On Bi-Partisanship

One of the central promises of the Obama movement was a new age of bi- or post-partisanship – however you want to put it – and an end to the old games and tired bickering and disagreement. Since the "stimulus" debate has occurred at all and is doing so along strictly partisan lines, the punditry has spent time and ink debating whether such an age is possible and desirable or whether the President has utterly stopped pursuing it (he never substantively did). Not usually dependable for reasonability, the Speaker of the House was at least partly correct in responding to this hoopla by saying that excessive discussion of bi-partisanship tediously over-focuses on process.

The valid point she implicitly makes is that bi-partisanship is not an end in itself. It is not even a means to an end. It is only a characteristic of the means to an end. When we do try to make it an end – when we make a value-based judgment on the ultimate result of something based upon whether it was created in a bi-partisan manner – we are misguided, usually disastrously so. To reach a common consensus all too often you have to sink down to the lowest common denominator, watering down something to such a degree that everyone or a vast majority of people can agree to it. The upshot is ultimately a product that is ambiguous, contradicting, and ineffective. Seeking bi-partisanship for its own sake then is a recipe for a bad product, for it foolishly confuses process and means with the end product itself.

None of this is to say that pursuing bi-partisanship is always a bad thing. It is entirely salutary if you seek issues which enjoy broad agreement and take care of those first, moving on to more contentious matters after. This is no different than plucking the lowest hanging fruit before climbing the tree to grab the stuff nestled securely at the top.

Indeed, this is exactly what the President and Congressional Democrats should have done with the "stimulus" package. There are matters – even within the current legislation, odious as it is – that Republicans and Democrats can mostly agree to, such as some tax relief and infrastructure spending. Why not pass those common items in a smaller version first and take up the divisive stuff after? President Obama would have enjoyed an early success in his Presidency and he would have created an atmosphere of improved comity and seriousness right at the beginning. Instead he allowed Congressional Democrats to rashly create a mountain of disagreeable, wasteful spending that alienated Republicans and became a massive target for ridicule and scorn. (This error is the fruit of President Obama's sense of bi-partisanship, which is to declare "I won" and expect the opposition to support something completely inimical to their better judgment simply because it is his. That isn't bi-partisanship, it's hubris.)

Such a tack is much more productive than racing to the bottom in search of agreement among people who often fundamentally disagree, engaging in some fool's errand not for a good product but one arrived at on a bi-partisan basis. That is just a waste of time.