Vice presidents of the United States can be major players in a political drama, as current VP Joe Biden demonstrated amply in the past couple of days.

He helped broker a financial deal that averted a potential economic catastrophe. Biden worked with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell on a deal to save middle-class tax cuts and to stop automatic spending cuts that could have plunged the nation into another recession.

Biden’s role was critical for this reason: He spent 37 years in the Senate and knows how the system works in that body. He speaks senators’ language and knows many of the Senate’s senior members, such as McConnell, very well.

Indeed, President Obama employed the VPOTUS in a constructive manner that could serve as a model for future presidents. Indeed, think for a moment of another president limited legislative experience with a VP with many years of it working on Capitol Hill. The thought turns to President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson.

JFK never used LBJ in the way Obama deployed Biden. Johnson in fact was a master legislator, perhaps one of the best in Senate history. It is to his great credit that the current president sent Biden onto the legislative battlefield when the call came from McConnell to help rescue the talks that had broken down between the GOP leader and his Democratic counterpart, Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Whatever political spoils go to the administration over this deal, the president owes his No. 2 man a debt of thanks.

Given the stock market’s reaction to news of the deal – the Dow skyrocketed 300-plus points today – so do millions of Americans who made a few bucks today.

Good job, Mr. Vice President.

Note: I am going to write this post without using the words “fiscal cliff,” a description that is beginning to make me as crazy as the phrase “at the end of the day …”

Well, the House of Reps proved me wrong, and I’m glad it did.

I was sure the purists among them were going to spoil the Senate-passed budget hammered out by Vice President Biden and Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. The pie-in-the-sky crowd had me going. Then, Speaker John Boehner counted heads and realized he didn’t have enough votes to amend the measure and send it back to the Senate … and then he put it to a vote.

Guess what? A bipartisan majority approved the bill – and that included staunch conservative Republican Rep. Mac Thornberry of Clarendon. Mac said “yes,” and then griped about the need for more spending cuts in his statement announcing his affirmative vote.

I’m glad the measure passed, not because I’m crazy about it. It needed immediate spending cuts. They won’t come for another two months when the “sequestration” deadline extension expires. That’s when automatic cuts kick in, unless our distinguished lawmakers make the cuts voluntarily.

But tax rates remain low for us middle-income Americans. The wealthier of us will see a modest increase, to the levels imposed during the Clinton administration, when the economy exploded in a grand expansion.

Even better news for us older Americans is that the stock market – which has some of our retirement income tucked away – took off like a rocket today with news of the budget deal. I don’t expect the market to keep soaring, but at least it didn’t fall off the, um … never mind.

I am gratified as well that House members and senators aren’t patting themselves on the backs today. CNN business correspondent Ali Veshi said it best on Tuesday when he reminded us that Congress had 518 days to get this thing done but waited anyway until the last minute. “They live in a parallel universe,” Velshi said.

They got the deal enacted, but they still should be ashamed of themselves.

Goodbye, 112th Congress, and good riddance.

It comes down to this: Are the purists in the House of Representatives going to blow up an imperfect fiscal deal because it isn’t pure enough and, thus, risk raising taxes for tens of millions of their constituents?

Seems as if that’s a distinct possibility.

I don’t recall Senate Republicans singing the praises of the deal brokered on New Year’s Eve by Vice President Biden and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. They don’t like it any more than some liberal Democrats didn’t like some of the tax provisions contained in the bill. But they sought and reached some middle ground, which usually results in effective legislating.

Now it sits in the laps of the House members, most of whom are Republicans – many of whom are ideological Puritans who just cannot fathom the idea of compromise. They want it their way, or else. The “or else” could produce considerable chaos when the financial markets open for business Wednesday, threatening a lot of people’s nest eggs.

I’ll confess that I don’t like much of the budget package cobbled together either. I wish it had contained immediate spending cuts. But buried deep in the bill, near the end of it, there is language that says the cuts will occur in March, after the extended deadline when the automatic cuts are supposed to occur. It remains for Congress to make the cuts rather than allowing the axe to fall.

It’s not a deal-breaker in my view.

It is, however, a non-starter in the eyes of those rigid House purists who now are insisting on having it their way – or no way at all.

The 112th Congress is going out with a bang, illustrating for all to see precisely how it earned the title of Least Productive Congress in history.

Compromise isn’t a four-letter word.

So it came to pass early today when the U.S. Senate approved a deal to avoid plunging the nation into a new recession.

And it was lame-duck Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, who said it well. “You have some wins, some losses; in the end it’s about even.” Hutchison, who voted in favor of the deal, is about to leave the Senate, handing over the seat she held since 1993 to tea party zealot Ted Cruz, who doesn’t see the art of compromise as quite the shining art that Hutchison does.

Too bad for the cause of good government.

The 89-8 Senate vote seeks to keep middle-class taxes low; it stops the automatic cuts mandated by the so-called “fiscal cliff”; it boosts tax rates for families earning more than $450,000 annually; it cuts government spending. All in all, not a bad deal.

