What Is Bipartisanship Good For, Any Way? Posted by David Shorr

Does bipartisanship on foreign poliicy have anything to offer in an election season? Brian Katulis says not much -- it's time to have it out and let the better side win. Matt Yglesias says consider the source and the content. For me, it depends on what you expect to get out of bipartisanship.

Brian is right that there needs to be a vigorous debate about the recent policy and its consequences. I'm not really worried that this will slip off the campaign radar screen, though. But what we need to realize is that bipartisan can really help strengthen the argument for the major shift in direction we all want and need. Republican disaffection is significant, and it's not limited to Jim Leach and Chuck Hagel.

The bipartisanship I have in mind (and have actually been operationalizing) isn't so much about 2008 but laying the policy agenda ground for 2009. That was the purpose of the consensus-building confab the Stanley Foundation convened in late-November with the express purpose of re-posturing the US toward the world -- and which actually produced a consensus statement (with Brian Katulis as one of the participants).

It's also the point of our book, Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide, about which Matt is more ambivalent. Recently when I was on an Iowa Public Radio talk show (scroll to Dec. 19) with my conservative co-editor Tod Lindberg, he made the important point that these documents tell the next president which approaches and ideas s/he could find broad support for. And that's the other key thing about bipartisanship, whatever the outcome in November the reality of our two-party system is that broad support will be a sine qua non for almost anything important we want to do.

As Brian reminds us, we can't expect consensus on the entire foreign policy agenda. I readily admitted that Iraq isn't a ripe subject for bipartisanship in a post last summer, when I went one round with Matt and Anne-Marie Slaughter on the issue.

Comments

[Mike M.]

Really? If the Democrats act like Republicans have been acting, and if a Democratic president decides to put Bush's "unitary executive" powers to good use, maybe they won't need as much bipartisan support for some intitiatives as you anticipate. The problem is getting the much more diverse Democratic congress to act in lockstep the way the Republicans did. But if they did, even with a slim majority, it seems that a Democratic administration could wield the kind of influence Bush did, and that didn't depend much on bipartisan support.

[david shorr]

at the top of this list for me is billons for the civilian foreign affairs agencies for which we ll need all the support we can get

[Zathras]

Frankly, I don't think consensus among the foreign policy community advising a new President who hasn't done his (or her) own thinking about foreign policy is worth very much.

Foreign policy is made in a political context, and requires a degree of trust on the part of the great majority of Americans who do not devote much of their own attention to the subject. Such trust is extended far more readily, by both the public and the Congress, to a President than it is to any group of people whose role in government would never be more than, essentially, staff.

Substantively this is not always a good thing, as President Bush's first six years in office demonstrated; trust can be misplaced, especially in disorienting circumstances. It is a fact of political life, though. A President suspected of not really knowing what he is doing in the foreign policy field will always be a magnet for public criticism and opposition in Congress, regardless of how talented his advisers are (or think they are) and regardless of whether the actual foreign policy situation is all that bad.

This is a real risk for every candidate remaining in the Presidential race, with the possible exception of John McCain. Plenty of people in both parties are spinning furiously right now, putting together cases for their favorite candidate's foreign policy experience that clear the bar of plausibility -- the only thing the media, with its unrelenting focus on the campaign itself, really pays attention to most of the time. Some of them do it because they are angling for positions in the next administration; most of them do it because they are either projecting hopefully their own views onto their candidates or trying to give their candidates reputations to uphold.

But ground truth is that all the candidates who have done serious thinking of their own about foreign policy -- Biden, Dodd, Richardson -- are out of the race on the Democratic side (McCain for me is a special case; I acknowledge his record and for the most part respect his judgment, but think him utterly wrong on the salient foreign policy issue we face now -- Iraq -- and moreover consider him too old to be President). The candidates remaining are foreign policy novices, most of whom would much rather deal with the domestic policy issues on which they have made whatever reputations they now have.

It is probably idle to say that we can't afford another foreign policy novice -- the third one in a row -- in the White House, since we are likely to get one whether we can afford it or not. If we are very lucky the one we get will do did what Truman eventually did, which was to empower one trusted subordinate with preeminent responsibility for foreign policy and trust that subordinate to create and enforce his own consensus throughout the relevant agencies. That was a unique time, of course, and Truman was unique himself. More recent administrations (and all more recent Democratic administrations) have tended toward a less orderly, not to say chaotic policymaking structure. Our margin for error in the foreign policy field is less than it used to be, however, and the path to a successful foreign policy for any new President will be narrower in the future than it has been in years past.

[Kyle]

How come we never heard about the bipartisan thing from the MSM when Bush was just steamrolling the country? It only seems to have come up now that the Dems have some power, though they are too fucking cowardly to use it on the whole.

[William Smith]

Ezra Klein linked you for this article and pointed out that at a policy-level, bipartisanship isn't hard. Convincing two polar opposite wonks of a sensible compromise happens a lot. At an 'operational' level, as in Senators and Congressmen, it is much harder. Ask Lincoln Chafee about compromise and bipartisanship...

[Peace]

The Democrats could do without the so callled bipartisan ideas of O'Hanlon and Pollack.

[David Shorr]

Thanks for the tip on Ezra Klein's post. I'll reply here shortly. We're the kind of group that has access to the MSM and may yet get some attention. We got these materials into the hands off all the poobahs gathered at University of Oklahoma the other day. As a career-long advocate, I often face the challenge of getting media attention for things like this. Part of it is what Zathras says about how reporters are consumed by the personalities and process of the campaign. The blogosphere is really helpful (even to us VSP-types) in getting things into circulation without having them in the pages of the NYT or WaPo.

[David Shorr]

The comment from Peace about Mike O'Hanlon got me thinking about the semiotics of O'Hanlon. Mike is a person, and I don't want to demonize him, however much I might disagree with him on Iraq. Here's what I infer from seeing his and Kenneth Pollack's names invoked so regularly: moderate foreign policy liberals (the type who go in for bipartisanship) don't really stand for anything distinct from our conservative counterparts. I'll quickly add that many of you do not believe that, I recognize.

But I have a dare -- albeit a transparently self-interested one. I would like any of you who does harbor the kind of image of moderates I'm describing to read the Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide book (Routledge). See if the ten chapters look conservative to you. If there is someone who can't afford the $19.95 (or whatever the discounted price is), get in touch with the Stanley Foundation and we'll get one to you, though in such a case I would definitely expect a book report.