, as Boehner might say, “An adult in the room.”
We still have adults in the White House and Capitol Hill – just not enough of them.
Jim Newton
Itasca, Ill.