Centrists, Principles and "Men of the Earth"

One thing that I've noticed in the blogsphere is how many people don't like "deal-makers."

Deal-makers are a vanishing breed. Some were centrists, but there could also be people who firmly on one ideological perspective or another. The late Ted Kennedy was a fierce liberal, but he was willing more often than not to work with conservatives to get the job done.

But in reading both in passing and more indepth, you get the sense that those politicians who make deals with the other side are people to be reviled. Ross Douthat, is a young conservative that has come up with some great policies that I believe could benefit the Republican Party in the long run. Nevertheless, he tends to look derisively at centrist Republicans seeing them as persons without principle. This is what he wrote in a piece last year after Arlen Specter's defection:

The larger species to which he belonged — Republicanus Rockefellus, the endangered Northeastern moderate — likewise has little to offer a party in distress. Indeed, if you listen carefully to high-profile Yankee moderates like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Lincoln Chafee, who fanned out across op-ed pages and TV shows last week to bemoan their marginalization, it seems as though they don’t even understand their own political situation, let alone the Republican Party’s.

The Northeastern moderates tend to style themselves as fiscal conservatives, spinning a narrative in which they’re the victims of a doctrinaire social conservatism and its litmus tests. But many of them are just instinctive liberals who happen to have ancestral ties to the Grand Old Party. Chafee fit that bill; so did former Senator James Jeffords of Vermont, who amassed a distinctly left-wing record after he bolted the Republican Party in 2001 to become an “independent.” For that matter, so does the retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a New England native and Republican appointee who often gets described as a moderate, but boasts the jurisprudence of a reliable liberal.

Others, like Collins and Snowe and (until last week) Specter, are simply horse-traders and deal-cutters, whose willingness to cross party lines last month to vote for $800 billion dollars in deficit spending tells you most of what you need to know about their supposed fiscal conservatism. They’re politically savvy but intellectually vacuous. Their highest allegiance isn’t to limited government. It’s to meeting the party in power halfway, while making sure that the dollars keep flowing to their constituents back home.

As I wrote back then, I agreed that the stimulus bill was a rather bad piece of legislation. That said the three GOP Senators who backed it, tried to make deals to make it less bad. Douthat assails the three for not being true fiscal conservatives, but seemingly ignores the other more "loyal partisans" who basically did the same thing for years when the GOP was in power.

Douthat along with writers like Daniel Larison, see these deal-making centrists as lacking any principle instead of self interest. Now, in the case of Arlen Specter, there is some truth to that. Specter is nothing more than a rank opportunist that tries to save his own skin when the going gets rough. But I think it is a little too harsh to say that all centrists or those who want to make deals are some how defective and lack any sense of principle.

Politicians aren't defective, but the public is.

The problem here is that we the people, liberals and conservatives, tend to think we are the only ones around. We live around people who are like us politically and ideologically and tend to look at the other side as either delusional or evil. So when we elect our representatives to the statehouse or to Washington, we expect them to be partisans and not politicians.

While I respect bloggers like Douthat and conservative bloggers, they are part of the problem. They forget that in a democracy, politicians have to deal with competing interests. What politicians are called to do is to mediate between those cacaphony of interests and desires and produce legislation that benefits the most people. It means that politicos have to learn to tolerate and compromise. This something a blogger sitting in their apartment don't ever have to face.

Would I love some conservative political ideas to become policy? Sure. But I also know that I live with liberals who are as much Americans as I am. Their voices have to be heard and I leave it up to my elected officials to work something out that I can live with and so can my liberal husband.

It's interesting elections are starting to be seen as mandates handed down from God. Both Democrats and Republicans see political victories as some kind of divine sign that they can do anything they want-after all, didn't that election justify their viewpoint? It's symptom of a public that is walled off from other ideas and ideologies.

In 2008, Bill Bishop wrote the book, The Big Sort. In it, he explained that over the last 30 years, American society has sorted itself along ideological lines. We now live in like minded communities and that has had an impact on Washington. One those impacts is how it has taken out the dealmakers who made legislation possible. He uses the example of the Nuer Tribe in Africa to talk about the role American politicians used to play:

Nuer tribes were constantly crossing paths, and so they could easily fall into conflict over lost animals and scarce forage. Professor Evans-Prichard wrote in the 1940s about the intricate ways the Nuer encouraged cooperation and resolved conflicts.

The Nuer put special faith in a group of arbiters known as "men of the earth." Men of the earth had no formal powers. They couldn't arrest people or make arbitrary decisions. But the Nuer granted these people a kind of local authority to settle disputes. If a fight broke out, a man of the earth could stop the conflict by running between the combatants and hoeing a line in the dirt. If a tribal member was killed in a fight, a man of the earth arbitrated compensation to be paid by the winner to the dead man's family.

The "man of the earth" was a deal-maker, a negotiator, a compromiser. He was the person given the job of representing all the conflicting interests of the tribes.

A man of the earth was a politician.

He then goes on to explain what has happened in America since the 1970s:

Over the last 30 years, most communities have grown either more Democratic or more Republican. Through an incremental process of migration and self-selection, people have clustered in like-minded neighborhoods, clubs, and churches.

Migration had consequences. Legislative districts grew more lopsided, and they elected more-partisan representatives. Politicians no longer mediated competing interests in their districts. They represented increasingly one-sided constituencies that grew more extreme in their ideological isolation.

The meaning of politics changed. Voters didn't want men of the earth. They wanted partisans.

And he's right. We the people don't want deal makers, "men of the earth." We want partisans. This is probably the main reasons that moderates of both parties have been squeezed out of politics. As the deal makers leave the scene and are replaced by partisans, the political process grinds to a halt.

