The Bipartisan Policy Center
Four former Senate leaders. Howard Baker, R-Tenn.; George Mitchell, D-Maine; Bob Dole, R-Kan.; and Tom Daschle, D-S.D. have formed the The Bipartisan Policy Center aimed at putting aside partisan politics and offering solutions to the nation’s biggest issues.
“We’ve all been leaders and you know how difficult it is,” said Dole, who served as both majority and minority leader between 1985 and 1996. “We’re all partisan in a way,” Dole said in an interview Monday, adding they also hope to show that “compromise is not a bad word.”
Congress, evenly divided and sharply partisan, in recent years has turned to outside commissions for advice on politically sensitive topics. Two of those nonpartisan groups, the Sept. 11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group, have had considerable influence on policy.
The former senators believe the new group “can help create common sense solutions to key national challenges and can help foster a return to more civil political debate,” Baker, the Senate leader from 1981 to 1985, said in a statement.
The center has a staff of 20 and a budget of $7 million for 2007, funded by several philanthropic groups. At first, it plans to concentrate on projects dealing with agriculture, energy and national security policy.
This effort to build consensus is a refreshing contrast to the recent high profile commitment of Ann Coulter to inflame divisiveness. I hope for a collaboration of this group, The Republican Main Street Partnership, It’s My Party Too, Gov Schwarzenegger and Mayor Bloomberg to promote candidates similarly inclined to collaboration. Perhaps this group of Centrists can also focus on non-partisan redistricting and campaign finance reform to help reduce the influence and distraction of special interests on public policy.
This high minded effort to build bridges also contrasts with this recent article summarizing the big business of political negative attack ads.
Ex-GOP candidates turn attacks back on national panel
The GOP independent expenditure operation spent $77 million attacking Democratic House candidates, while spending $6.6 million in positive ads boosting Republicans, according to FEC disclosures.
Certainly both parties do resort to negativity and distortions but the GOP seems to have elevated it to central offensive strategy with much more weight than promoting why voters should choose GOP candidates. As a Moderate Independent I value learning the truth about a candidate’s relevant behavior such as voting records and taking large amounts of money from donors with interests in conflict with the public good. But the politics of distortion inclines me to give the Dems the benefit of the doubt when it comes to conveying facts and context.
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15 Responses to “The Bipartisan Policy Center”
I would argue that neither are anything like as influential as most people expected. Please note what the most important impediments are to getting bipartisan initiatives implemented.
Bi-partisan commissions are valuable as reference points for those of us voters who have interest in considering principled compromise. I am interested in why leaders would resist the recommendations of such groups.
It seems to me that the main barriers to more bi-partisan cooperation are primarily loss of power and influence, unwillingness to allow the opposing party to achieve a PR advantage, obligations to significant big donors, pandering to significant voter interest groups, fear of distorted campaign advertising.
Well, those are all of the cynical reasons and they’re all true enough. But there’s one motivation for opposition that isn’t so cynical: that sometimes ideologues actually believe in their ideology. If you believe that govt run healthcare system would be a disaster, you are right to oppose it at every turn. If you believe that business friendly legislation harms workers, you are right to oppose that.
Compromise sounds great and I agree it is necessary, but as I keep saying, the devil’s in the details. I’d like to see more substantive posts from centrists about what exactly they think we should all compromise on. Take an issue and specifically state the stance of conservatives and the stance of liberals, and what you believe each one should consider compromising on. Tell what you personally would be willing to compromise on and where you draw the lines of being ideological on a particular issue yourself. I think that if centrists actually went through this exercise with all of the major issues of the day, it might be informative. You might find that you have more in common with the ideologues than you think that you do. You may lean toward one ideology on one issue and toward the other side on another, but I honestly doubt that there are many people who don’t have strong opinions on what type of policies would work best for solving various problems.
I have proposed my ideas on compromises on this blog and my former one Austin Centrist.
The Second amendment should be tempered by keeping guns and assault arms out of the hands of predators.
Woman should have the final say on their abortions while we do what we can to avoid pregnancies and stop them as soon as possible. Adoption should be facilitated.
Military might should be balanced with aggressive diplomatic efforts and humanitarian aid.
Taxes should be at a level to pay for government without increasing the national debt.
Free trade should be balanced with a safety net that protects who need to change careers.
Health Care should be universal in large part through optimizing market systems, reducing obstacles to administrative efficiency, and individual ownership of insurance.
School Vouchers should be part of the tool box for making education more efficient.
Corporations and Unions should be banned from political action so that large concentrations of money do not overwhelmed less centralized minority interests.
I prefer Cap and trade methods for reducing noxious emissions into our air and water.
These are just some of the ways I look for a reconciliation of public interests.
Paul,
With all due respect, some of those things are wishes rather than policy prescriptions. I think even the NRA would say that they’d like for assault weapons to not be in the hands of predators; however, they aren’t going to agree to restrictions on their own gun owning rights in order to achieve that goal. I assume you would prescribe some such restrictions in order to work toward the goal, so I’m asking, which restrictions would you favor? What is reasonable to expect gun owners to accept, and what goes too far?
