Oh yes, government

We’ve noted before in this space the wisdom of a comment once made by a British leader who was asked what the greatest challenge was for a statesman. His answer was, “Events, my dear boy, events.”

He grasped that it is a lot easier to deal with what you can see coming at you, such as a quadrennial election, for example, than it is to react effectively to sudden surprises — shocks, even — and to persuade your party and country to follow you while you do so.

The apparent and sudden urgent need to rescue the American financial sector is, by any definition, an event, and one that presents big challenges. So it is instructive to see statesmen trying to grapple with it — disagreeing but sensing the need for sagacity and leaderly bipartisanship while, nevertheless, seeing this event, as all others, through the prism of their ideology and party priorities.

Democrats want to make sure Wall Street corporations don’t keep all the upside potential of the bailout while sloughing off the risks, and also that executives don’t emerge from the debacle enriched despite having made poor investment decisions.

In the same way, Republicans object on principle to federal intervention in markets, boggle at the $700 billion cost and suspect that it is bad policy both to bloat the national debt and stiff taxpayers with the tab. In short, lawmakers react in accordance with their predispositions — which is why they are Democrats or Republicans.

What is not predictable — what is, indeed, amazing — is that Washington’s focus just six weeks from the election should be less on politics than on government. Sure, the political differences cited above play out in the campaign. And sure, the presidential nominees are obliged to discuss their own rescue plans as though these made a difference even though neither man is yet in the Oval Office.

But that very obligation shows how much the need to govern effectively right here and now has displaced the tactical maneuvering that each side had in mind before the lid blew off Wall Street. This paper and other publications that monitor Congress often lament the fact that for more than a year before an election, the necessity of winning votes increasingly encroaches on and eventually displaces altogether lawmakers’ efforts to govern in the national interest.

By this stage of most electoral cycles, issues of good government and wise policy are usually ignored. The ballot box casts a shadow back from November all the way to at least the previous spring. This year, however, it is the need for good government, for sober policymaking and sound judgment, that have displaced the prattling of the campaign.

It is weird to look at newspaper front pages in late September and see the presidential nominees shouldered aside by major issues before Congress. One could wish for better circumstances for this to occur, but it is a welcome and forceful reminder that winning is neither everything nor the only thing.