The toughest legislative negotiations always resemble those old movies in which a terrified and helpless damsel lies bound to the railroad tracks.
At the last instant, a hero intervenes to stop the locomotive. It happened with tax reform in the 1980s, deficit reduction in the ’90s, and the health care overhaul last year.
Odds remain good that because of the immense pressure for action on all involved, the pattern will repeat itself this week on raising the debt limit and averting a default by the United States government. But Washington’s capacity to recreate that narrative arc faces an unusually demanding test.
One set of reasons involves the continuing evolution of the American political culture in ways that make bipartisan compromise more difficult. In 2008, Barack Obama, as a presidential candidate, made changing that culture a signature objective; if anything, it has grown more dysfunctional during his presidency.
Another set involves specific near-term circumstances and the characters attempting to resolve the crisis.
The House speaker, John A. Boehner, has lived through many political storms during two decades in Congress. His relatively inexperienced leadership team, and the ideologically ardent freshmen in his caucus, have not.
President Obama has earned the gray spreading through his hair since reaching Washington in 2005. His chief of staff, William M. Daley, is in his seventh month on the job after a 10-year absence from Washington.
None of the institutional players hold power securely. The Democratic president, the Democratic Senate, the Republican House — each could get tossed out in the 2012 elections.
As all three reach for a solution, their margin for error has grown very small.
Powerful boundaries
What most complicates the chances for compromise is the broad political realignment that has played out over the decades since World War II. Once, partisan differences were blurred by intraparty factions in a Democratic caucus with Southern conservatives and a Republican caucus with Northern liberals.
Now, partisan and ideological boundaries are powerfully self-reinforcing — a double-layered Great Wall of Division, buttressed by fund-raising patterns and gerrymandered House districts.
A National Journal analysis of voting patterns earlier this year showed the trend essentially perfected. The 2010 record of the most liberal Senate Republican lay to the right of the most conservative Senate Democrat.
The attitudes of average voters are not quite that polarized. But they are nearly so. The ascendant methods by which they receive political information — cable television, the Internet, Twitter — reinforce divisions.
In a crisis, skilled leadership and fortuitous circumstances can overcome them. That happened in the fall of 2008 when Congress passed the $700 billion Wall Street bailout.
The request then came from a Republican president, with strong free-market credentials, whose term was nearly over. Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and were heading toward Election Day positioned to gain strength.
Even then, passage came only after one market-rattling floor defeat. This time, the pro-bailout votes cast by many incumbents make them doubly gun-shy about supporting a debt limit increase.
Senate Democrats, with at least 10 incumbent seats in jeopardy, could easily lose their majority next year. House Republicans could lose theirs too; after taking a big risk by overhauling Medicare in their budget plan, they have doubled their bet on the debt limit.
Another wild card
Mr. Obama, too, is vulnerable. He hopes to repeat the deftness that President Bill Clinton displayed in facing down the speaker then, Newt Gingrich, and securing a second term in 1996.
Mr. Clinton benefited from the prior Congressional experience of Leon E. Panetta, who was his White House chief of staff and is now Mr. Obama’s defense secretary. At the moment, some senior Democrats on Capitol Hill believe Mr. Obama misses the legislative savvy of his former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, now the mayor of Chicago.
Similarly, some veteran House Republicans fret that the “young guns” of their leadership team may lack the ability to command the votes of recalcitrant caucus members the way Tom “The Hammer” DeLay, as majority leader, and Roy Blunt of Missouri, as whip, did during the Bush era.
Institutional strains between the House and the Senate, which do cross party lines, add another wild card. That much was clear when a fallback plan written by the top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell, yielded no support from House Republicans.
The Tea Party-influenced House caucus poses the biggest obstacle because so many members have declared themselves impervious to normal political pressures. Disdaining the White House, the Senate, Wall Street and re-election concerns all at once, they reflect the declining confidence in established institutions that has transformed political debate for a half-century.
As the first unsuccessful bailout vote showed in 2008, legislative leaders sometimes bring critical measures to the floor without knowing for certain where all the votes lie. Even a slight miscalculation, at the White House or the Capitol, could produce a devastating financial market reaction.
The race to brake the locomotive of economic chaos proceeds hour by hour now. And as Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, a Republican member of the so-called Gang of Six, said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation” on Sunday, “Frankly, we don’t know what’s going to happen for sure.”
This article, headlined "Working with new script to stop a train wreck," first appeared in The New York Times.