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Author, biographer and magazine writer Robert Draper graduated from the Austin media to become one of today’s most prominent political journalists, publishing his latest book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives,” earlier this year. A native of Houston, he grew up with politics and power. His grandfather was Leon Jaworski, best known as the Watergate Special Prosecutor during the investigation of President Richard Nixon, and a partner in the Houston based international law firm Fulbright & Jaworski.
Draper arrived in Austin after graduating high school in 1976 to attend the University of Texas, earning his degree in three-and-a-half years and writing for the Daily Texan. “I don’t know what the rush was because then I just kind of floundered hanging around Raul’s and Club Foot in the punk/new wave scene spinning my wheels,” he confesses. Eventually he began to pursue his longtime ambition to be a writer “and started writing for a publication that didn’t really pay and that was the Austin Chronicle. But at least thanks to them I started to throw some ink down on paper and as well wrote for the city magazine we had at that time, Third Coast.” From 1983 to 1988 he pursued what he calls “the ignominious life of a freelancer, writing for anybody that would take me, and there weren’t many takers.”
His career got a boost when he published the book “Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History” in 1991. He joined the staff of Texas Monthly that same year. In 1997 Draper moved to GQ magazine. His 2007 biography of George W. Bush, “Dead Certain,” landed him on the New York Times bestsellers list. He currently lives in Washington, DC and is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic and a correspondent for GQ.
The Austin Post spoke with Draper following his return from a month in Libya exploring the nation following the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi for National Geographic. “Do Not Ask What Good We Do,” like his Bush biography, is an impressive work of all but immediate history, tracing the experiences of newly elected congressmen in the wake of the Tea Party movement during the 112th Congress and the legislative body’s wrangling and machinations around the debt ceiling issue. It offers telling insight into the sausage making of the House of Representatives and serves as a valuable political barometer as we approach the 2012 elections.
Austin Post: One distinguishing characteristic of both of your political books and your magazine stories on politicians is your fairness and even-handed treatment of the people you write about no matter where they fall on the ideological spectrum or how controversial they may be. Can you explain how that approach developed?
Robert Draper: Before I wrote about politics I wrote about prison gang members, serial rapists, white supremacists, all this for Texas Monthly and GQ. For a good eight years, I hardly wrote about politics at all. I found that the way to approach those people was not to judge them, not to condemn them, not to lecture them, but instead try to get inside their head and find out why they are the way they are and why they do the things they do. And I suppose I’ve applied that method to politicians as well. I think there are some really interesting opinionators out there who have a very sharp and pithy way of expressing what they believe. I’m not one of those people and I think that to the extent that I have opinions on the subject, it’s far more valuable to readers to sublimate those opinions and instead give them these fairly telling glimpses into political figures. I’m kind of bemused by people who find it so puzzling or amazing or suspicious that a guy can write about a Tea Party freshman like Allen West or Sarah Palin or George W. Bush and keep my opinions in check. If I can do that about serial murderers and rapists, why can’t I do that about a sitting president?
I just think that what’s apparently uncommon is for a writer to un-spool a 7,000 to 8,000 word magazine story or write a 150,000 word book and not lace it with his or her own opinions. I just think that it gets in the way. As a practical matter for a journalist, how do you go to someone and say, “I’m going to give you the level treatment,” when there is in fact a public record of not doing that. Others may disagree, but I don’t feel like my work suffers from me not asking gotcha questions or doing takedown pieces. I think that particularly in this world we live in now where people are inundated with information in 140 characters or Facebook postings, someone who lays out in long form journalism a person’s world view and puts it in a larger context… it only makes sense to use the space that I have at my disposal on that sort of thing rather than some pithy quip that someone can do in 140 characters.
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AP: How did you come to write a book about the 112th Congress?
RD: It’s not as if I had always been hankering to do a book of the House of Representatives. It was that when I saw who was getting elected in 2010 and what that would mean to the institution that I became interested. It was my view that when I saw these 87 incoming freshman, about a third of which had never had any political experience of any kind before winning, the thought occurred to me that this institution that was already pretty raucous to begin with compared to the genteel Senate was about to engage in a mud wrestling match. And the whole idea of that was to focus on these characters. Not just because they brought the Republicans to a majority and not just because of their ideology, but because these guys were newbies in the truest sense of the word. I thought it would be a chance for me to kind of do a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” – to see whether these freshmen would change the institution or be changed by it.
