Lamar Alexander Offers a Welcome Break From Today’s Glue-Factory Politics

In the mid-1940s, 4-year-old Lamar Alexander climbed a tree, fretted that he could not climb down, and called for his mother to help. This was before the noun “parent” became a verb, and before advanced thinkers decided that parenting is a science, or an art, or both. So his mother simply told him, “You got yourself up there, you can get yourself down.” He did.He graduated from his free-range Tennessee childhood with a stock of gumption that propelled him through a public life spanning almost a quarter of the nation’s life, working with 10 presidents. His career’s astonishing breadth began in 1963 as a staff member in Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department. Mr. Alexander, now 85, was a White House aide to President Nixon, two-term governor of Tennessee, president of the University of Tennessee, education secretary under President George H.W. Bush, and a three-term United States senator.His memoir, “The Education of a Senator: From JFK to Trump,” tells his story of many achievements and a few disappointments (two attempts to win Republican presidential nominations). His graceful but unembellished prose suits his penchant for understatement. Even if — no, especially if — you find today’s politics repulsive, read this book while remembering Mark Twain’s warm endorsement of an exemplary congressional candidate during the seaminess of Gilded Age Washington: “The presence of such a man in politics is like a vase of attar of roses in a glue-factory — it can’t extinguish the stink, but it modifies it.”The placidity of Mr. Alexander’s memoir is disturbed only, but emphatically, and twice, by his immoderate dislike of the adjective “moderate” when applied to him. He specifically deplores a description of him as “of mild mien” and a senatorial model of “moderate Republicanism” that is “as valuable as it is scarce.” Those words are from this column in 2009.Mr. Alexander writes that he has always “detested” being called “moderate,” a “lazy adjective” that describes “style more than philosophy.” Homer nods, and Mr. Alexander errs.There are political people, and he is one, in whom personal style is inseparable from — is an emanation of — a philosophy. Of conservatism, properly understood. A conservatism whose principles include flexibility is indispensable in a functioning legislature, where negotiation and compromise are inescapable. Principles must be moderated to accommodate the inconvenient existence of others elected espousing different philosophies.Edmund Burke, the fountainhead of modern conservatism, warned against purely performative politicians, of which America today has a surfeit. They “make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity,” and become “flatterers instead of legislators.” By them, “moderation will be stigmatized as the virtue of cowards, and compromise as the prudence of traitors.”Politics is neither a science nor an art. It is a craft, like carpentry or playing shortstop. The dignity of a craft derives from the fact that it is acquired only through many years of repetitions. Hence patience is a conservative virtue. Faux conservatives who proclaim on the Senate floor their principled refusal to compromise often achieve their only intended result: cable television and social media resonance.This is actual conservatism: While campaigning for governor, Mr. Alexander met a mother who said, “I am sad tonight. My twin boys are smart, but they’ll never find a good job around here, and I’ll never see my grandchildren.” Hence his protracted courtship of Japanese automobile manufacturers to locate plants in Tennessee. By 2006, both of that mother’s sons and one of her grandsons were working for Nissan.Mr. Alexander’s political craftsmanship was honed during almost six decades of a public career whose diversity of offices filled is perhaps unmatched in American history. Of the 2,019 people who have been senators, few earned as much respect as Mr. Alexander, and like Ted Williams, he homered in this last at bat.Near the end of his Senate tenure, he and two other senators met in the White House Roosevelt Room to try to persuade the mercurial president to pressure some of his Senate acolytes to support a major bill, the Great American Outdoors Act. Pointing to a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, one of Mr. Alexander’s colleagues said to Donald Trump: “If you support and sign this law, you’ll be the greatest conservationist president since Teddy Roosevelt.” Alexander writes that President Trump “leaned back, folded his arms, and looked into space. ‘Wouldn’t you say ever?’ Trump asked.”He endorsed the bill, which became law. As Otto von Bismarck reportedly said, “You can do anything with children if you only play with them.”The Washington Post

Lamar Alexander Offers a Welcome Break From Today’s Glue-Factory Politics

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