Early in this year’s primary election season I did a study on bipartisanship for the Center on Communication Leadership of the University of Southern California. I’m afraid I was not very optimistic that Republicans and Democrats would be able to get together on much of anything after the Clinton and Bush years of what some call “hyperpartisanship.”
Now I’m not so sure.
I concluded then that: “My own feeling is that only a strong president with a mandate for governing through a universal crisis — a necessary war or devastating climate change — can bring any bipartisanship or, better, nonpartisanship to Washington.”
There is no doubt that we do now have that “universal crisis,” though it is economic rather that climatological or military. The question then is whether President-elect Barack Obama will prove to be a strong enough leader to embrace and encourage bipartisanship. So far, I would say cautiously, that maybe he is, as his opponent jibed in debate, “That one.”
The two obvious pieces of evidence that that might be true are his decision to keep Robert Gates as secretary of Defense and, perhaps more important, his “order” to congressional Democrats to allow Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut to retain his standing and seniority — even after Lieberman campaigned for his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain.
You don’t see that every day.
It is obvious that Obama is a Democratic liberal, who is going to rely primarily on ideological soul mates. But it is also obvious that he seems to have a centered confidence — or is it pragmatism? — that gives him the freedom to accept smart, strong people around him,
beginning with his formidable primary opponent, the lady senator from New York. I’m sure there are legions of Obama supporters and voters gritting their teeth at his decision to offer Hillary Clinton appointment as secretary of state.
A short memory and inclination toward compromise may not be weakness but a sign of security and strength, something badly needed in Washington these days. In my research on partisanship, I took as true something that Fareed Zakaria wrote in Newsweek International:
“In most of these areas (of governance) the solution involves some short-term pain in exchange for long-term gain. But Washington has become incapable of that. Passing a pork-laden bill takes no time. Trimming subsidies, raising taxes or making strategic investments are near impossible. … Compromise is hard. No one gets all or even most of what they want. But in a vast, continental land of 300 million, people are going to disagree. No compromise means nothing will get done. And America will slowly drift down in the roll of nations.”
A lot of people have been talking that way; perhaps Obama has heard them. This was from a former independent governor of Maine, Angus King, who thought Washington governance had been reduced to nothing more than damage control:
“It’s a slow-motion catastrophe. We don’t have troops pouring across our neighbors’ borders. But we are facing a kind of slow-motion challenge that, if we don’t address, our children and grandchildren are going to look at us and say, What in the hell were you doing when this
country went down?”
Obviously, we have gone down a long way since King said that last January. At the same time, David Gergen, who has seen partisanship up close in both Republican and Democratic White Houses, said: “With the end of the Cold War, we saw a new, destructive kind of partisanship.
And for much of the past decade, we’ve kicked the can down the road on our big problems.”
Interestingly, Obama has used that phrase as well, saying he did not want to be a president who kicked problems down the road.
My favorite quote while I was wandering around Washington asking about bipartisanship was from Robert Merry, who covered Congress and the White House for The Wall Street Journal before becoming editor and then president of Congressional Quarterly: “Bipartisanship in
Washington is a cyclical thing, it comes and goes in an organic way. It changes when people get fed up with the status quo.”
Well, we’ve won half that battle, the negative half. People are fed up. Now we will see if their elected leaders are ready for some organic change in the status quo.
Reeves’ original article can be found at RealClearPolitics.com.