Michael Oreskes in the Feb. 3 NYT: "...Call it a split between whether politics should be a pursuit of consensus or an effort to enact a party’s fundamental ideas, its core orthodoxy. Each party’s nominating fight boiled down last week to a choice between two candidates: one who argues for a politics that reaches across party lines and looks to identify common ground within the broader electorate; and one who states his or her first principle as representing the traditional party base by drawing firm ideological lines..."
"American politics has been so polarized for so long now that it is hardly surprising that veteran politicians like Mr. Romney and Mrs. Clinton fall back on standard political tools (like casting doubt on their opponents’ partisan bona fides) to motivate the party base, particularly in what is, after all, still a party nominating fight, not a general election. Mr. Obama spoke last week of bad political “habits” of divisiveness and partisanship, which he said were not the fault of any one campaign. In their political careers these candidates have never really seen much else.
What is perhaps more revealing is that for all their experience Mr. Romney and Mrs. Clinton are campaigning as if they had missed the extraordinary shift in national mood.
Not so Mr. Obama or, to a considerable extent, Mr. McCain. Mr. Obama’s campaign has clearly been tapping a pervasive disenchantment with the nation’s condition and its politics. And Mr. McCain has been running against the conservative establishment, the seat of its orthodoxy.
“I don’t know that we have seen in the last 50 years two candidates who have so openly tried to move beyond their party base before the nomination as Obama and McCain,” said Meenekshi Bose, professor of presidential studies at Hofstra University...
The implicit choice facing voters today in both parties is whether the next president should govern from an orthodox ideological position or more in the manner of the postwar presidents who led through bipartisan consensus.
Certainly Americans have learned that the manner of campaigning does not guarantee the manner of governing. Mr. Bush ran on the promise that he would be a uniter, not a divider. But if the nature of a campaign is any signal, the current ones show clear distinctions on this question of partisanship..."
"The sources are different today. But alienation again fuels frustration and disenchantment. Government seems distant and ineffective to many voters. Even a government as powerful as America’s seems inadequate to crucial challenges — from the physical threat of terrorism to the economic wrenching of globalization. The political world, to many, seems out of joint.
“It is too easy — and too partisan — to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush,” wrote a man who could hardly be blamed if he did, Al Gore. In a book published last summer, Mr. Gore captured part of the mood when he wrote that “American democracy is now in danger” because public debate has been hollowed out by a vicious cycle of partisanship and shallow media. “It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse,” Mr. Gore wrote.
Across the political spectrum Americans say they feel that something is wrong. For many years, poll takers have been asking Americans the standard question of whether they think the country is going in the right or wrong direction. The numbers this winter are about as bad as they have ever been. Nearly 7 in 10 of those surveyed say the country is on the wrong track. Indeed, says the poll taker Peter D. Hart, the country has gone through Vietnam, Watergate and impeachment without a period of sustained negativity that equals this."...
"“The real split, it seems to me,” said the historian and Thomas Dewey biographer Richard Norton Smith, “is between those Americans, a majority in my opinion, who at least say they want to see politicians trying to work across the aisle and the political system as it has actually evolved, with gerrymandered districts and talk radio and much of the media coverage reinforcing the tyranny of the base.”
It would be easy in the current political climate to presume that the bipartisans are the good guys and the party fundamentalists the bad. But that would be to assume that what is politically attractive at the moment will also be politically effective or even right.
Mr. Smith picked his words precisely. Americans say they want to see politicians working across party lines. But do they really mean it? One voter’s consensus is another’s fatal compromise. Are you actually willing to give up some cherished goal, or part of it, to achieve more unity?
Mr. Hart, the poll taker, notes that while voters agree that the American house needs repair, half want to shore up the floorboards and the others want to fix the roof. They may all want to unite, but unite around what?
Indeed, you could look at Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Romney as the realists. They confront politics as it is, rather than engaging in flights of fancy about what it might be. They aren’t just pandering to the base because they need core party voters to win the nomination. They are fighting for principles that separate their side from the other.
There is a strong cadre around Mrs. Clinton who believe that this is the moment for Democrats to do what the Republicans did so well for nearly 30 years: seize the high ground of ideas, offer strong proposals and push them through. In other words, the goal, as Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton adviser, put it in a recent interview with The New Yorker, is not transcending partisanship but “fulfilling it.”
With the tide running for the Democrats this year, the campaign season will show whether it is the misfortune of partisan Democrats that their moment has arrived just as the country has had it with partisanship."
Any regular reader of this blog knows where I come down on this issue. Yes, there are times when you go to the mat for a value you believe in, but more real progress is achieved through cooperation and persuasion than through competition and force. What's interesting to me is the degree to which the rigid ideologues on the left don't see how their behavior feeds energy to the other side. The person who has the most responsibility for Bill Kristol's arrival at the Times? Paul Krugman, who now has his column appear across from Kristol's two times a week. The only way to balance a hard core ideologue is to put them across from a kindred soul from the other side. The best columns require no such quotas, because they provide the balance themselves. The NYT editorial board was wise to avoid falling into the trap of ideological purity (such as the WSJ editorial board did long ago)... Bill Kristol is harsh medicine, but I'd expect no less from the old grey lady.