Is it perfect? No. I don’t even know how to define perfection at this point. Extremists on both ends of the spectrum sought it, threatening to increase every Americans’ taxes while enacting 10-percent across-the-board cuts in every single government agency. How is that good government?

The House of Representatives has the legislation in its lap. Some zealots – quite likely those on the Republican side – will insist on legislative purity. The buzz at this moment is that the overwhelming majority of House Democrats will sign on to the Senate package.

Those of us out here in Flyover County who believe in good government also believe that you cannot get everything you want every single time. As Sen. Hutchison noted, you win a few and you lose a few.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/blogs/burkablog/?p=14703

Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka seems to feel a bit sorry for Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst.

Not me.

It’s not that I dislike Dewhurst. I’ve always found him to be an earnest fellow. He’s very detail-oriented and has plowed into the workings of the state Senate, over which he presides.

Burka’s sympathy arises from Dewhurst’s loss in the Republican U.S. Senate primary this year to upstart tea party favorite Ted Cruz. Dewhurst, who’s allegedly richer than God, was supposed to be a lock to win that race, and then win the general election against Democrat Paul Sadler. It didn’t happen.

Dewhurst tacked far to the right and out of his comfort zone in order to out-right-wing Cruz. It was a poor fit for a guy who’s about as “establishment” a Republican as they come.

But it’s hard to feel sorry for a guy who still has a pretty important day job as lieutenant governor. Granted, it doesn’t pay much; he earns the same pittance – $600 a month, plus a per diem expense when the Legislature is in session – as other members of the Legislature. But he’s got all those gazillions earned from business investments.

Dewhurst will shake off the bad karma that covered him in 2012. At least he didn’t implode on the presidential campaign trail the way Gov. Rick Perry did. And by the way, Perry then threw all his weight behind Dewhurst’s Senate candidacy. That didn’t work too well for Perry, either.

http://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/fiscal-cliff-hanger-as-deal-in-limbo-85599.html?hp=t1

John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner, wherever he is, must be rolling over in his grave.

The crusty Texan was one of three men who served as vice president during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. He said famously that his office – and this is the cleaned-up version of what he actually said – wasn’t “worth a bucket of warm spit.”

Cactus Jack, meet one of your political descendants, Vice President Joe Biden, who has suddenly become a player in the latest drama to envelop Washington, D.C. Biden has been negotiating with his old Senate buddy, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and as Politico is reporting (see link above) the men apparently have made significant progress toward avoiding the so-called “fiscal cliff” that so many in DC say they want to avoid.

Biden and McConnell go back a ways together. Biden was elected to the Senate in 1972. McConnell came along in 1984. They served together for 24 years before Biden was elected vice president in 2008. I don’t know this as fact, but my hunch is that they’re actual friends, not the phony friends that politicians describe each other just to make nice in public.

McConnell and Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., have been unable to breach the divide. Enter the vice president, who apparently worked with McConnell overnight to forge some sort of compromise dealing on tax rates for the rich. The word is that the White House and the Senate have closed the gap significantly between their respective definitions of who is rich.

This is what friendship can do for the cause of good government. It remains to be seen as of this morning whether a deal will be finalized and approved by both houses of Congress.

But if comes to pass and we avoid this fiscal calamity by the end of today, I’m half expecting Cactus Jack to rise up out of the ground in Uvalde, Texas, and light a stogie in Joe Biden’s honor.

I listened to President Obama this morning on “Meet the Press” defend his position on the so-called “fiscal cliff” negotiations and came away with a single notion.

It is what he said about tax cuts for the middle class. He wants to preserve them, rather than let them increase if the White House and Congress drive us over the cliff. He said that keeping taxes low for middle-income Americans used to be a “mainstream Republican” idea, but now it appears that the GOP is willing to sacrifice those reduced rates to preserve the low rates for the wealthier among us.

If the Democrats and Republicans don’t strike a deal by midnight Monday, we’re all going to get kicked in the teeth with tax increases. I don’t want to pay more in taxes than I do already. I’m also quite sure no one who shares my economic standing wants to pay more, either.

The Capitol Hill negotiators now seem stuck on what qualifies as “wealthy.” Congressional Democrats put the figure at $250,000 annually; Republicans put it at $1 million. How about this? Let’s split the difference at, say, $600,000 annual income. Everyone who earns less than that can keep their taxes low, while the rest of Americans can pay a little more. Does anyone remember that during the Clinton years, taxes went up for the richest Americans and that kicked off a huge economic expansion, despite warnings from some Republicans, such as then-Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, who said the country would implode?

From my standpoint, 600K a year is a pretty nice income.

Meanwhile, the clock is still ticking.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/29/16216300-do-something-americans-fed-up-with-washington-as-fiscal-cliff-deadline-looms?lite

I’m not exactly going out on a limb here, but I am one of the millions of Americans who has had up to here with Washington, D.C.

