Keep in mind that the Partnership for a Secure America is dedicated to recreating the bipartisan center in American national security and foreign policy. As its mission statement says, “the United States is being ill-served by the growing partisan divide surrounding its national security and foreign policy. Although partisan rancor has traditionally stopped “at the water’s edge,” this tradition of bipartisan cooperation has eroded significantly in recent years in negative and harmful ways.” 

Thus, let us look at presidential candidates Barrack Obama and John McCain. Forget for the moment their positions on various issues, Iraq, Iran, Georgia, war on terror etcetera. Let’s just simply consider how well receptive they would be to reaching out and working with members of the other party. I have not seen that much written on this so the article by Ronald Brownstein in the current issue of Atlantic Monthly caught my attention. 

He writes that because both men are balancing their daily criticisms of the other with these inclusive signals, each may succeed more than Bush did at keeping a foot in the door to those who ultimately prefer the other candidate. That would allow either to emerge from this election with the opportunity to build broader coalitions than Bush has done or than Bill Clinton managed to do after 1997.

But will they?

To reach agreements that attract support beyond their own party, politicians usually must make concessions that antagonize interests within it. In the Senate, McCain has often passed that test, partnering with Democrats on several intensely controversial issues, including the “patient’s bill of rights,” campaign-finance reform, preserving the filibuster for judicial appointments, comprehensive immigration reform that included a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and global warming. In each of those fights, he accepted severe criticism from conservatives in and out of Congress as the price of building legislative alliances with Democrats.

As president, would McCain take as many risks as he did in the Senate to assemble inclusive coalitions? 

Many Democrats, noting McCain’s concessions to conservatives in this campaign, believe the answer is no. His high-profile bipartisan partnerships (which multiplied after he returned to the Senate, disillusioned and angry, in the wake of his 2000 presidential-primary defeat by Bush) always coexisted with an overall record that placed him in concert with conservatives, and in collision with Democrats, on most issues. On his way to the GOP nomination, McCain moved demonstrably to the right; his 2008 campaign agenda includes conservative priorities certain to provoke intense Democratic opposition, such as extending Bush’s tax cuts and overriding state regulation of health insurance. And McCain has taken an uncompromising position on Iraq, insisting that he will maintain American troops there until the country achieves stability. 

Yet if Democrats make gains in Congress, that might make McCain more conciliatory. It would mean he could get legislation passed only by reaching agreement with the Democrats in the congressional majority. That would encourage conciliation and deal-making, especially on issues such as climate change, immigration, and conceivably health care, where McCain has shown some willingness to break with his party’s orthodoxy. The danger, however, is that it might also provoke McCain’s more combative side on spending, taxes, and above all, the Iraq War.

Brownstein’s judgment is that McCain is a politician of stormy personal passions, and a McCain presidency would likely offer a roller coaster of cooperation and conflict. He probably would replace the permanent warfare between Bush and the Democratic Congress with hairpin turns in mood from day to day, if not hour to hour. He could treat a Democratic Congress as a legislative partner or an electoral foil—or, most likely, as some of both.

So what about Obama? Ironically, in Brownstein’s view, a Democratic victory might make the candidate, who has campaigned on a promise to reduce the prevailing hyperpartisanship, less willing to compromise.

An Obama victory almost certainly would enlarge the Democratic House and Senate majorities and diminish the already attenuated ranks of Republican moderates who might be open to working with him. In that scenario, both the gain of Democrats and the loss of centrist Republicans would increase demands for Obama to pass his program by maximizing unity among Democrats and minimizing outreach to Republicans. The bigger the victory, the stronger the pressure to marginalize GOP legislators and push uncompromising policies. 

Obama may be more talk than action when it comes to reaching across the aisle.

In Washington, Obama has been much more cautious than his rhetoric suggests about working with Republicans or challenging Democrats to reach bipartisan agreements. Since arriving in the Senate, in 2005, he has voted with a majority of Senate Democrats almost 97 percent of the time, according to Congressional Quarterly. (McCain has voted with a majority of Republicans 85 percent of the time since entering the Senate, in 1987.) And although Obama has sometimes worked with Republican senators to pass legislation, he’s done so primarily on relatively noncontroversial issues, such as a bill to post government contracts online.

Yet there may be reason for hope. Brownstein’s bottom line is this: 

A president who chooses compromise will inevitably confront obstruction from many people in the other party and discontent from the most-ideological elements in his own. Those are formidable obstacles to a more inclusive and productive politics. But Bush’s failure has highlighted the fact that, ultimately, presidents who divide rarely conquer, and it has created an enormous opportunity for his successor to reshape the contours of American politics. Today the American political system is more polarized than the American people; a president who can deliver pragmatic legislation on big issues might cement the allegiance of the millions of voters who are disenchanted with Washington’s failures and not tightly bound to either party. The opportunity to build a lasting majority would be greater for Obama than for McCain, because of the damage Bush has done to the GOP’s image. But either man could strengthen his party by redefining it as more flexible, inclusive, and practical than it is seen to be today. More important, he could remind Americans, as Theodore Roose­velt once put it, that their “common interests are as broad as the continent.” And that could be the key to progress on all of the problems—from health care and energy to the economy and national security—that will await the next president in January 2009.

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