Bishop notes that the Nuer tended to see that they had the ground between them in common:

The earth was what the Nuer had in common. If locusts swarmed or a drought persisted, every tribe suffered. When the grass was thick, they all prospered. They were called "men of the earth," anthropologist Max Gluckman wrote, because "the earth, undivided as the basis of society, (symbolized) not individual prosperity, fertility, and good fortune, but the general prosperity, fertility, and good fortune on which individual life depends."

What do Americans have in common today? Not much. Oh, we share a lot with our neighbors, with the people at our church. Too much, in fact. But we don't know fellow citizens just a few counties over. It takes a "social experiment" in some parts to imagine how it would be to live as a member of a different political party.

A politicians do have an ideological background that should be around to inform their decision-making. But at the end of the day, Democrats and Republicans have to do what is good for all of the nation, not just those who agree with them.

At some point, we have to start seeing the deal makers not as traitors, but as trying to be do what they do best: trying to take our various voices and make them one.

The Return of Glass-Stegall?

With all the talk of partisan rancor and all the talk about how Wall Street is not learning the lessons of the near economic disaster, this little news story is kind of slipping under the wires. Kudos to Senators Cantwell and McCain for trying to right the ship and try to reign in the banks.

The blog, the NextGOP gives a good reason why Republicans should support this bill.

The Real Work of Bipartisanship

"Bipartisan" has become the word of the day in political life. Actually, I don't think its hold has ever left us. There is something among Americans that we want to see people put aside partisan differences and work together.

Presidential candidates love to talk about how they will come to Washington and create a new environment where people will work together and things will get done.

When George W. Bush became President in 2001, he talked about being a "uniter, not a divider." He said he wanted to bring a new spirit to our political life, citing his time was governor of Texas, where he worked with Democrats to pass meaningful legislation. He came to Washington with a jovial mood and even took to calling people by nicknames. One example of this was his calling the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone "Pablo."

But we all know what happened. The President as well the GOP, which then held both houses in Congress, pretty much ran over the Democrats. Bipartisanship got lost pretty fast.

Now, we have a new President who has talked about creating a new kind of politics. So far, though, all is not well among the parties in Washington. President Obama has placed three Republicans in his cabinet, he has met with GOP leaders and even invited some to the White House. What does he get in return? Well, House Republicans voted en masse against the Stimulus Bill. In the Senate, only three Republicans voted the stimulus package, and not without cutting some money from the bill.

Democrats and Obama admirers are quite upset about this. Here President Obama has done so much for Republicans and this is how they treats him.

But the problem here, in my view, is the President Obama is making the same mistake that President Bush made: trying gun for the look and symbolism of bipartisanship, but not really getting at the hard work of bipartianship.

To really be bipartisan means having to find a way to work out a bill in light of the fact that you are dealing with two political parties with very different ideas of how governments should be run. It means that both sides have to learn to give up some cherished ideas and projects to reach a deal. There is a reason they say that making law is like making sausage; it's not pretty.

In a recent opinion piece, Steve Huntley of the Chicago Sun Times notes that Obama was basically trying to do bipartisanship on the cheap. He notes:

Obama has been good on the symbols of reaching across party lines, saying he wanted to hear Republican ideas for stimulus, inviting GOP lawmakers to the White House and traveling to Capitol Hill to meet with the entire Republican House caucus.

But Obama didn't walk the talk. He outsourced the writing of the stimulus bill to the hyper-partisan House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with predictable results. When members of the GOP House caucus complained they were being frozen out of the writing of the bill, he did nothing to persuade Pelosi to include Republican thinking.

The outcome was a bill long on the big-government spending liberals like and short on the kind of investor- and consumer-friendly tax cuts that conservatives want. Rather than serving as a focused strategy of stimulating the economy, the bill unleashed eight years of pent-up Democratic ambitions to expand government. It didn't get a single GOP vote, and 11 fiscally minded Democrats refused to sign on to it.

Now, the GOP are not victims here. And, of course, elections do have consequences. But the thing here is that Obama could have used his chief of staff, Rham Emmanuel to work with congressional Republicans to hammer out a deal. No, it would not be the GOP wish list of tax cuts all the time, but it might have included more conservative ideas that would have brought more Republicans on board.

But instead, Obama let Nancy Pelosi do the heavy lifting. Pelosi has made it known that she isn't interested in working with the GOP and the President should have known that.

Of course, bipartisanship is a two-way street. If the winners have to learn not to be so haughty, then the losers, in this case the Republicans, have to understand that they are not in the driver's seat. That doesn't mean accepting everything that the majority party puts in front of them, but it does mean that they won't get everything they want because of their status.

President Obama, like President Bush before him, has decided to use symbolism as bipartisanship. But such a tactic fools no one and just sours the relationship even more.

Maybe the best, if imperfect example, of bipartisanship has been what the three moderate GOP Senators have done in regards to the Stimulus Bill. Realizing that they aren't the party in charge anymore, they worked with moderate Democrats to work out something that was at least a bit more palatable. In my opinion, the bill is still too bloated, but it is at least not as bad as it was before.

But the thing is, that took hard work. No nice meetings or getting together to watch football. It was probably doing a lot of talking and talking and talking. And it got people cheesed off. Conservative activists see Senators Snowe, Collins and Specter as traitors, liberal activists think they have done "violence" to the bill. But that's politics: in a nation of 300 millions with differing visions of governing you can't please anyone.

I wonder what would have happened if Obama worked with the GOP leaders in the House and Senate to workout a deal. There would have been a lot of yelling, but I think that in the end, there might have been a bill that more Republicans could swallow.

I can only hope that this is not a sign of things to come with the President. I hope that in the future, Obama will be willing to get his hands dirty to work out a deal with the opposition and save the football for another time.