AP: It would seem that your Mr. Smith might be South Carolina Republican Jeff Duncan.
RD: He’s certainly Mr. Smith in that he has a kind of anonymity to him that the name Smith implies. And the reason that I picked Duncan was precisely that. It turned out that he became part of this ultra-conservative straw that stirred the drink in the Republican majority. But he’s also a guy who no one had ever heard of and a guy who no one has [still] ever heard of. And part of the ongoing experience of the House is how one guy becomes heard in this cacophony of 435 voices. And Duncan’s experience as much as anything else would prove to be that experience: not just to be distinguished among his peers but even getting a chance to speak. He talks in the book about how when he was in the State Senate in South Carolina he would give 15 to 30 minute speeches and see himself actually persuading people. But in the House of Representatives here in Washington his speeches would be 15 to 30 seconds. And that’s if he got a chance to speak at all. And so I selected Duncan because in addition to the very immediate issues that the House faced there was this sort of ongoing matter of trying not to be anonymous that I thought was poignant to write about.
AP: One clear-cut recipient of your fairness seems to be Allen West, who some of us have a hard time taking seriously due to his many almost insane statements such as his claim that some 80 Democratic congressmen are members of the Communist Party.
RD: West does say some not just provocative things but outlandish things. But he’s just as capable of offending Republicans as he is Democrats. For instance there was the new House calendar, the House schedule, drawn up by Majority Leader Eric Cantor, which would have the House of Representatives spending far more time back in the districts and far less time working together in Washington. Alan West as an incoming freshman even before he was sworn in was condemning that calendar, saying that now more than ever before all of us ought to be in Washington working harder to deal with various problems that America has, and this is a completely wrong-headed calendar. And that was a pretty ballsy thing for a guy who hadn’t even served one day in Congress yet – taking on one of the leaders of his own party. Having said that, I think the book faithfully chronicles a lot of alarming things that Alan West has said, and some of them will be difficult to defend on the stump. I will say this: unlike, say, Mitt Romney, you are not going to see Alan West crawfish on any of them. He’s perfectly willing to fall on the sword of his own rhetoric rather than say he misspoke. You will never hear him say he misspoke.
AP: One subject where it seemed that your own feelings seem to have possibly seeped through is former New York Democratic Congressman and undies pic tweeter Anthony Weiner. Then again, it seems that he is not well or widely liked overall, to put it mildly.
RD: I become interested in the way people are. I spent a lot of time with Weiner before his world crashed and burned and I think he’s a really brilliant guy who’s really hilarious. And when you’re a journalist and you’re sitting in a room with Weiner, you have no clue that he’s very abusive to his staff, for example. You don’t see that at all. But that is a reality that helps explain why it is that when his political and personal world began to fall apart, there weren’t a whole lot of people lining up behind him. Not people from his staff or former staff and not people from the Democratic caucus. And that’s important for readers to know. I will admit that I don’t like bullies and I don’t think that anybody who has attained power has to have as part of their job description the right and the power to abuse people. But I don’t have any particular animus for Weiner at all. I just think the facts are what they are and they don’t line up very favorably for him.
AP: It certainly seems like it was a fascinating time to be around the House with such partisan divisiveness and rancor plus internal party conflict.
RD: Yeah, and there are a bunch of different reasons for that, and I think that the Tea Party is part of that. But there are these other external factors like redistricting, which is this really obscure process that has dramatic political consequences, because in a nutshell what is happening is that swing districts are being eliminated when state legislatures redraw the maps. If the Democrats control, say, Illinois as they do, they’re doing all they can do to wipe out Republican districts and make more and more blue districts, Democratic districts. In Texas of course they’re doing the opposite. What that means is that you’ve got all these guys from really red districts coming in and all these guys from really blue districts coming in. These are guys who are not equipped to compromise and there is no percentage in them doing so. If the first thing they do is say we want to work with the opposition party, then they get primaried from the far left or the far right. So that’s one external factor.
AP: I can’t help but be impressed with how you have written what could be termed “instant history” or a work of über-long-form journalism, reporting and writing the book and then publishing it in less than the two-year election cycle.
RD: The thing is that it is a very compressed time frame. The idea to do the book came on the evening of the midterm elections on November 4, 2010. I got the contract about 10 days later. I began work on it November 16th. I think that’s when I did my first interview. And then I turned in a first draft the following Labor Day. And then did all the rewrites and tacked on the epilogue the day after Obama’s State of the Union address on January 25th of this year and then it was published on April 26th three months later.
