I just came upon a really interesting profile of Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) in the August issue of Philadelphia Magazine. The author, Patrick Kerkstra, is a self-identified liberal who describes how Toomey has come to be seen as a pragmatic dealmaker, despite having first arrived on the national scene as a conservative firebrand. Kerkstra attributes this shift to the fact that the Tea Party movement has led to a rightward rhetorical shift among Republicans, yet he also acknowledges Toomey’s willingness to make concessions in negotiations with congressional Democrats back in 2011:
In August 2011, Toomey was named to one of three GOP Senate positions on the so-called Super Committee, the bipartisan panel charged with the near-impossible job of coming up with a deficit reduction plan that both parties could live with. Toomey was picked to fill the role of Republican bad cop. His selection was meant to assure the conservative base that the GOP wouldn’t get steamrolled, and signaled to Democrats that there was little chance they would get big tax hikes on the rich as part of any deal.
After about three months of futile backroom discussions, the Super Committee was ready to announce it had failed, as most Washington observers had expected all along. And then Pat Toomey—the freshman senator—offered a compromise that for a fleeting moment looked like the ticket to a $15 trillion deficit deal both sides could swallow. His package was heavy on spending cuts (epic ones, in fact), but it also made a nod to the Democratic holy grail of new tax revenue—$300 billion worth.
“I was bending over backwards,” Toomey says from his office in the Hart Senate Office Building. He laughs, tightly. Six months have passed since then, but the memory still grates at him. “We were willing to do some really hard things. Putting additional revenue on the table is about as excruciating as it gets for Republicans.”
Democrats wanted more than the $300 billion. A lot more, so they rejected his offer, and the committee folded soon after. Still, the episode worked to Toomey’s enormous political advantage. It earned him a spot on the talk-show circuits. And the attempt at compromise made middle-of-the-road Democrats take notice of him, not just in Washington, but back home in Pennsylvania, too. “Pat has his beliefs, and he has the capacity to defend them incredibly well, but there’s a pragmatic side to him,” says David L. Cohen, the Comcast executive and Democratic power broker. “He’s not an ideologue. He’s a legislator.”
That may sound like faint praise, but Cohen means it lavishly. Legislators—people capable of putting together a majority, perhaps even a bipartisan majority—are increasingly rare in Washington, D.C. But Toomey just may be one.
The sections on Toomey’s biography are also fascinating. For example, I imagine that Toomey is one of relatively few members of the U.S. Senate to have lived and worked in Hong Kong. And Kersktra closes his profile with an illustration of Toomey’s ideological consistency that I imagine conservatives will appreciate. I’m eager to see the role Toomey will play in 2013.