Golf buddies irk the fringes

Here I offer my two-pronged take on the emerging talks to execute a couple of absolute imperatives. Those would be raising the federal debt ceiling and cutting rates of federal government spending.

The first prong is that golf remains a powerful bond that has long ruled corporate boardrooms and now offers encouraging contemporary political implications.

The second is that we indeed are getting somewhere when, as now, those on the two extremes of modern American partisan and philosophical thought begin squealing.

If President Obama's left flank is peeved at him, and if, at the same time, House Speaker John Boehner's right flank is peeved at him, then the prospects for the nation seldom have seemed more encouraging.

Golf seems to have helped facilitate a functioning personal relationship, one with potentially profound policy implications, between Obama and Boehner.

They got together for 18 holes two weekends ago. Then, last weekend, Boehner apparently dropped by the White House to say, you know, Barry, you've got a nice-enough touch around the greens with that southpaw stroke of yours. And, oh, by the way, we Republicans might go along with plugging a few tax loopholes on such things as luxury aircraft and oil company earnings, as you prefer, but only so long as we call these loophole plugs for revenue, not tax increases.

But that's only the case, Boehner added, if you could find your way clear in turn, Mr. President, to go along with us on real long-term savings both in Medicare and, yes, Social Security, which, you must admit, may be all right for a while but cannot go on forever at its current level of take-in and pay-out.

That kind of thing is music to Obama's ears. It represents the spirit he naively thought he might confront or help create as he embarked on his presidency in January 2009.

The president is not a strict ideologue. He is a natural left-leaner who wants to forge incremental progress in the middle. He aches for reasonable compromise with Republicans, whom he would prefer not to demonize in his hollow, grandstand-playing rhetoric, except that, you know, the Republicans have been demonizing him in their hollow, grandstand-playing rhetoric.

Obama is the kind of guy who would tell a newspaper editorial board that Ronald Reagan was a transformational president while Bill Clinton wasn't. He is the kind of guy who longs for what Reagan had with Tip O'Neill. You had a solid conservative and a solid liberal who got along and worked out a few things.

By the way, most of us will be better off if tuning out the hollow, grandstand-playing rhetoric of both persuasions, accepting it as a necessary evil to keep the hungry fringes fed.

So the potential beauty in these hints of productive discussions between the current Democratic president and the current Republican congressional leader lies in that there would be political advantages for incumbents of both stripes.

Democrats would gain politically from cutting spending. Republicans would gain politically from working with Democrats to make the tax system less tilted to the very large and rich.

Please understand that these advantages would accrue in general elections. These squealing partisan extremists -- liberal Democrats wanting more taxes and fewer cuts and tea party-inclined Republicans wanting no taxes at all and even deeper spending cuts -- are potent, but only in party primaries. They're largely irrelevant in general elections when decisive independents break disproportionately one way or the other, almost always to the candidate less extreme and more solution-oriented.

Obama and Boehner would do well to blend their talks with the Senate's so-called Gang of Five, consisting of three Democrats and two Republicans who have long been talking this same language. It would probably help if these five senators could play a little weekend golf.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.