Bipartisanship or My partisanship
When you hear leaders in Washington demand bipartisanship, they are usually demanding support for one partisan agenda or another. The President can offer soaring rhetoric about the need for bipartisan cooperation on national security – but what he wants is for the opposition party to support his policies (and, preferably, appear behind him in a Rose Garden photo-op). The opposition party can make soaring appeals about the need for bipartisan cooperation on national security, but what they really want is for the President to change his policies (and, preferably, give them a healthy share of the credit). That is why “bipartisanship” is often seen by Americans as another empty political word.
Real bipartisanship isn’t a word to be dropped into a speech – it is a process to be pursued over weeks, months and years: the President reaching out to a broad spectrum on Capitol Hill, members of Congress working patiently across the aisle, and even opinion leaders and academics looking for the sound of consensus in the noise of their endless chatter. Why? Because it yields better policy.
No President can sustain a major foreign policy initiative without bipartisan support. If he rams a policy through with one-party backing him in Congress, that means that – on a good day – he is working with a slim majority in the Congress and the country. When things go wrong that slim majority can disappear quickly, and the policy is in jeapordy. Conversely, the opposition party must recognize that in our system the President is, far and away, the chief foreign policy-maker. So – even as you should vigorously put forward your own policy alrenatives – if you want the country to succeed, you have to work with him. Meanwhile, there is much experience to be found on both sides of the aisle. Why use only half of it?
Most people become Republicans or Democrats because of domestic reasons – for instance, a preference for lower taxes, or for national health care. The idea that we would decamp to one side or another of the foreign policy divide based on these divisions makes little sense. If anything, Iraq should remind us that foreign policy is not a game that two teams are playing in which one is the winner and the other the loser – we either all win, or all lose.
And yes, there are examples of effective bi-partisanship in national security: the Nunn-Lugar initiative, the 9-11 Commission, and a recent panel on UN reform come to mind. So do World War II and the containment of communism.
Ben,
You strongly imply (indeed, you state) that bipartisanship yields better policy; better, that is, than policies promulgated and supported by only one party. And at some level that is certainly the case, for all of the reasons that you cite.
But would you concede that it is possible for a policy that is initially supported by only one party to be eventually embraced on a much wider scale?
Or, the converse, would you agree that some policies that have the support of political leaders on both sides of the aisle have had disastrous effects. After all, a Republican president put U.S. forces on the ground in Saudi Arabia, and a Democratic president left them there. This had the effect of energizing al Qaeda AND propping up a despotic regime.
To cite a more recent example, there is strong bipartisan support in Washington for the notion that democracy promotion should be a core object of U.S. foreign policy, but pollster Daniel Yankelovich, writing in the May/June 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, found that only 20 percent of Americans ranked promoting democracy as a “very important” goal for the U.S. government – the lowest support noted for any goal asked about in the survey.
The public is disenchanted with our current partisan state of affairs, and they see bipartisanship — as you point out — as an empty political word. But I don’t see how they will become more enamored with bipartisanship if Washington is leaning in one direction, and the public at large is leaning strongly in the other.
So, don’t we have to be more specific about which policies are likely to derive strong, bipartisan support — support from the public at large, and not just from opinion leaders? And if the results turn out not as the supporters predicted, don’t we have an obligation to say, “This particular case of bipartisanship did not serve American interests.”
Thoughts?
Chris Preble
Comment on May 8, 2006 @ 9:33 am
[...] I challenged Ben Rhodes a few weeks ago, questioning whether it was necessarily true that a bipartisan solution to problems would be inherently better than a partisan one. Ben, graciously, engaged the discussion. [...]
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