Quote:In 1981, [Elaina] Newport and her boss, Bill Strauss, were staffers for Illinois’ moderate Republican senator, Charles Percy, on the Subcommittee on Energy, Nuclear Proliferation and Government Processes for the Committee of Government Affairs — a panel whose name, they would later recall, “took three lines of 10-point type on our business cards.” Newport was a 25-year-old legislative assistant — a University of Maryland graduate who had studied music and played piano. Strauss was a 34-year-old committee counsel and staff director — a published author with three degrees from Harvard who had started writing song parodies in his spare time. In “Sixteen Scandals,” the pair’s 2002 book recounting the Steps’ first two decades, they explained how their day jobs allowed them to hone a flair for the theatrical:

“Our subcommittee swiftly became notorious for energetic use of oversized props — charts, photos, giant Treasury checks — anything to create buzz, urgency, and TV appeal. What we did in those hearings — as anyone actually present could surmise — was provide political entertainment — what Jay Leno once called ‘show biz for ugly people,’ ” they wrote. “Gradually, we came upon a discovery: if B-grade actors (like Reagan) could become politicians, then B-grade politicians (like us) could become actors.”

Quote:Then, in 2007, the same year I arrived in Washington from small-town Rhode Island with their songs in my head, the Steps suffered a major loss when Strauss died of pancreatic cancer at age 60. (He and Newport had been the group’s main writers; she would collaborate primarily with troupe member Mark Eaton going forward.)

I was moved to see the obituaries and remembrances of Strauss in major national outlets. They mentioned the serious books he’d written with co-author Neil Howe about the role of different generations in shaping history — and how he’d co-founded the Cappies, a writing and awards program that trains high school students as theater critics — but they all foregrounded his work for the Steps. In The Post, Ken Ringle wrote that Strauss “taught an entire generation of elected leaders to laugh at themselves,” noting that, in the end, “he died peacefully — in the season of the Christmas parties, when it all began.”

Quote:Of course, bipartisanship itself has become more controversial — the equal mocking of both sides a more fraught proposition. “It affected our bookings, because an association that might have hired us five years earlier might have been afraid its members would be divided — that if we made fun of one side or the other they’d get complaints,” Newport says.

As Trump entered the White House, they kept things light with jokes about his crowd size, hand size, tweets, narcissism and braggadocio. As Newport puts it, the troupe “still wanted somebody who liked the guy to come to the show and laugh.” But the effect of this, at least to me, was an inability to engage meaningfully with the most important stories in American politics: the danger of polarization, the radicalization of the Republican Party and genuine threats to the future of American democracy.