Senators' Optimal Experiences

I notice a fair amount of alarm on the left about Senator Lindsay Graham's claim that the 14 Senators who reached a deal on the Nuclear Option will now move on to negotiate a deal on Social Security. I suppose that's possible, but that ship has sailed, or, I should say, has sunk.

But Graham's enthusiasm reminds of why the important thing about Monday's "deal" is not the letter of the agreement, which has been lawyered to death already by people who don't seem to realize that it was written in half an hour and has no one to enforce it anyway. It's the change in the culture of the Senate. For most Senators, huddling in a room or in a hallway with a handful of colleagues from different viewpoints and working something out is the kind of "optimal experience" that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote about in Flow All the preening self-satisfaction that many noted in the Senators' presentation Monday night appeared to me just glee at being able to do this thing that they love. It's why they are there.

Many of them -- the best of them -- slog through all the campaigns and the fundraising and the committee meetings and the rest, just to get to those moments.

My most vivid memories of working in the Senate are of witnessing such interactions. I remember that as the welfare reform bill of 1996 moved toward passage, seeing Senators Dodd and Hatch just off the floor madly negotiating how to add more money for child care, in a kind of intense duet -- and feeling sort of sad that my boss, in implacable opposition, couldn't really be a part of it. I remember watching the bipartisan group that tried to salvage something from the Clinton health care debacle throw themselves into ten-hour days of learning and bargaining, and I have a feeling, just as a distant observer, that the process was still gratifying and thrilling despite failing to produce a result.

And they have really been denied the opportunity to engage in this basic Senatorial need for a long time. It's a need that Frist doesn't share or recognize, and that the culture of one-party rule has aggressively denied them. To use a very crude and obvious metaphor, they're like people who been involuntary celibate for a long time and now they all have brand-new girlfriends and boyfriends. Of course they want to do it again and again!

Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution had, I thought, the last word on the issue of whether to negotiate on Social Security reform, writing in the New Republic Online several months ago. Mann used the key point of one of my favorite books -- Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation -- to show from game theory that one should not cooperate with someone who has previously defected from a cooperative effort, and that Bush had already "defected" from the cooperative effort to rescue Social Security. In addition, the Republicans defected from cooperation on the tax cuts, the Medicare bill, judges, almost everything else, making it completely irrational for Democrats to try to cooperate.

Now, in an atmosphere of cooperation, and with a fresh start, within the closed circle of the 14 members who have defined themselves as the controlling center of the Senate, it might be possible to begin a discussion of Social Security afresh. It's very unlikely, but you can see why they would try.

More interesting is that these 14 are trying to return to the kind of institution where they have those rewarding experiences of collaboration and compromise. And for that reason, I think that whatever the letter of the agreement, there is going to be great resistance to letting Frist or anyone else pull them back to the precipice.