Still Thinking About Lindsey

Is it wrong to compromise?

I’ve been thinking about Lindsey Graham a lot. Maybe because his death was such a shock. I guess we’ve forgotten that people can die that suddenly, in the middle of the night, after just a chest pain or two. And he was 71. In fact, he had just turned 71 a couple of days before. As a friend who’s 81 said, he was young. You know the old cartoon of someone reading the obits and going younger, younger, older, older. Well, to a lot of my friends and to me, too, Graham at 71 was younger.

For years and years, he was always there on “Meet the Press” and on the top of the news. The Senator from South Carolina but more familiar and in-my-face than my own New York senators. These days Kirsten Gillibrand seems to be trying to figure out how the Dems can recapture the Senate. Not an easy task since Platner imploded. Were we really going to have a senator with a giant SS tattoo on his chest? And Chuck Schumer appears to be hiding out a lot. Maybe retirement is looking good.

I was also interested in how columnists were writing about Graham. John McCain’s daughter Meghan wrote a very touching tribute. Graham had been one of John McCain’s best friends. Along with Joe Lieberman, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, they called themselves The Three Amigos and traveled, drank and fished together. Graham once said, “If I had to pick one person in this great land to explain to someone from a different planet who are these Americans, it would be John McCain.”

Yet after McCain’s passing, Graham who had criticized Donald Trump and called him “unfit for office” among a lot of other things, joined Team Trump and became one of the President’s most vociferous cheerleaders. Was it because he was that ambitious and knew this was the only way to survive and stay in “the room where it happens.” When asked why he had changed from a Trump critic to a BFF he answered honestly. He said he wanted “to be relevant … to have a say in what’s going to happen today, tomorrow and next week.”

Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist at the New York Times had a more nuanced view than most about Graham’s changing allegiance. He noted that Graham had just come back from an overseas trip that had taken him from the NATO summit to a meeting with Zelensky in Kyiv. The trip represented a string of foreign policy triumphs for Graham. As well as an example of the senator’s steadying influence on the President’s behavior toward allies. At least some of the time. After the summit, America remains part of NATO. Trump and Vance have stopped scolding Zelensky.

Stephens concluded his piece by writing: Although Graham had flip-flopped he “didn’t abandon his core belief in the unity of interests of democratic nations against tyrannical foes or in the need for American power to serve just causes beyond our borders … He believed in big things, many of them important and true, and he didn’t let his moral or intellectual self-respect get in the way of advancing them. There’s a nobility in that, too.”

Graham compromised. In these days of fierce partisanship compromising is looked on as disloyalty or a cop-out. But I’ve been taking a course all summer about the Declaration of Independence. Let’s acknowledge it, the Continental Congress compromised. Big time. Without making a moral compromise, there wouldn’t have been a United States of America. At least not on July 4, 1776.

Of course, the real date when the Continental Congress voted for independence was July 2^nd. July 4^th was the date printed on the Declaration which explained the reason for their monumental decision. But I guess you learned that, if not in school, then over the last few weeks.

In fact, there was a good chance there would’ve been no vote at all. In Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration there was a fierce condemnation of slavery “this execrable commerce.” He blamed the entire slave trade on King George along with the King’s many other misdeeds. This wasn’t true. Besides, the southern delegates, especially from South Carolina and Georgia would not vote “yea” for independence if that paragraph was included. And some of the New England colonies, home to the ship captains who transported the slaves, didn’t want the subject brought up either. John Adams and Ben Franklin were both early abolitionists. They wanted independence, they compromised. And if we are going to discuss moral self-respect Jefferson had slaves and never freed most of them.

Sen. Gary Peters, the retiring senator from Michigan, is in our class. We’re all interested in what he has to say. The Continental Congress together edited Jefferson’s Declaration. They cut out 400 words and made 86 changes. Jefferson, of course, hated every change. They did it all, a very good editing job, in just two days. “Well,” Gary said, at the end of our last class. “It just shows you that legislatures can legislate when they are working together. And working on a common cause.”

The last sentence of the Declaration is an oath by the signers: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Clearly even though they had made an enormous compromise that would bedevil our nation throughout its history they thought their sacred honor was still intact.

Did Lindsey Graham, no matter how outrageously he sucked up to Trump, believe as long as he kept protecting the Ukraine and Israel, he had his honor? What does honor mean at all these days? Stephens acknowledges that pundits can be high-minded, but politicians probably can’t. Were our wise, brave Founders demonstrating you can compromise and still have honor if you can stifle your partisan differences and work together to achieve the greatest good.