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Dan Pfeiffer interview reveals inside view on Congress, and why the next president needs to make the Hill move

Andrew's Assessments

By Andrew Geisler, For The Miami Student

Last month, long time Obama hand Dan Pfeiffer left his job as a senior adviser to the president. On his way out the door, Pfeiffer gave a revealing interview to New York Magazine. It's an interview that gives political watchers an explicit window into how President Obama and his team view the House GOP. It can also tell us why Washington isn't working now, but why it certainly could again in the future.

The original Obama view, before the debt ceiling showdown in 2011 was that the House could be reasoned with. But after government shutdowns and a continuing strategy of budget politics by continuing resolution, Pfeiffer came away from the White House with the view that Democrats and the White House "don't have the ability to communicate with [Republicans]."

Pfeiffer's interpretation of the administration's basic view of their political adversaries is worth quoting at length.

"You have to be careful not to presume a lot of strategy for this group. I've always believed that the fundamental, driving strategic ethos of the Republican House leadership has been, what do we do to get through the next caucus or conference without getting yelled at? We should never assume they have a long game."

Washington types have struggled ever since the Tea Party wave to understand exactly what these people want. The President and his closest advisers are chief among them. But understanding the broader House Republican strategy as no strategy at all, or simply that leadership seeks to avoid getting yelled at during a conference meeting is a problematic misread of what is going on between the White House and the Hill these last five years.

The best way to understand the House Republican conference is to understand that the rank and file members are the important ones. Not the leadership. Speaker Boehner himself constantly admits this, telling reporters and anyone who will listen that he just wants to do the will of the House.

In this view, what the rank and file believes becomes the key to understanding how Washington operates today--especially now that the Senate is filled with members of the same political stripe.

When describing the Tea Party and the rank and file House Republicans, New York Times columnist David Brooks often says this is an anti-political political movement. This is a group that does not believe in politics. Instead they believe in draining any power out of Washington they can. That means when it comes to strategy, anything that takes away political authority from Washington is what they care about.

They choose to take a pure, anti transactional or political, approach to this goal, which means they will refuse to give in to the demands of the progressives in Congress or the White House on almost any level. They are seeking total victory over compromise.

This approach is of course a deeply flawed one in many ways. Politics is compromising. It is reasoning together, from the litany of viewpoints, to find the public's interest. It is often an incremental long game where goals are achieved slowly and over an entire career, not just a few short years.

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Conventional wisdom on the Obama administration would tell you there is no way to work with these anti-political freaks. That they do embrace the view of politics described above. This is wrong. The Obama administration also prefers the anti-political route.

Remember, this is the president who ran for office directly refuting the idea that the transactional politics of Washington needed to be done the way they had always been done. Pfeiffer channels this in the New York Magazine interview when he says, "He had hopes of being able to change the polarization, not just in the country, but in Washington."

High hopes indeed. The conventional wisdom is that the president, realizing he was unable to do this, turned inward quickly and decided to simply move the progressive political goals ball forward as much as possible during his two terms in office. He jammed through his stimulus and the Affordable Care Act when he had his majorities, and now he's simply looked outward, working on foreign policy because Washington is so impossible.

In the Pfeiffer interview he says the incentives in Washington now push the Democrats to take action that will please their base without much care for the center-the opposite of the Clinton strategy.

When he took a beating, President Clinton sprinted to the center and came away with welfare reform and a balanced budget despite being charged with articles of Impeachment by the House GOP of his time. He worked toward the center, where politics happens.

This is an example of embracing the nature of politics. It is not like there wasn't polarization-or "the Great Sort" as smart people are calling it now-during the 1990s. We simply had a Congress and a president who embraced what politics is.

As the Obama administration slowly comes to a close, the history will likely say the president did all he could, but what was he to do about his insane Congressional opposition? This quick trigger reading will be wrong. Obama and the House Republicans of today both have no desire to truly engage in politics--Republicans because of their desire for ideological purity and Obama because he thinks he is above it--despite being in the highest level political offices in the country. Both are too focused on their bases and less on the broader public-this isn't the first time this has happened, but this too shall pass.

Remember, politics is a long game. It's likely that our next president, no matter their party, will seek to make political transactions with Capitol Hill. And real presidential leadership is the type of thing that can make the Hill move, whether they want to or not.