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I did about 300 interviews with some 200 people. Some I interviewed just once. But the freshman like Duncan, West, Blake Farenthold and Renee Elmers I interviewed anywhere from 12 times to 20 times, because their experience was the one I was most interested in capturing. Whatever else one might say about these Tea Party freshman, they not only have convictions, whether any of us agree with them or not, and they also have opinions that they are not afraid to articulate on the record. When I’d be interviewing Duncan, for example, I’d often say to him, “Hey, if you want we can do this on background.” And he’d say, “No no no. What I am telling you I’d tell Speaker Boehner to his face.” And often he’d be very blunt. That was another reason why it would be worthwhile for me to follow these freshmen around: They had something to say and they weren’t afraid to say it.
There was really no choice in the matter, if you’re going to cover the House and have it at all character-driven then you have to reckon with the fact that these guys run for reelection every two years, and if you put this book out after a two-year cycle, you run the risk of some of the people you want to write about not even being in the institution anymore. So the whole conceit was to immerse myself in the goings-on for a little over a year and gun the book out. If you’re going to write about characters in the House you’re faced with little other choice. You can write about the institution, but then it becomes a think tank book, and I wanted to avoid that.
AP: Because it would have been really long.
RD: Yeah, and really boring.
AP: Do you feel that writing a very balanced and non-ideological biography of George W. Bush helped you gain the trust of and access to Republicans, whose distrust of the media is rather apparent?
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RD: I think so. I think another thing that helped me was that around the time that I was writing that book on Bush I was also writing a story for GQ about the McCain campaign and was following around Mark Salter, who was McCain’s co-author/speechwriter/chief of staff and sort of alter ego. I followed Salter and the McCain campaign for the better part of a year until the McCain campaign crashed and burned and a number of senior staffers left, and McCain was basically given up for dead. I wrote a long story anatomizing that meltdown that was I think widely viewed as a fair treatment of McCain and the vicissitudes of his campaign. And I think that in turn helped set up another story for The New York Times Magazine on the McCain campaign when it rejuvenated itself but then fell into a problem of trying to decide what narrative it would adopt for the general election campaign against Obama. That story also fortified this view that in the so-called liberal press I was someone who Republicans could expect to be treated fairly by. Right before doing this book on the House I did this long piece for The New York Times Magazine on Sarah Palin, and that piece was closely watched by conservatives and people in the Tea Party movement, and they were all very surprised that the very emblem of the “lamestream media,” The New York Times, would publish a long and level-headed and fair-minded piece about her. I think that story more than anything else gave me the opportunity to then approach Tea Party freshman like Alan West and Jeff Duncan and Renee Elmers.
AP: One very alarming statistic you cite in the book’s last chapter is how only 19 pieces of legislation that originated in the House during the 112th Congress reached the desk of the President. For all the noise Congress makes, it would appear they don’t really get much accomplished.
RD: It’s a really woeful output. What that is about more than anything is that the Republican leadership, to help bring their senior conservatives and Tea Party freshmen on board, offer all sorts of carrots in the form of legislative riders to these bills – sprinkling an ordinary appropriations bill with the stuff that would appeal to social conservatives that would bring them on board but would effectively move the legislation so far to the right that it stood no chance of being passed in the Senate. On top of which the Senate majority leader for the Democrats, Harry Reid, made the strategic decision that he wasn’t going to work with what he viewed as off-the-wall, far-right Republican legislation and try to bring it back to the middle; that that would be basically be diving into the mud, and would also confuse the Democrats’ overall message which is that these guys are extremists. So what Reid basically did was not play ball at all. The Senate, for example, never tried to craft and pass an alternative budget of its own which it would send to the House. It preferred to have dangling out there the Ryan budget plan for them to bash like a piñata rather than have two budgets up there that they would take turns bashing.
AP: One way in which most average citizens might question what good if any the House does is how at a time when the nation faces dire problems, Congress seems to spend much of its time playing politics and addressing special interests and pet causes rather than coming together to work towards solving some major crises like the economy and unemployment. And it would seem like the prevalence of winner-take-all politics is a major factor in that failure.
