president relationship and quoted Reagan as saying, “The speaker says that here in Washington we’re all friends after six.”
I’m not sure that means very much. Being chummy in private, where it doesn’t matter, but churlish in public, where it does, is no recipe for civility in public affairs. In truth, the Democrats of that period ran a tyrannical House, where Republican privileges and prerogatives were severely limited. For all the time he spent on the fairways with O’Neill, Michel was always a supplicant, not a political equal—until Michel had a semblance of a working majority because so many conservative Southern Democrats, known as Boll Weevils, were voting with the Republicans on tax and budget matters. And it is beyond contention that O’Neill and his allies mounted a ferocious offensive against Reagan in the 1982 midterm congressional elections, portraying the president as a cruel enemy of the aged and an unfeeling plutocrat ready to break faith with the American promise of Social Security. Reagan’s forces returned the attacks in kind, focusing on O’Neill’s portly profile and his liberal spending record. Lucky for the speaker, earmarks weren't earmarked for extinction in his time, or else there would be no billion-dollar warren of new tunnels under Boston today.
Civility more elusive The problem with the civility serenades we are hearing in the wake of the tragic shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson is that they are blatantly political in a way that makes a mockery of civility itself. Still, it is true that inter-party civility might be harder to achieve today than it was in the recent past.
As the Boll Weevil example suggests, as recently as a quarter-century ago there were large groups of political figures with affinity for the views of the opposing party. It was easier, for example, for Lyndon B. Johnson to win the support of Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois, the Republican leader in the Senate, for civil rights legislation than it was to attract Southern Democratic votes. In fact, a larger percentage of GOP senators than Democratic senators voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Dirksen and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield had an easier time displaying civility in 1964 than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his Republican counterpart, Mitch McConnell, do today.
And for all his problems with Republican lawmakers who opposed the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt was far less than civil with Sens. Walter George, Ellison D. “Cotton Ed” Smith and Millard Tydings, Democrats he brutally sought to defeat in primaries. 34