Love / Spit / Love
Interesting set of columns from the New York Times recently, as I suspect bipartisanship as a theme is intentional. I am a firm believer that there are a lot of inefficiencies in solving problems in our current political climate, to use a Moneyball phrasing. Both Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton have advocated saving thousands of lives and millions of dollars every year by moving health care record-keeping to computers, but we're still not doing it. Are we really so divided that we couldn't work out the details over lunch? Maureen Dowd's current replacement has an odd debut in Saturday's paper, but she makes the same point in an astute paragraph:
When I find myself puzzled and even vexed by the opinions and beliefs of other people, I invite them to have lunch. Multiple experiments have supported what we will call, in Jeff's honor, the Limerick Hypothesis: in the bitter contests of values and political rhetoric that characterize our times, 90 percent of the uproar is noise, and 10 percent is what the scientists call "signal," or solid, substantive information that will reward study and interpretation. If we could eliminate much of the noise, we might find that the actual, meaningful disagreements are on a scale we can manage.
Jack Valenti, who was a top aide to LBJ before becoming head of the MPAA (that is indeed the movie lobby), wrote a really good essay on the subject on Friday:
The president, with the skill of an actor, would begin: "Ev, I wouldn't treat a cut dog the way you treated me on the floor today."Dirksen, with a mock somber expression, would answer, "Mr. President, I have a vow to be faithful to the truth, so I had no choice in what I said."
L.B.J. would laugh. Touché. Dirksen, pleased with his retort, would rumble up a laugh as well. They would trade stories and gossip.
Then the president would say something like: "Ev, I need three Republican votes on my civil rights bill, and you can get them."
Dirksen would frown. Without answering, he would reach into his jacket and pull out a list of nominees to just about every operational regulatory commission in Washington. He would also suggest that the president relax his opposition to a bill the Republicans found congenial to their aims.
They would ramble on, reminiscing and teasing each other. When the Frescas were finished, Dirksen would depart. There would be no summary of what they had said. Their relationship was built on something that is sorely missing today: trust. Both men knew that plenty of quarrels would be played out on the Senate floor and on the campaign trail. But they also knew that once a commitment had been made, it would be kept. If they disagreed, they would keep talking.
This is real rocket science here, the same head-slapper you get when you spend some time with someone of a riotously different political persuasion and remember that political views don't matter outside politics. Now, sure, I know plenty of Republican jerks. I also suspect they'd still be jerks even if we agreed completely. Our friend Patricia Nelson Limerick, who wrote the first op-ed I quoted above, brings in another historical example:
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson began as friends. The tensions and frictions of the early Republic took care of that. Then, after years of silence between them, a mutual friend persuaded them to write to each other. In 1812, they launched into a correspondence that continued until it was ended by their deaths.That ending point was on their minds and drove their correspondence. As Mr. Adams wrote Mr. Jefferson, "You and I ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to each other."
Fair point. My personal experience is that lost contacts never get on your case for taking so long to get in touch with them. (After all, they didn't get in touch with you, right?) In professional life, it seems like this approach to negotiation works too: don't give up your values and your most important projects, but talk about what you really need from the other side. It may not be insightful to remark that I'm surprised to find common ground more often than not, but our politicians still aren't doing it, so the comparison is still worth making.
The trouble is that working well with others is easy in theory and harder in practice. You get a couple Frescas in you and all of a sudden you're conceding major parts of your Social Security plan. But to return to our friend Senator Clinton, she's made joint policy proposals with Newt Gingrich, Lindsay Graham and Tom DeLay, among others. Since she likes to focus on genuinely common-sense issues, Senator Clinton a) finds more opportunity to get more done and help more people and b) comes across as moderate. And every time Clinton stands up there with another conservative Republican, it gets harder and harder to attack her as a crazy liberal. Best of all, since she picks her issues well, you can't attack her for doing it, or you're attacking something like reducing hospital errors. So there's plenty of room to get more done in Washington.
Unfortunately, the challenge is that a willingness to work with the other side can be faked for political purposes. I'm sure you saw Karl Rove's ridiculous comment last week about how liberals wanted to offer "understanding" to the perpetrators of 9/11. One of the few Republicans to distance himself from those remarks so far is Rick Santorum: he has a really tough election to win next year, and acting like he values the other side of the aisle makes him come across as more moderate.
Right, right, despite his votes. Nonetheless, there's still hope for an effective American government. We've just got a ways to go.