RD: A lot of it is that both sides – Democrat and Republican, particularly the leadership on both sides – are more about winning than about governing. When the Ryan plan was proffered by the Republicans, the impulse by the House Democrats was to sort of gleefully bash this budget as “ending Medicare as we know it.” And it took a lot of convincing on the part of Chris Van Hollen, who was the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, to get them to offer an alternative budget on the House side. Van Hollen thought, come on, let’s make a good faith effort to show the American people what we stand for, what we’re about, rather than just condemning the other side. But there were a lot of Democrats who believe that, no, ours isn’t going to pass anyway. So the important thing for us to do is focus on a winning message. And that winning message is to Mediscare, essentially – to essentially condemn these guys for putting their hands on Medicare. That’s been a tried and true for not only Democrats but in the 2010 cycle for Republicans to bash the other side, to demagogue on the issue of Medicare. But that’s about strategic messaging. That’s not about governing.
One thing that Democrats have turned a deaf ear to has been the ballooning federal debt. The Republicans have too under the Bush Administration. But that’s what a lot of these Tea Party freshman have said. They make no bones about saying: Look, a lot of Republicans went off the rails too. But for them, the big crisis, the serious issue to be addressed is Washington’s addiction to spending. The one thing you can say about something like the Ryan budget plan is that whether you like the way it addresses Medicare or not, it does dare to address entitlement, at least Medicare. And almost any half intelligent person on Capitol Hill and beyond will tell you that without serious entitlement reforms our country is teetering towards bankruptcy. I think the same reasonable people would tell you that the additional thing you have to do to address our debt and deficit problems is on the side of revenues. That’s the area that Republicans have turned a deaf ear to. So there’s the gridlock.
AP: One very telling moment in the book as far as the current political mood is where a constituent yells at Blake Farenthold: “You don’t get elected to compromise.”
RD: That took place at the town meetings he had outside of Corpus Christi in the spring of 2011. I thought that was a remarkable tableau, the “Coffee With Your Congressman.” It really did show you what a lot of these Congressmen – particularly the freshmen who don’t have much of a record and haven’t built up a whole lot of good will yet – have to deal with. The people who say that the Tea Party is dead are using as their unit of membership the number of people who show up at the rallies on the Capitol steps or are yelling or screaming at Democrats about Obamacare. The reality is that they are still out there. They just entered the bloodstream of the Republican Party. What was happening at that particular moment is that Blake Farenthold was saying – somewhat as a lament but also recognizing the realities – is that we have a divided government: The Democrats control the Senate and control the White House, and until the election, we just have to recognize that it’s a divided government and so every side has to compromise. That’s when these guys stood up and yelled: We didn’t send you to Washington to compromise. And as Republicans, their belief is that compromise means do what the Democrats want you to do. That’s why at the end of that debt ceiling deal in August 2011, when John Boehner said we got 95 percent of what we wanted, the Republicans weren’t doing cartwheels any more than the Democrats were. The Republicans went back home to their districts and people screamed at them: You promised us during the campaign that you wouldn’t raise the debt ceiling and you just did, you caved in, you’re a liberal. That’s the conundrum that Farenthold could already see; he could already see that train coming down the track as he conducted that town hall.
AP: That attitude seems to be totally antithetical to the very notion of representative democracy. As I see it, in an ideal and likely very naïve way, alas, the aim if not duty of legislators is to govern in a fashion that results in policies that benefit the greatest amount of citizens while being at least acceptable and also not offensive or damaging to the least amount of citizens.
RD: But what a lot of those voters from the Tea Party movement would say to that is: that very mindset of compromise has gotten us into the moment of time where we now have this $15 trillion debt, where we have this massive deficit, and where we have even Republican congressmen who are entrenched and still spending money hand over fist. And until the House starts rolling back that mindset, things will continue to get worse. One man’s obstructionism is another man’s remedy. For Democrats the performance of this House of Representatives was a miserable one, especially seen in terms of how few bills they passed. For the Republicans, and John Boehner has said this, that’s a beautiful thing. A government that doesn’t spend time passing tons of bills spending more money and regulating businesses is the best government we can possibly have at this time. I actually think that most level-headed people will say that the debt ceiling standoff was the legislative branch at its absolute worst, and that finally a desire for governance trumps ideology on things like whether or not the nation will default. But not everyone feels that way. And the people who don’t feel that way are the people that show up at town halls and scream at Republicans for not hewing to the right far enough.
AP: Would you agree that anyone who discounts the continuing effect of the Tea Party movement on national politics is ignoring reality?
