Come Together…Over the Issues
In Thursday’s Congress Daily, Bruce Stokes and Andrew Kohut published a piece in which they labeled “voters’ avowed desire for bipartisanship in dealing with pressing national problems” a “self-delusional” myth:
Americans tell pollsters and journalists that they are sick of the partisan divide in Washington and want a candidate who can reach across the aisle to get things done…But surveys show such aspirations are likely to be frustrated by voters’ stark differences over priorities. For, while the American public fancies itself bipartisan, it remains deeply partisan.
Derek Shearer lauded their argument, and expanded it to bash foreign policy bipartisanship, in yesterday’s Huffington Post. Now I’ll tell you why these fine commentators, and the polls they cite, don’t tell the whole story.
Let me first concede that Democrats and Republicans are—and should be—genuinely distinct, responding differently to basic questions like how and when government should intervene in people’s lives, how big it needs to be, and what kind of tax structure should support it. But the voters’ demand that the next president must bring change to Washington by reaching across the aisle to actually get things done is both deeply established in American politics, and eminently possible.
In national security and foreign policy, Americans can look to a long and proud tradition of bipartisan cooperation, dating at least to the famous Truman-Vandenberg pact in the early days of the Cold War. That cooperation gave rise to Senator Vandenberg’s immortal call for Americans to unite our voice “at the water’s edge.” Since that time, leaders on both sides of the aisle have recognized the wisdom of maintaining a strong bipartisan center on matters of national security and foreign policy. Here are just a few examples.
Shearer is right that in the past few years, “such matters as the Iraq War and the conduct of the War on Terror” have broken the bipartisan center. Polls accordingly reflect deep divisions between Democrats and Republicans on those issues. That’s the bad news. The good news is there are still a host of crucial national security issues on which Americans can and do agree. The Partnership for a Secure America recently launched the Secure America Challenge to highlight five of the most important areas of bipartisan agreement, and challenge the next president to take up this agenda. The Secure America Challenge is also an invaluable offer of bipartisan support to the next President, whichever party wins the White House in November.
Poll numbers suggesting Americans remain divided on many hot-button issues are not surprising. But the polls are misleading for at least two reasons. First, the very nature of polling requires that pollsters dissect public opinion into often artificially black-and-white positions. By limiting a respondent’s choices to for or against, left or right, pollsters leave no room for moderates at the center. Second, public opinion polls take place in the privacy of the respondent’s home, away from the real world policy-making process, where both sides have a voice. For that reason, questions about issues are effectively academic exercises. They might represent how individuals would vote on a ballot measure, but they have little bearing on how policymakers will act when faced with a vocal, organized constituency on the other side.
Ours is a two-party system. Even a landslide victory for one party in the next election will not obviate the need for bipartisan cooperation, especially on the most essential national security and foreign policy issues where the appearance of national unity can be as important as the policy itself.
In the past eight years, the Administration has fabricated a “mandate” to abuse executive power, has defied the will of Congress, and has strained America’s credibility and leadership internationally. I believe that the American people have learned from this bitter experience. The mantra of “change,” and the messages of cooperation and unity are so powerful today precisely because they demand a new, substantive agenda on which Americans can agree and move forward together. Let’s not ask the same old divisive questions about the same old divisive issues and then doubt that a new era of bipartisanship is possible.
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I’ve always framed issues in Washington as “major league” and “minor league”. Major league issues are what you read about in the A section of the Washington Post — and are generally partisan. Minor league issues are the annoying dreck of issues where you don’t form partisan alliances — you’re instead working with ten separate interest groups that are each trying to get their version passed. The Washington Post never covers them. Minor league issues are the bread and butter of policy wars — you’ll sometime find an alliance with a member of another party against a member of your own party. (cough, ed markey)
A lot of national security/foreign policy issues are now major, major league — very partisan issues — but there is still a lot of them that are minor league. Take Kosovo, or cyberwar, or US relations with South Korea.
Some stuff are beyond politics as well — energy security, or maybe the environment/global warming/AIDS.
I used to say that your job in Washington was to make sure a minor-league issue never became a major-league issue, and I wonder how true that is of PSA’s basket of national security issues. Once you get up the majors, resolving the problem isn’t really that important as you can use that issue as a stick to bash your partisan opponents.
And yes, this does mean I finally figured out how to add you to my RSS feeds.
Comment on February 8, 2008 @ 4:24 pm