Same with a lot of the other issues. On abortion, it’s fine to say you’d like for abortion to be legal but rare, but how do you actually go about that? Restricting late term abortions (beyond what week, and is this going to change as medicine advances and viability becomes earlier and earlier in pregnancy?) Informed consent laws which would require women to view certain materials in order to really consider what they are doing? Parental consent? Consideration of rights of the father? Where do you draw all of these lines?
Do you have more detailed descriptions of your ideas on your own blog? I’ll try to check it out, but if you have a specific link I’d be interested.
CSTANLEY: “…doubt that there are many people who don’t have strong opinions on what type of policies would work best for solving various problems. ”
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Of course, people have strong opinions, or we wouldn’t be talking about the need to compormise.
JUst like diplomacy doesn’t mean giving the other guy whatever he demands, compromise doesn’t put a muzzle on anyone’s opinions.
People debate, do advocacy etc. but it’a all for nothing, it at the end of the road there are no WORKABLE policies, and all we have are just two different opinions.
I would argue that it’s detrimental for one side to achieve 100% of what it wants. It leaves the concerns of the opposition out in the cold, angry and looking for revenge. Thus we get a see-saing shift in policies with every shift in power, with one side gloating and the other looking for their arsenal of attacks.
I confess I never liked Bush, but I often widhed I could advise him about his ‘now we’re going to do it may way’ style. It attracts extreme opposition from the word GO. His insistence that everyone was rich and happy in our booming economy caused a backlash among those not aboard the money train. If he had addressed concretely the plight of those negatively impacted by the lightning quick changes in the economy, he would have disarmed his critics at the pass.
When you’re talking national policies, you ignore the opposition at the risk of producing national warfare. That’s what is taking place now, and it’s not good for anyone.
PAUL SILVER FOR PRESIDENT, with me as advisor to ajdust some os his policy points.
domajot,
I wasn’t advocating for polarity, I was just pointing out that collaboration is easy to wish for but much, much more difficult to achieve. And since Paul only pointed out the cynical reasons that compromise is difficult, I felt the need to point out that there are also reasons that are based on principle.
I think it’s important for each side of the polarized divide to better understand the ideals of the other side. That’s the beginning of compromise, to define the starting positions.
Then each party has to be honest about what they’re willing to compromise on, and what is non-negotiable.
Then the people who are in the middle also have to be honest about their own positions, because even though the polarized ones don’t appeal to them, they may have their own sacred cows that they’re unwilling to sacrifice.
The devil IS in the details, and those depend on who is at the negotiating table. I am less interested in the precise definition of an assault weapon, or the extend of back ground checks, or the beginning date that defines a late term abortion than that people are at the table who will consider these issues with a pragmatic temperament towards moving the policy forward towards fewer assault weapons in the hands of predators and few abortions of viable fetuses.
My concern is the suppression of “all or nothing” attitudes that are meant more for pandering to extremist partisans than responding sensibly to an evolving culture.
CS-
It seems to me you are asking for an issue by issue debate here, whereas I am addressing the approach (the state of mind, if you will) applicable to any issue at hand.
Deciding on issue positions occurs within each side, before they come to the table. The crucial point concerns the attitudes they bring to the table, and those will determine if law is produced that can move the country forward or whether the battles will rage on without any resolution at all.
domajot,
You are right that I moved the discussion to the specific issues, but that was to illustrate the point. I just think that you and Paul are marginalizing those who must be brought into the negotiating process (those who are at the extremes of either end). By focusing on those who are already motivated to compromise, and by implying that the extremists are at fault (not only that, but that implying that the motives for extremism are always impure), I think you set yourselves up for failure. Unless the people at the fringes can be made to see the benefits of compromise, they will continue to exert pressure beyond that which can be borne by centrists. Yes, there are always extreme fringes who won’t compromise, but with the right motivations, the right of center and left of center can make progress if they’re shown a way to do that with integrity.
CS-
Each side has to decide how to deal with the extremists among them, how far to go to accomodate them. That’s part of forming party policies, not creating workable solutions in a bi-partisan manner.
Well, doma, just the idea of phrasing it as “accomodating” is a problem IMO. Each party does encompass those with ideological positions and while they shouldn’t pander to the extremes if it means alienating the more moderate members of the party, I don’t think they should alienate the purists either. That’s kind of my point; the moderates within a party shouldn’t have to apologize for people in their own party who hold a principled opinion. They should just figure out how those people might be made more comfortable with the idea of compromise; for example, if moderates in the GOP would convince the gun crowd that agreeing to background checks doesn’t mean that they are going to give up the right to bear arms. It’s a matter of delineating where they’ll draw the line so that the more ideological people in the party don’t feel that they’re being sold out.
CS-
You are talking about party (either party) politics.
I’m talking about co-existing in the same nation after the within-party debates are done
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doma,
Sorry to be so argumentative, but I am specifically NOT talking about intraparty politics. You may disagree, but my point is that I believe that the country as a whole needs to debate these issues openly and honestly. The two sides need to better understand each other, and if the discussions only happen at the intraparty level then the misunderstanding and polarization in society as a whole will not get any better.