RD: Again, as I said, if you want to look at it in terms of crowds, yes, it appears that the Tea Party has diminished in its influence. But if you look at it in terms of how Republican congressman are voting and how they are campaigning and what they say on the campaign trail – and for that matter when you look at Governor Romney and his embrace of the Ryan budget plan, something Republicans rejected in 2008, 2009 and 2010 when Ryan put it forward as a ranking member of the House Budget Committee – when you see all these Republicans now voting for a bill they would have been disinclined to vote for, viewing it to be draconian in terms of its Medicare reforms, you know that the Tea Party has come of age. You know that they’re out there holding Republicans’ feet to the fire pushing them farther and farther to the right.
AP: Did you come out of the experience of doing the book with any conclusions about how the mess that is Congress can be fixed so they can get down to the serious work of solving the serious problems facing our nation?
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RD: Outside of redistricting reform or the emergence of a third party that might compete for votes in the center and thus cause the Democrats and Republicans try to earn the votes they may get from moderates and independents, the only other thing is for voters to stem their tendency to be disgusted at Congress while continually reelecting their own guy. Until there is an unambiguous disgust registered by the voting public, and I think that unambiguous disgust would be reflected in pretty much all incumbents from both parties being tossed out, this behavior is likely to continue. Because the extreme elements in both parties – though I think as the party in the House the Republicans have properly had the spotlight shown on them on this regard – reward them for extreme behavior and punish them for anything that smells like moderate behavior. So until the voters step in and say "quit behaving like children and govern" then they’re going to continue to be this way. After the debt ceiling debate I really assumed as did the Republican leadership that a lot of the Republicans who had bucked the debt ceiling negotiations would go home and hear this clear-cut issue from their voters along the lines of "grow up and start governing." But that’s not what they heard. Once again, the problem is that the people who show up at the town hall meetings and the people who respond on Facebook and the people who call the congressional offices are the activists. And the activists tend to be more extreme. A lot of the Republicans heard: why did you compromise so much? And of course for that matter, Democrats heard the same thing. So coming out of the recess any hope on the part of the Republican leadership that these guys would have come to Jesus evaporated almost immediately.
AP: I have to wonder if the two-year Congressional term works against them being effective legislators because almost as soon as they take office they are all but running for reelection. I know this will never happen, but logic might suggest that a four-year term could to some degree alleviate that effect.
RD: The founders set it up because they believed that it was important to have this one sub-branch, the legislative branch that was particularly responsive to the public. And the context in which that was established was on the heels of fighting off a monarchy and not wanting a strong federal authority or at least let’s say a removed federal authority. There’s a certain beauty to the House in being maximally hotwired to public opinion. The problem is that when public opinion whipsaws so drastically from the hope and change of 2008 to the shut ‘er down of 2010, you have a Congress itself that is so governed by these spastic reactions and tends as if in a seizure to just shut itself down.
AP: The power playing of senior members of the House portrayed in your book seems to make a strong case for term limits. And I find it interesting that Idaho Republican freshman Raul Labrador changed his mind about term limits.
RD: Labrador had a rather purist idea coming in that the best term limit is the one imposed by the voters. What he saw was kind of an entrenched behavior by congressmen in his own party who had been around too long and weren’t responsive to the desires of the public. And it led Labrador to conclude that three terms and you’re out, six years and that’s it. It took less than a year for him to make a total about-face on that subject.
AP: When you were writing the book were you at all concerned that it was about an institution that the citizenry on all sides is so disgusted by that its approval rating dropped to a single digit?
RD: I think that was [publisher] Free Press’s concern. And it is true from a sales perspective that you’re not putting the wind at your back when you write about something that’s reviled. My agent broadly hinted to me with something along the lines of: You wrote a book about a guy whose approval rating was in the twenties and then followed it up with a book about an institution whose approval rating was nine. Have you ever considered writing a book about someone or something that’s admired? That’s food for thought. As Jon Stewart said to me when I was on his show a couple of months ago: a nuanced portrayal of characters whose work product he happens to revile makes him very uncomfortable. I’m not actively seeking to cause people discomfort, but trying to deliver a portrayal that’s humane is not always what readers have in mind.
I particularly enjoy the reporting and writing stage but kind of cringe at everything that comes after it. That’s left up to the gods of marketing and literature and I’m just glad when that’s all over. I guess to my surprise almost all the Tea Party freshmen that I focus on in this book like the book a great deal, and even though I think that some of the facts add up to a portrait that isn’t altogether flattering, they don’t seem to think so.
