The Media Quest for the Right Bipartisan StuffThere's something about the lure of "bipartisanship" that hooks many journalists. And often it seems that boatloads of politicians are eager to swallow the bait. In fact, these days, it's hard to tell who's more eager to succeed in the quest for the bipartisan holy grail — the reporters and pundits who keep yearning for it or the politicians who try to make clear just how much they want to find it. The attraction is somewhat understandable. After all, heated partisan wrangling has often shed more blight than light. During the last couple of decades, the story of Congress has commonly seemed to be about efforts by Democrats and Republicans to attack, embarrass, trap or otherwise skewer their colleagues on the other side of the aisle. But the promised land of bipartisanship is the kind of holy territory that either doesn't exist or is apt to be more like hell than heaven. In recent decades, bipartisan majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate have frequently taken actions that led to disaster. Conformity has not been auspicious. Many overwhelming agreements have led to catastrophes. In August 1964, for instance, both parties provided a model of bipartisan unity. With no opposition in the House and only two dissenting votes in the Senate (from Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska), the Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Based on false renditions of what had taken place early that month in the waters off the coast of Vietnam, the resolution opened the floodgates to the Vietnam War. In mid-September 2001, Congress was also nearly unanimous in its bipartisan fervor. Only Rep. Barbara Lee of California was willing to vote against a blank check go-to-war resolution three days after the horrors of 9/11. The continuing U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have their roots in this craven exercise in congressional bipartisanship. Often, the most pernicious bipartisan policies are made possible by silence and inaction.
In recent weeks, to the rapt approval of many journalists, President Obama has asserted and reasserted that a bipartisan approach to policy is far more preferable than any other. While this tends to play very well in the press, the logic escapes me. Compromise can be a very good aspect of politics, but that doesn't mean compromised principles lead to the greater good. Countless major advances in lawmaking — and social decency — have come when politicians pushed back against pressures to find the prevailing middle ground and occupy it. Ultimately, whether a decision is "bipartisan" tells us nothing about the quality of the decision. Yet a vast amount of media coverage leaves the impression that bipartisan agreement — or at least deal-making — is a certification of quality. Why do so many journalists yearn for bipartisan decisions in Washington? Part of the answer has to do with an eagerness to avoid a lot of disruption of the status quo. But that explanation doesn't explain a key fact: We didn't hear so much eagerness for bipartisan agreement during eight years of the presidency of George W. Bush. Barack Obama encouraged the media's ongoing propensity in favor of calls for "bipartisan" policies. By making such a big deal out of seeking bipartisanship, Obama provided high wattage for the current media spotlight on that criterion for assessing success. Let's face it: "Bipartisan" legislation can be brilliantly visionary or stupidly disastrous. The same goes for legislation that one party manages to ram through Congress and into the law books. All the blather about seeking a bipartisan spirit is a big distraction from substance. Norman Solomon wrote the book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," which has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com COPYRIGHT 2009 DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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