Needed: A new culture of the deal

What Washington needs is a New Deal culture — or, more precisely, a new culture of the deal.

All the elements are in place: a president who prides himself on the art of the deal. Congressional Democrats who have made careers out of fashioning deals. And a government-closure stalemate that reduced Washington to paralysis, exposed American government to ridicule and called into question whether our political system works at all.

It took more than a month, but the country finally got a deal to get government workers back on the job and government functions back in operation. But we also need to acknowledge that there are two separate kinds of deals: deals of desperation, which is what the shutdown moment required, and deals of cooperation, which is what Washington will need now that the crisis has passed.

And it is the deals of cooperation that have, over the decades, made America great and have redounded to the glory of its leaders.

These sorts of compromise in the early days of the Republic gave us a Senate to preserve the prerogatives of small states and a House to assure the power of large ones. As years passed, they delivered great social advances for the many and they empowered the powerless few. Overall, they made the country more equitable, more secure and more welcoming.

At a moment when discouragement and despair rule, it may be inspiring to recall some moments of cooperation that provided uplift, moments of compromise from political figures who sublimated their rivalries and their personal interests in the service of the national interest:

— President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie. The two were bitter combatants in the 1940 presidential election, but once the contest was over, Willkie supported FDR’s LendLease program to provide armaments to Great Britain during World War II, rallied Americans to understand that isolationism could not endure in a world where the Axis nations were on the attack, and even served as Roosevelt’s emissary to Britain, Russia and China.

— Sen. Bob Dole and Sen. George McGovern. The two farm-state lawmakers, remembered best for winning their party’s presidential nominations only to lose the general elections, put aside their wide political differences to craft legislation broadening the food stamp initiative, expanding the school lunch program and providing food assistance to children around the world.

— President Ronald Reagan and Rep. Dan Rostenkowski. One a classic urban liberal from Chicago, the other a new-era conservative from California, together they worked to overhaul and simplify the federal tax code, one of the most dramatic legislative achievements of the last quarter of the 20th century.

— Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and Sen. Orrin Hatch. There seldom was a less likely pair of coconspirators than the Irish Catholic liberal from Massachusetts and the Mormon conservative from Utah, one corpulent and ebullient, the other slim and taciturn. They agreed on almost nothing but combined to battle the tobacco lobby and to treat uninsured AIDS patients.

— Sen. Tom Harkin and Sen. Lowell Weicker. One was an Iowa Democrat from a hardscrabble background, the other was a Republican heir to the E.R. Squibb & Sons pharmaceutical fortune. But Harkin had a brother who was deaf and Weicker had a child who was disabled, and their effort, along with Democratic Rep. Tony Coelho of California (who had epilepsy) and Attorney General Dick Thornburgh (who had a son with developmental disabilities), expanded America’s commitment to equal access and civil rights.

— President Lyndon Johnson and moderate Republicans. The 36th president, reared in the South, regarded civil rights legislation as perhaps the leading legacy of the Northern president whose assassination sent him to the White House. Along with Republicans Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois and Rep. Bill McCulloch of Ohio, Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress.

These deals righted American wrongs, opened American opportunity and softened the hard edges of American life. They required vision and were greased by cooperation.

They required courage, and they rewarded risk. And they required a culture of compromise, even amid moments of great contention.

It can happen again.