The truth about political deal making
There is a foundational fairy tale to this presidential campaign: a born and raised plutocrat, a man who has always lusted for the shallowest of celebrity lives, has somehow morphed into the leader of a Movement, fighting for America’s working people. As President Barack Obama now says to roaring crowds, several times a week, “C’mon, man! I mean, really?!? . . .” It is a monstrous political fiction.
Occasionally, he lands a successful punch, nonetheless. Donald Trump’s attack on Hillary Clinton for her unwise remarks to a private fundraiser was bang on. Every successful politician offers one message behind closed doors and another in the open, on big divisive issues.
She should never have discussed such political sausage-making, even in a “closed” social event with major donors. Like her “deplorables” gaffe, it was further proof of how weak is her understanding of total change inflicted on politics by the intrusive reach of social media.
Clinging to the fantasy that you can offer confidential remarks, even to the most loyal group, in an era when smartphones can sneakily record any dumb remark can be fatal. Clinton must have forgotten Romney’s famous “47 per cent” smartphone debacle.
Trump has made the rhetorical backbone of his march to a humiliating defeat crude labels and insults. “Lazy Jeb Bush,” became “Lying Ted Cruz” then “crooked Hillary.”
Now there is “Hillary who is such a liar . . . so corrupt . . . she needs to be locked up.” In the flood of increasingly hysterical insult that flows from him non-stop, we are numbed to the fact that it is Donald Trump who has taken fiction, fable, and daily dishonesty to unheard of heights.
Despite her foolishness, to hear the definition of a “bald-face liar,” sneer at her admission that a leader must offer different versions of a policy pitch on a big and risky issue to different audiences was another gold-plated Election 2016 irony.
When she awkwardly tried to use Abraham Lincoln’s famously torturous journey to winning support for the abolition of slavery, as a defence, she dug herself a deeper hole.
Otto von Bismarck, the statesman who built Germany through endless secret deals, favourite bon mot was: “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” It has survived because of its essential truth.
Curiously, many Americans still hold a more naïve view of compromise and political deal-making. Woodrow Wilson’s Paris Peace Conference nonsense was that he would deliver, “Open covenants of peace, opened arrived at.”
Every serious political compromise is crafted behind closed, not open, doors. Lincoln’s round after round of secret persuasion with hard line abolitionists and hostile slave owners was essential to winning the 13th Amendment. Did he share the same message with each senator? Don’t be silly!
The similar skill of his successor at slippery sausage-making was powerfully told by Robert Caro in his Master of the Senate, volume three of the best political biography of the century. He reveals LBJ’s cunning and negotiating prowess in winning the Civil Rights Act. There is an ironclad corollary to keeping the sausage factory hidden. It is this: Never talk about it! The many, many months of the often painful path to winning Canada’s Charter of Rights ran through many locked caucus rooms, backrooms literally filled with smoke, and too many anxious whispered concessions in dim parliamentary corridors to count. Only Joe Clark thought one could successfully negotiate with a megaphone.
One senior Canadian politician, advocating to skeptics in private, the basis for the Free Trade Agreement, would chuckle, “Look, the Americans are always gonna cheat on trade. Why? Because they can! And no one can stop them! All I’m trying to do here is add a little friction, to slow them down a bit. You don’t think that’s a good idea?” It was a persuasive line to Canadians, always willing to believe in American skulduggery. It was not one he would have used with any Americans in earshot.
The Trudeau government has been playing three-layered chess for many months to win support for a pipeline in Alberta and B.C. and a national standard on carbon pricing — all without enraging green Liberals, red-hot Greens, or suspicious First Nations leaders. When the Toronto Star reports on their sausage-making, Ottawa loses. Silence until agreement is reached is essential to any such finely balanced deal.
If Donald were to lie a little less flagrantly in public, listen a little more respectfully in private, he might become a master of the “Art of the Deal” for real. Not merely deals made in a locker-room cooking up tax fiddles for casinos, but in the high-stakes real world of terrorism and nuclear-diplomacy. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Robin V. Sears, a principal at Earnscliffe and a Broadbent Institute leadership fellow, was an NDP strategist for 20 years.