Blurring the Lines of Partisanship
I lead a non-partisan organization and we work hard in everything we do to think in terms of issues and not parties. But one of the difficulties of being non-partisan in today’s America is that the Bush administration has worked so hard to magnify small differences and to frame these differences automatically in terms of different ideologies and values. An example from last week is instructive. Bush was asked at a press conference about General Powell’s letter, which said :“The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.” Instead of responding directly, Bush said “It’s unacceptable to think that there’s any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.” What Bush was essentially saying is that his disagreement with Powell was not over strategy or pragmatic foreign policy concerns — this was a difference at the most basic level of whether Powell cared about Americans or terrorists. Was he with us or with them?
The divisionary nature of this administration was a main focus of a panel discussion I spoke on last Wednesday at NYU (see the news story). Some students after the panel said that they felt it was a partisan panel because it took such a sharp aim at the Bush administration for magnifying our differences and making our country and our world a more divided and partisan one than any time in recent history. And the discussion I had with these students reminded me of the odd and difficult place in which our country finds itself today. Non- and bi-partisanship really is under attack by a President who seeks to magnify our differences and yet even to bridge this subject is to open yourself up understandably to being called a partisan. Hopefully, the next leader who promises to be a uniter and not a divider may actually deliver on that promise so that we can keep our differences in perspective and magnify our commonalities instead.
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