Columnist Dana Milbank Praises Republican Senator Rob Portman (Ohio), a Man Trying to Walk in Senator Robert Taft’s Admirable Shoes — a Story Illustrating that Who We Pick as Heroes Reflects Who We Are and (Sometimes) Who We Will Become

© 2011 Peter Free

 

15 July 2011

 

 

Were there more Congress members like Senator Portman is purported to be, I would have increased hope for the nation’s future

 

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has a keen eye (and a pen) for the flood of madness that Congress and the Executive gush.  When he finds something favorable to say about someone in high-ranking office, we should probably pay attention.

 

Yesterday, Milbank highlighted Senator Rob Portman’s (Republican, Ohio) efforts to derail the nation-destroying political madness that is eating us alive.  According to Milbank (an expert on Congress), Portman is attempting to emulate the honorable gravity that long-deceased Republican Senator Robert Taft (also of Ohio) brought to the Senate.

 

 

Why this matters

 

Keep in mind that, today, the Senate is a highly dishonorable caricature of the arguably laudable institution that it once was.  Anyone who attempts to return sane behavior to that body is worth supporting, no matter what his or her political affiliation:

 

Seems just about everybody in this town has gone mad.

 

President Obama and congressional leaders storm out of meetings and exchange taunts.

 

As the nation nears a calamitous default on the national debt, Senate Democrats waste much of a week debating a symbolic resolution about taxing millionaires. Republicans opt for a fight on the House floor over light bulbs.

 

But one man, Sen. Rob Portman, continues to do the people’s business.

 

On Thursday, the Ohio Republican shepherded through the Energy Committee, in a bipartisan vote of 18 to 3, a bill promoting energy efficiency that he had written with New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.

 

The day before, he stood in a windowless room beneath the Senate chamber to announce legislation to reduce prisoner recidivism that he wrote with the fiercely partisan Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

 

The show was vintage Portman: sober, smart — and exceedingly dull. He droned on in his Midwestern monotone about program streamlining and legislative reauthorization. “Let me put some statistics behind this,” he said, rattling off many.

 

This somnolent performance is exactly why I have admired Portman since I met him years ago when he was in the House, before he became President George W. Bush’s trade representative and budget director.

 

© 2011 Dana Milbank, Rob Portman, the boring Midwesterner who could bring sanity to the debt debate, Washington Post (15 July 2011) (paragraphs split)

 

 

“So where does Portman’s seemingly rational behavior come from?”

 

Milbank writes that Republican conservative Robert Taft (1889-1953) is Portman’s hero, right down to requesting Taft’s old Senate desk and office as his own.

 

Who was Robert Taft?

 

In 1957, a Senate committee chaired by John F. Kennedy named Taft as one of the five greatest senators in American history, along with Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Calhoun, and Robert La Follette.

 

© 2011 Wikipedia, Robert Taft (12 July 2011)

 

Eminent company, at least for those of us who know American history.

 

As a consequence, Portman — who is obviously not afraid to aim high— believes in getting things done.  And that apparently includes the true business of politics, reaching out to political adversaries:

 

Portman’s politics are no less conservative than Paul’s, but the uncompromising approach is foreign to Portman.

 

“We’ve now got to pull back, all of us, from our purity test and come up with how we get something done here that deals with the underlying fiscal problem,” he told me.

 

“This is a time in our country’s history when we have to figure out how to focus on results or we will fall further behind.”

 

© 2011 Dana Milbank, Rob Portman, the boring Midwesterner who could bring sanity to the debt debate, Washington Post (15 July 2011) (paragraphs split)

 

 

The moral? — Like his hero, Senator Portman apparently thinks politics combines statecraft, governance, and the art of the possible

 

Senator Portman is acting like a grownup in an age of demented children.

 

How many more of our leaders can we encourage to do the same?