With a few carefully chosen key appointments across the aisle, Barack Obama has shown he means to practice bipartisanship. While most of the world applauds, some reserve judgment: Much will depend on Barack Obama’s ability to govern effectively with so many egos looking out for themselves.

Never more so than over the past eight years have relationships between congressional staffers become strained. Bills are drafted behind closed doors, and rammed down the throat of the opposition. There are many possible reasons for this, including ego, arrogance, anger, poor communication/understanding, etc. Frequently, these traits have become contagious. Individuals on the Hill have become entrenched behind their different value systems.  As the new Administration has already discovered, the passing of legislation is fraught with difficulty, fragmenting its legitimacy, which is why Barack Obama should, and seems to, care.

In the past month, our new President has demonstrated undeniable skill at reaching across party lines, so much so in fact that he would be the envy of any relationship counselor. A smart therapist knows that overloading a patient with information at the beginning of the treatment as to why he is thinking the way he is leads to stress, dejection and sometimes flat out denial (“Pff, what does he know?”). A huge part of Barack Obama’s PR efforts on the Hill will therefore have to be how to reorient perceptions without seeming to lay down judgment. He will need to focus on the solution of problems while sidestepping their cause, because a focus on the cause will be perceived by some as blame and he will loose their cooperation.
This will be a difficult balancing act for Barack Obama, for there will invariably be some among us who will want to point fingers “in the name of justice”. These are tricky waters.

People on the Hill are hardly likely to engage in group mea culpa and hugs. But change in the way legislation is drafted is needed; policy therapy is needed. Let’s give the minority party a turn on the couch. Barack Obama needs to send clear signals to that effect or his calls to unity with a few well chosen key appointments will remain empty air.

Ultimately though, Barack Obama’s consensus building will only work if all agree that it is intrinsically beneficial for all the participants to interact with each other and with society at large with the least conflict possible. If only lip service is paid to this notion, it won’t work, and a huge drawback in that sense still is the cultural premium placed on combativity as opposed to civility in a politician.

You might say the game is already biased, since Barack Obama, our new president, is not an independent. How can he, our shrink-in-chief, profess the neutrality required of the therapist?

He can only demonstrate that his brand of bipartisanship tilts neither to the right nor to the left by introducing changes in the legislative process. Otherwise, the few key “bipartisan” appointments he has made will go down in history books as “a brilliant, if empty, PR move”.

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