The bipartisan ideal

To follow up on my previous post:

Steele's answers to the Sun survey are a good example of why many Democrats have come to abandon bipartisanship as a desirable political goal. (The Republicans having abandoned it long ago.) When a politician wraps a staunchly ideological agenda in the the language of achieving unity among all citizens, it's only a matter of time before one concludes that such language is inherently dishonest. Indeed, it is because many centrist and center-left pundits and politicians clung, and still cling, to the bipartisan ideal that they got bowled over by Bush and the Republicans during the build-up to war in Iraq, and it is why any politician who puts on a show of bipartisanship will have his praises sung by the traditional media, regardless of his actual positions (e.g., John McCain).

The situation is such that bipartisanship has become, paradoxically, just another partisan cudgel, used especially by Republicans to scold Democrats when they don't play along with their agenda, as they did for most of the first Bush administration. Perhaps not coincidentally, Joe Lieberman also invokes the bipartisan ideal as a reason for him to continue holding on to his Senate seat, despite the majority opinion of Connecticut Democrats (and, I suspect, of all Ct. residents). For their part, the Democratic Party is, albeit slowly, learning that proudly standing up and fighting for your beliefs yields dividends.

And even were the situation described above not the case, why should bipartisanship be held up as an ideal anyway? There is certainly value in not having political debates devolve into shouting matches (denizens of Frederick will know what I'm talking about), but the practical effect of such idealization is to make compromise more important than what's being compromised, and to make a bad compromise more desired than nothing at all. It is a bad compromise, for example, to give a $50 billion tax break to the top 1% of wealth-holders, rather than the $100 billion tax break that the opposition wanted. Similarly in Maryland in 1999, the General Assembly ought to have kept electric utilities regulated, or else gone whole-hog into deregulation; the compromise, however, turned out to be a fiasco, since the utilities retained their monopoly, but no longer had any real restraints on how they could set their prices (which may change with the BGE bill passed back in June). Compromise may be necessary, but, if you believe in what you advocate, never desirable.

UPDATE: Via Kos, Simon Rosenberg's post mortem on the Lamont/Lieberman battle explains why partisan politics is good -- or at least necessary for Democrats to survive.

Tags: Maryland politics, MD-Sen, Michael Steele, bipartisanship, Joe Lieberman