Giulio Andreotti (credit: Corriere della Sera)
“Power only burdens those who don’t possess it.”
– Giulio Andreotti, former Italian Prime Minister
What would Giulio Andreotti make of John Boehner and Barack Obama?[Note: The quote in its original Italian is here]
Chances are, you’ve never heard of Andreotti, though he is among the most accomplished politicians of the twentieth century. Andreotti, who died earlier this month at the age of 94, dominated Italian politics for nearly half a century. He served as its prime minister on three separate occasions and at one time or other held virtually every important cabinet ministry. He was a political prodigy – elected to help write the country’s new constitution in 1946 at the age of 27, named undersecretary to the Council of Ministers at age 28, and assuming a cabinet ministry while still in his 30s.
Andreotti led the Christian Democratic Party that ran the Italian government from the end of the Second World War through the early 1990s. His party was anti-fascist, anti-communist and pro-church, as its name suggests. It favored an expansive government that instituted all manner of social welfare programs. In foreign affairs, it was pro-American and anti-Soviet.
Though his career was remarkable both for its achievements and its length, Andreotti is better remembered today for the scandals that precipitated his fall. His ties to organized crime are well-established. Even the Italian appeals court that overturned his conviction for Mafia-related activity (because the statute of limitations had expired) affirmed Andreotti’s “authentic, stable and friendly openness towards mafiosi”.
The reform campaign (“mani pulite” or “clean hands”) that rousted Andreotti from office in 1993 and that resulted in the demise of his party ironically inaugurated an era in Italian politics that would be dominated by Silvio Berlusconi, who at the time was viewed as a political outsider, a successful businessman who would clean up Italy’s mess. Thus did “clean hands” give us “bunga-bunga.”
But it is no more fair to define Andreotti exclusively by his scandals than to define Barry Bonds exclusively by his steroid use. Andreotti’s achievements were extraordinary. When he first tasted power, Italy was in ruins. Its economy ravaged by two world wars in a generation, its politics poisoned by the legacy of Mussolini and threatened by extremists, its psyche ravaged by the rubble of Allied and German bombardments. From all of this arose an economic, political and cultural revival that looks the more remarkable in retrospect. Under Andreotti’s leadership, Italy emerged from its wreckage to become a prosperous and proud nation.
Italy overcame its problems in part because its leaders made the tough choices and compromises that politics requires. They understood that power was ephemeral and time was short. They preferred decisions to excuses, solutions to blame-shifting. They were flawed — often deeply so — but their achievements are inarguable.
I thought of Andreotti yesterday morning when Politico ran a piece entitled, “John Boehner’s Shrinking Power.”
“House Speaker John Boehner,” the article began, “who by title and position should be the second most powerful person in Washington, sure doesn’t seem or sound like it.
“He has little ability to work his will with fellow House Republicans. He has quit for good his solo efforts to craft a grand bargain on taxes and spending. And he hasn’t bothered to initiate a substantive conversation with President Barack Obama in this calendar year.
“All of this recently prompted Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, herself a former speaker, to declare on MSNBC that if Boehner were a woman, he would be known as the weakest speaker in U.S. history.”
Ouch. These criticisms of the Speaker are not entirely fair. From the beginning, Boehner has made it clear that he wanted to break from the recent tradition of heavy-handed Speakers that ran from Newt Gingrich to Denny Hastert (backed by the iron hand of Tom DeLay) to Nancy Pelosi. All centralized power in the office of the Speaker at the expense of committee chairmen and rank-and-file members. All met with disaster – Gingrich was ousted by his party just weeks after his single-minded focus on impeachment hurt his party at the polls, while Hastert and Pelosi had their tenures as Speaker cut short by overwhelming losses in mid-term elections. Boehner has employed a deliberately lighter touch.
Still, results matter more than style and, so far, those results have been unimpressive. The Speaker has failed to negotiate a “grand bargain” on the budget with the President, failed to organize his members behind a strategy to slow or even impede the implementation of the health care law, and has struggled, often without success, to keep his party focused and united. His biggest achievement in 2013 was his failure to craft any alternative to sequestration, something that has resulted in a reduction in government spending while avoiding political harm, although the policy of across-the-board cuts in military and domestic discretionary spending itself is hardly his party’s preference.
The President’s failures so far this year are legendary – his proposal to ban “assault weapons” garnered just 40 votes in a body where his party holds 55 seats, his efforts first to undo sequestration and then to blame Republicans for its consequences have fallen flat, and his budget, which arrived two months late, has largely been ignored.
His explanation for those failures would make Andreotti cringe. Unemployment remains high because of his predecessor, he failed on gun control because of the NRA, he can’t advance his broader legislative agenda because of Rush Limbaugh.
Just as the President blames Rush Limbaugh, the Speaker blames the President both for the nation’s woes and for Congress’s inability to relieve them. Both bend beneath the burden of power, unable to wield it effectively. So both focus on the next election, when they imagine that they will acquire the power that they now believe eludes them.
Andreotti would likely remind them that they have power now, that it won’t last forever, and that its weight doesn’t compare with the burden of its loss.