Barack Obama on the line
A couple of weeks ago Mike Ross, a conservative Democratic congressman from conservatively Democratic southern Arkansas, picked up the phone in his Washington office. It was Barack Obama calling.
The Democratic presidential nominee, at 33 percent in the only -- and surely outdated -- presidential poll of Ross' state currently available, was in town for the bailout vote.
He told Ross that he wanted to take the opportunity to chat with him and the other two chairmen of the coalition of 49 House Democrats calling themselves "Blue Dogs" and committed to deficit reduction.
"I didn't think that much of it, truthfully," Ross told me. "It was just a kind of a courtesy call."
But Barack Obama doesn't call a south Arkansas congressman in the middle of running for president merely for courtesy, jollies or to find out if the Razorbacks are likely to get it together this season. There are issues.
If he becomes president, Obama told Ross, he wouldn't be able to get anything through the House without the pivotal alliance of the Blue Dog faction.
This may be the kind of thing John McCain is talking about when he says Obama is already measuring the drapes. But this won't be an easy job for whichever of these men gets it. Contingencies and quiet preparation can't hurt.
If Obama becomes president, he'll almost assuredly encounter newly fortified Democratic majorities in Congress. But Democrats will be divided. You'll have those, such as Ross and the Blue Dogs, who believe the nation blundered to this fiscal calamity by a culture of debt and irresponsibility. You'll have those of a more liberal bent who believe the way to attack an economic slowdown is for government to chunk emergency bucks into the economy, for stimulus, for infrastructure, for jobs, even if it runs up George W.'s choking deficits.
Ross said that he and Obama talked a little about that and that Obama agreed with him that, while targeted new spending is called for, it must be paid for.
"Paid for" in that context means this: For every new dollar appropriated, the president and Congress find a dollar somewhere to take away or raise. It's challenging mathematics, putting bold and expensive new initiatives on health care and energy independence on one side of the equation and savings and newly generated revenue on the other.
Ross said the first way to pay for new spending is to get out of Iraq, which he, though conservative, wholly endorses. He disagrees with Obama only to the extent that Obama talks about 16 months for a drawdown and Ross thinks, for some reason, that 18 months would be just right.
"That's $16 million an hour right there" in savings, Ross said. It's a number so large that it is meaningless except for the hollow horror effect.
And Ross neglects the minor mathematical complication that he agrees with Obama that some of what we save by leaving Iraq must be spent on intensifying military activities in Afghanistan.
Beyond that, this is the kind of thing Ross is talking about: He wants ANWAR drilling, but for new royalty to be used exclusively for developing alternative and renewable energies. And he speaks with some credibility on attacking government inefficiency, if only because, as he is happy to point out, there are still 20,000 FEMA trailers parked at a rural airport in his district, never deployed to help victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Obama and this particular Southern Democrat are an odd couple. But Ross, who developed political antenna driving Bill Clinton 30 years ago, says he'd be comfortable squiring Obama around his district.
He admits he wouldn't have said that a month ago.
John Brummett, an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock, is author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.
