Politico recently reported a “sparks fly” confrontation between President Obama and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor over which party has been less bipartisan in the first hundred days of the Obama administration. Never mind that the actual exchange sounded more like a civil even friendly discussion. Politico’s modus operandi is to make news by investing trivial incidents with more significance than they possess. It’s the kind of hyped journalism begun in the modern era by cable news networks to bring the excitement of hurricanes and wars to the drearier business of reporting on government.
As reliable as April’s mass pilgrimage to experience the healing powers of Washington’s blossoming cherry trees, every new presidential administration takes office with a pledge to disdain cheap shot rhetoric, extend an open hand to the opposition, and together get something done for the American people. And just as reliably, they fail. They fail because they don’t mean it. While promises to change the tone of political debate and encourage bipartisan problem solving always poll exceptionally well among swing voters, doing it is seldom necessary to political success. More important is who gets blamed for the failure. Thus, the Obama-Cantor exchange’s irresistible juiciness to Politico, ever at the ready to trumpet anonymous insider accounts of clashes, hurt feelings, and ill temper.
Politico’s editors are rumored to regularly assail their frenetic reporters with the question: have we won the hour? The twenty four hour news cycle has become as quaint a relic as reporters using a telephone to dictate their stories to scribbling editors. Winning the hour assumes there is news made in this town every hour. There isn’t. Most days, nothing that informs, enlightens or should be of serious interest to anyone occurs here. But if you inject the mundane with a little performance enhancing conflict you excite the competitive instincts of other reporters, and the curiosity of politicians and their staffs. You manufacture “buzz,” which might be the purpose of many political journalists.
I don’t make these observations to chastise Politico. They have built a business model that appears to be successful in a terrible environment for their profession. More power to them. I offer them as a partial explanation for why sincere attempts at bipartisanship accomplishment are rather infrequent and the tone in Washington, despite its off putting nature to many voters, seems only to get worse.
Like all things, bipartisanship is subject to the rules of human nature. If President Obama can achieve 85% of his agenda by compromising only with the substantial majorities of Democrats in Congress, why would he accept 65 % by compromising with Republican minorities? So he cuts his deals on the stimulus and omnibus spending bills with Democratic leaders and, for the most part, disregards Republican proposals. He will put his health care reforms on the budget reconciliation bill, ensuring its passage by a simple majority and loud cries of protest from ignored Republicans, whom he will treat with polite indifference until they find the means to exact retribution for the slight.
To achieve genuine bipartisan accomplishments, which often produce the best results for the American people, both sides cannot have a choice to pursue partisan approaches. Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress produced a balanced budget and welfare reform, two of the most outstanding advances for the public interest in a generation. They did it because neither side could get any of what it wanted without the other’s agreement. To believe Obama would engage in similar bipartisanship assumes he genuinely believes bipartisanship, in and of itself, is a virtue greater than the big government activism he believes necessary to society’s progress. He doesn’t. Nor do his supporters in the public and media. Even the genial, mild mannered Washington Post columnist, E.J. Dionne, who spent much of the last decade preaching the virtues of bipartisanship to Republicans, urges Obama to get as much of his agenda through Congress as he can without troubling himself with Republican complaints.
Changing the tone in Washington is not something Obama or Congressional Republicans will do either. The entire political class, which has grown to include the press, the internet, Hollywood, the music industry and God knows who else, thrives on confrontation, the more vitriolic the better. Rachel Maddow sneers at Democrat Evan Bayh for taking seriously the concerns of fiscally conservative Hoosiers, and working with Republicans to restrain just a little government spending that will likely bankrupt the next generation of Americans. She calls him and other Democrats like him, “conservadems,” much like conservative talk show hosts branded John McCain a RINO for objecting to torture or advocating campaign finance reform. Ed Shultz accuses Dick Cheney of hoping for another terrorist attack, and it hardly merits a furrowed brow by the press or any Democrat.
Politicians, pundits and even many beat reporters don’t want more civility in public debates. Because if it were ever to occur, it would leave many of them with nothing much to say, and only swing voters would be happy about that.
