Who in Congress today is a true "statesman"?

By: WALTER WEBB, Editor        
                   
For all the pronouncements that the presidential candidates have made about how they will save Social Security, how they will spend the budget surplus, what they will do to improve education, what they will do for health care and prescription drugs, what they will do about gun control, etc., it ultimately is what happens in Congress that really matters before any of these things can get enacted.

I think what really has to happen before trust is restored in government is that the deep divisions of partisanship must be put aside. Democrats and Republicans must work together with the new President to solve the problems that have been debated for the past year in the campaign.

Who in Congress would you regard as a statesman today? Maybe the last one we can recall was the late Senator John Stennis, a man of such integrity that, although a Democrat, he was called on by Republican President Richard Nixon to review the Watergate tapes because Nixon knew among all people in Congress, Stennis had credibility.

That wasn't accepted by the court but it shows that Nixon knew what everyone else knew -- that John Stennis was a straight shooter and you could count on what he said as being the truth. We live in such a culture of talk shows today, and I admit I love the political shows like Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Hardball or Crossfire.

But things are so partisan that it becomes predictable and laughable that on any question they have totally opposite views.
With such saturation from television, newspapers and the Internet, we have more information to deal with than we can absorb and so much of it is contradictory...it's hard to really sort out the truth.
But by the time this paper is read we should know who the new president is.

Let's hope that he is one who can bring everyone together and can deal on a level with Congress, to reach the right decisions on issues that face the country. Not just the Democratic view or the Republican view.

But the talk shows will have a tough time dealing with that.