(I’m not sure if there’s really a debate here; it’s more of a political musing. But since it’s politics, I figured GD was the place to put it.)
I don’t think many people around here would disagree with the notion that there is at least some common ground between the two parties. It may not be much, but there’s always some.
By ‘common ground’, I mean where both parties agree that X needs to be done, and (maybe) they even agree on how X should be done.
An example: providing prescription drug coverage for seniors on Medicare. Thanks to public pressure, both parties now agree that it needs doing; however, there’s a deep divide, still, on how such a benefit should be provided. So it’s in common ground as far as the ‘what’, but not the ‘how’.
My sense is that, absent a strong mandate for change, new Presidents do best when they begin with the part of their agenda that falls into the ‘common ground’ range. Once they’ve gained the trust of more of the public, they’re better positioned to bring up some of the more controversial aspects of their agenda. (Clinton never really recovered from starting off with gays in the military.)
What brought this to mind was reading the transcript of Bush’s speech last night, looking at the list of issues that he regarded as being part of that ‘common ground’:
Public schools, Social Security, Medicare, prescription drug coverage, a sound military, a bipartisan foreign policy - yup. These are widely shared goals. The level of agreement on how to achieve each goal varies from issue to issue, but people generally believe these are the things we want.
OTOH, the vast majority of Americans don’t feel we need a tax cut, and don’t expect to benefit from one. That one is merely a Republican concern, rather than an American concern. I don’t want to argue whether a tax cut is appropriate or not, here; I’m just stating that this can’t be characterized as a ‘common goal.’
Also, the statement, “Together we will address some of society’s deepest problems one person at a time,” takes one side of a fundamental philosophical divide between American liberalism and conservatism. Liberals tend to believe that society’s problems aren’t really solved one person at a time, unless one changes the environment in which those persons make the decisions that they make: absent some change in larger-scale forces, changes in the way individuals act is statistical ‘noise’ that, over large numbers of people, cancels out. Conservatives either don’t buy that logic, or don’t worry about it, because they don’t want to change society anyway: society, in their view, should be whatever happens as a result of everybody’s individual decisions. (OK, that’s libertarianism, but I’d argue - elsewhere - that libertarianism is the pure form of conservatism.)
I’ve couched that in language that raises a debate, I suppose, for which I apologize. My point is that, like with the tax cuts, this approach, right or wrong, is not an ‘American responsibility’; it’s something that in fact underlies the partisan divide in this country.
While on the whole, Dubya said the right words last night, I think characterizing positions and approaches on which there is deep partisan disagreement as common ground could get him into trouble, and I hope his brain trust has the sense to get him to back off. There’s plenty of stuff that the two parties can agree on, right now, and it would be good to actually get that stuff done first, and then try to sell us on tax cuts and one-person-at-a-time approaches to societal problems. If he wants to be ‘a uniter, not a divider’, then that’s what he’ll do. Here’s hoping.