I do think that if this had been a book that demonized the Republicans who control the House and in particular the Tea Party elements, if it were determined to make all these guys all look like buffoons, I suppose I could have written that book and it would have done that much better than it has commercially. But I just made the decision that it’s not how I approach things as a journalist.
AP: Do you feel that your writing and reporting are influenced in any way by being a Texan?
RD: Probably not at all. There are certain elements of my Texas upbringing that have been useful to me. My grandfather was this famous Texan and really famous American, and to me his sense of fairness – particularly seen during Watergate when he pushed back against his younger, more zealous, more liberal deputies in the special prosecution force and decided that whatever one felt about Richard Nixon, the likelihood was great that he would not be able to receive a fair trial, and incurred a lot of hostility from The New York Times and others has a result – had an impact on me. The experience of working for Texas Monthly, where basically every day was a seminar on narrative journalism because I was sitting in the midst of people like Gary Cartwright and Mimi Swartz and Skip Hollandsworth, was really influential to me. But I think beyond whatever embrace of independence and individualism that is endemic to the Texas character, I’m not sure I can point to anything in the Texas experience that becomes evident in the way I do my journalism. Really, it’s not like I’ve invented a wheel here. This is the sort of the way journalism is supposed to be where you draw out a subject’s point of view and their behavior and you try to sketch them faithfully and you leave it to others to conclude what all that means. You try to have some guiding framework to it, but you largely leave your own ideology out of it.
AP: You already had a contract to do another book that you abandoned to write “Do Not Ask What Good We Do.” What was that book about?
RD: It was a book about the 40 years of race relations in America between the assassination of Martin Luther King and Barack Obama’s election. And I got the contract to do this book on how we got from the one place to the other shortly after Obama got the nomination. And at that time, a lot of other people in the media and the publishing business and I were really interested in the race narrative, and I think a lot of ordinary citizens were too. But I became increasingly concerned that by 2012 when that book would be published that no one would care about it; that for better or worse Obama would be judged by the majority of Americans on his record and not the color of his skin. And I was facing the additional difficulty that – this is unsurprising to everyone except me maybe – that people don’t like to talk about race, Blacks for one reason and whites for another. So the research was moving more slowly. And I might have had some difficulty anyway with that book. So when I saw this other subject was materializing I just thought it was more timely and something that I could pull off within the time frame that I had.
AP: It sounds like it was a continuation of Taylor Branch’s masterful trilogy about the civil rights movement.
RD: I am a big admirer of Taylor Branch and his three Martin Luther King books. I think they are really remarkable literary feats. But he didn’t try to do any of those within three years. And that’s essentially what I would have had to do with this more complicated narrative where the focus isn’t around one individual like King but rather all these other components relating not to Bull Connor and German shepherds but instead bussing, the educational system and a variety of other things that are whole lot more nuanced. I still think it’s a worthy subject but within the time frame that I had it was becoming increasingly undoable.
AP: If Obama gets reelected it would seem you have another shot at it. And to me it’s undeniable that race has been a huge factor in the opposition to his presidency.
RD: Even if he’s not reelected it doesn’t make that topic any less valid. But I’m not sure that’s the next book I am going to do.
AP: What do you think your next book will be?
RD: I don’t feel at liberty to say as yet because I am still developing parts of it. But my next book is not going to be a political book.
AP: In closing, I have to pose the question that Congressman Fisher Ames said back in 1796 that we shouldn’t ask: Just what good if any do these people do?
RD: Well, I suppose that’s in the eyes of the beholder. There are a lot of Republicans who believed that the House Republicans completely changed the ethos of Washington. Where Obama in January of 2011 in his State of the Union address talked about winning the future by reinvesting in all these things like education and research and development and infrastructure, that was a message that he discarded almost immediately when it became clear that Republicans weren’t going to have anything to do with that, that instead they were about cutting and slashing. And that indeed did happen. For those people who wanted to see government programs rolled back, they should be very pleased with the 112th Congress. For that matter, in the 100th Congress, for those people who wanted to see a monumental health care bill passed, mission accomplished on the part of Speaker Pelosi. The sort of routine things that allow the government to function were on the precipice of evaporating as a result of the deadlock in this Congress. So by that measure this was a dramatically obstructionist and underperforming House of Representatives.