President Obama was elected on an inspiring message of hope and change. The content of these wonderful things was left to the eye of the beholder. That’s how it’s done, and Obama did it very well. In his first year in office he has indeed changed things. He has steered a very moderate policy course and tried very hard to exemplify what he calls “post partisanship.” He has tried to live up to a rhetorical claim that everyone makes but no one seriously tries to fulfill, namely putting partisanship aside and trying to solve big problems by consensus. This was both a political and a policy mistake! He thought that the American people really did want bipartisan cooperation and compromised policy responses to serious problems, something Americans only claim when confronted with the false choice of gridlock or unprincipled compromise.The response of a badly splintered Republican Party has been predictable and even understandable. Held hostage to extremists in the wake of an unpopular administration and a number of significant events that seriously reduced the credibility of mainstream conservative economic and foreign policy ideas, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill have had little choice but to circle the wagons and try to weather the storm. Any serious efforts to support mainstream conservative policy ideas were doomed to be attacked by the ascendant populist mob and its highly visible but not highly reasonable spokespeople. Doubling down on failed ideas based on the premise that they would have worked if only those “meddling kids”(Scooby-Doo lingo for liberals) hadn’t screwed everything up was a matter of self defense for mainstream conservatives.
The reality is that our political system is designed to be competitive and adversarial. Americans love competition and “hardball,” political or otherwise. Calling for cooperation and bipartisanship should mean that all sides compete hard, but play by the rules; that all sides play to win, but without delegitimizing the rules of the game, or the game itself. In courts of law plaintiffs’ and defendants’ attorneys cooperate with each other by adhering to the rules of discovery, evidence, etc… No one would ever seriously call for opposing attorneys to compromise their clients’ interests. Why do you suppose all the legal shows on TV focus on competitive trials? Why do you suppose there isn’t a hit show about plea bargaining?
Americans assume that the pursuit of justice requires competition. Our political system ought to be openly viewed the same way. Imagine if a rhetorical attack on the court itself or on judges became a staple in the rhetorical arsenals of trial attorneys. What if lawyers routinely claimed to hate the law and pledged that they were above it? How would that play in Peoria? Yet, that’s exactly what we have in politics; politicians who claim to hate politics and to be willing to rise above it. Shouldn’t politicians who think they are above politics be just as illegitimate? If lawyers shouldn’t “put the law aside,” why should politicians “put politics aside?” The pursuit of the public interest ought to be assumed to require competition no less vigorous or adversarial than that required for justice.
The major political parties represent the interests of two broad coalitions in America and should be expected and even encouraged to do so vigorously and skillfully. The pretense that All Americans agree on anything should be understood as the absurdity that it is. Americans only unite when the stakes are existential or insignificant, and that’s as it should be in a liberal democracy. When politicians lay claim to the will of “the American people” they should be vigorously challenged, even mocked on most occasions. Voters, like jurors, should subject such claims to the evidence and should hold the evidence to reasonable standards of proof. Unlike jurors, however, voters should understand which team best represents their interests in politics and not let rhetoric, lofty or low, distract them from voting those interests.
In politics we need to stop calling for “time outs” and just embrace a more “game on” approach. It’s actually more fun and more productive.