Have I found a villain among all the bad guys who are herding this country to the brink of fiscal ruin? Yeah, it’s probably the Republican Party leadership in the House of Reps that cannot find the stomach, the will or the courage to actually compromise with Democrats. They have become hostage to the know-nothing tea party crowd that comprises a portion of the House GOP caucus.

They won’t ask the richest among us to pay a little more in taxes, as if the richest Americans somehow will become un-rich. They refuse to buck the no-tax-pledge edict mandated by a professional lobbyist, Grover Norquist, who’s never been elected to anything in his life.

The “fiscal cliff” negotiations have entered the final phase. Maybe something will get done in the name of sanity. Without a deal that must be struck by midnight Monday, the nation likely will plunge into another recession. And the consequences?

Well, speaking for myself, my family is going to see its retirement account drained of a lot of money. I don’t want that. Not now, especially, at my age. My taxes are going to go up. Employers are going to be even more reluctant to hire people. Long-term unemployment insurance will be disappear for about 2 million Americans. Oh, and the tax rates for the rich folks whom the GOP is trying to protect? Their taxes will go up, too.

Unemployment may spike back up to around 9 percent. The economy will stall out. International financiers say the U.S. will register zero growth in the coming year if we dive over the cliff.

And for what? Because Republicans and Democrats cannot find a way past their bitching about ideology and philosophy and protecting their respective political “bases.”

To be fair, Democrats aren’t blameless. They need to suck it up on the spending side. The government is spending more money than it can afford on a whole array of programs. However, from my seat, I keep hearing President Obama offering actual spending cuts to go along with a modest increase in tax rates for those who can afford to pay a little more.

But as I write this, we’re still stuck. Americans don’t understand – or care – about the political differences that divide our so-called “leaders.” They want something done. Now.

Count me as one of them. Get it done.

http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/

The link attached here contains some fascinating election data from every presidential election going back to 1789, when the Father of Our Country, aka George Washington, was elected as the country’s first president.

When you drill down into the 2012 election results, you are struck by at least one curious aspect: Republican nominee Mitt Romney won much more real estate across the electoral map than President Barack Obama. I haven’t calculated the difference, but when you click on the state maps you see that Romney won many more counties in the vast majority of states than the president. Romney won every county in several states, such as Oklahoma and Utah, while Obama ran the table in places such as Massachusetts and Hawaii.

The same thing was true in 2008, when Obama defeated Sen. John McCain by an even greater margin than he beat Romney. In fact, that’s been the tendency in many recent elections, with Democrats scoring well in the densely populated urban areas while Republicans do better where the population is more spread out. Take the Texas Panhandle, for example, where it is said that in some counties cattle outnumber human beings.

Some of sour-grape swallowers out there among the GOP ranks like to suggest that Obama’s two victories don’t really count partly because of that phenomenon. They like to declare some sort of moral victory by explaining that the losing candidate actually did better than the results indicate because he/she won more real estate than the individual who actually won … by getting more votes than the loser.

My answer is this: People, not livestock, elect politicians.

Get over it.

Our nation keeps losing high-profile warrior-heroes. Others remain and for as long as we’re involved in conflicts, we’ll produce more of them.

We said goodbye recently to Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, a Medal of Honor recipient and World War II veteran. Before that we bid farewell to former Sen. George McGovern, a decorated bomber pilot and fellow WW II vet. Of course, we’re losing many of our Greatest Generation combatants daily as age takes its toll among them.

And now it’s retired Army Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf who’s left us. Stormin’ Norman served two combat tours in the Vietnam War, led the American invasion of Grenada in 1983 to free captive U.S. medical students and then, most famously, led the allied assault in early 1991 on Kuwait to free that nation from its Iraqi occupiers.

Schwarzkopf was a larger-than-life figure. He was a man’s man who stood tall during those now-legendary press briefings, where he gave detailed accounts of the progress of the military campaign to boot Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait.

One of the obituaries I’ve read in the past few hours noted some criticism of the general’s strategy during the Persian Gulf War. It said some armchair generals back home – including those in Congress – had criticized Schwarzkopf for not pressing the fight further, for not capturing Baghdad and getting rid of Hussein when he had the chance.

The criticism was idiotic.

The Pentagon had clear orders from the commander in chief, President George H.W. Bush: Kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait … period. The president, using his immense diplomatic skill, had secured a United Nations mandate to support that effort. The mandate drew the line at liberating Kuwait. President Bush wasn’t going to violate the UN edict and he instructed his field commander, Stormin’ Norman, accordingly.

And as Schwarzkopf and others noted at the time, taking the fight to Baghdad would have cost many more American casualties – as the nation would learn when it invaded Iraq in March 2003 ostensibly to rid the Middle East of Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” which we would learn to our profound shame did not exist.

Gen. Schwarzkopf served his country with honor and valor. He now can rest in peace.