"We are sure to be losers when we quarrel with ourselves; it is a civil war, and in all such contentions, triumphs are defeats."
- Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832), English writer
Shortly after writing about Arnold Schwarzenegger's success in getting his opponents in California to cooperate with him, I ran across some related thoughts by Jim Miller on his weblog, Jim Miller on Politics.
Jim asks where good ideas come from, and refers to a University of Chicago study indicating that in business the best ideas come from those who have contacts outside their immediate work groups, especially with people who think and act differently than the ones with whom they normally associate. Miller believes that what is true in business is also true in politics:
"...I have long thought that listening to those you disagree with is one of the best ways to learn that you are wrong on some point. It may not be pleasant, but it is often useful."
He cites several examples of how treating your opponents with civility and listening to what they have to say leads to better solutions than deciding on a course of action after conferring only with those who agree with you. Then he poses the question, "Do I always practice those principles?" and admits that he doesn't, but that he tries to.
I think most of us know we should entertain other points of view, but it's a rare occasion when we do. We usually feign interest by letting those who disagree with us have their say, but I doubt that we really listen with anything close to the attention we'd give to someone who agrees with us. Most of us have already made up our minds, and little short of the threat of bodily harm would lead us to consider the possibility there might be a better way than the one we brought to the table.
Is it possible for Republicans and Democrats to cooperate for the common good? Maybe. We're seeing some signs of that in California, but unity in Washington seems to be giving way to mostly criticism, finger-pointing, and "I told you so's."
I wonder? Had Bill Clinton been president when 9/11 happened, and had he taken every action taken by Bush since then, would the Democrats and the media have been as critical of him as they have been of Bush? And conversely, would the Republicans have given their support to him as they do now to President Bush?
I really don't think so. I think the roles would have reversed. I believe that Democrats would have supported the war as most Republicans now do, and Republicans would have been against it, as most Democrats now seem to be.
Maybe it's simply asking too much of a member of either party to support the policies of the opposing party. Maybe the common good must take a back seat to partisanship. Maybe you can't be a team anymore. Maybe the way we do politics today won't allow party members to cooperate with each other.
On the other hand, maybe there's some hope, for surely, there must be many exceptions to the strident criticism we hear being hurled back and forth between the party leaders. The problem, for me anyway, is the exceptions are like positive stories out of Iraq. You rarely hear about them.
Update: EvilPundit in his post "The Great Divide," shares an email from a reader whose friendships are being jeopardized by disagreements over politics. Sad, really.
3 comments:
I think you may be reading an awful lot into the "bipartisanship" of Schwarzenegger's administration. Essentially, he's passing exactly the kinds of cuts in services and short-term borrowing fixes that his party insisted on recalling Gray Davis for doing. The only real change in the partisan conduct in the California legislature is that the Republican minority under Davis was taking advantage of the state's "super-majority" requirements on budgets to make it nearly impossible to pass a balanced and half-reasonable budget. With their own partisan in the governor's mansion, they aren't using the same blocking tactics to shoot down the same kind of measures.
That's not bipartisanship. It's a continuation of the same extreme partisanship that recalled an elected governor for purely partisan reasons.
On the partisan alignment of war, the Democrats in fact have backed the war in Afghanistan consistently. If anything, they should be faulted along with the Republicans for not asking more questions about the lack of commitment to any reasonable goal there at this point.
Speculating about "what if" scenarios if Al Gore had been allowed to take office is just that, speculation. In fact, most Congressional Democrats including Kerry voted for the resolution that Bush claims authorized him to go to war in Iraq. If anyone in Congress wanted to press the argument, it's highly questionable whether Bush fulfilled the terms of that resolution. But the enormous problems with the Iraq War have made even a few Republicans complain about the war and its conduct.
Al Gore himself made it very clear before the war, in a major speech in San Francisco, that he opposed going to war in Iraq at that time under those conditions - *contrary* to the Congressional Democrats. I see no reason to assume that if he had been President, with full access to classified information to know just how feeble the WMD claims were, th
For some reason, the last words got cut off on my last note. That final paragraph should have read:
Al Gore himself made it very clear before the war, in a major speech in San Francisco, that he opposed going to war in Iraq at that time under those conditions - *contrary* to the Congressional Democrats. I see no reason to assume that if he had been President, with full access to classified information to know just how feeble the WMD claims were, that he would have decided to go to war instead. - Bruce
I just posted on a minor incidence of bipartisanship:
http://journals.aol.com/bmiller224/OldHickorysWeblog/entries/1351
But this one was more pathetic than inspiring, I'm afraid. - Bruce
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