As any new president takes office, attention is lavished on the question of what “tone” he will set in the capital city. US President George W. Bush, you may recall, vowed to restore “honor and dignity” to the White House. He merely meant, of course, that he wouldn’t be playing find-the-cigar with any interns on its premises, not that he would be truthful with the American people about matters like, oh, the grounds for starting a war.
Bush promised also that he would bring a new tenor of bipartisanship to the politically stricken capital. He would work across the aisle and govern from the compassionately conservative middle, which he did, perhaps two or three times in his entire eight years. For the most part, Bush’s was the most remorselessly and extremely ideological administration in decades.
US president-elect Barack Obama promised to change all that. They all do. But one senses that Obama actually believes it. Post-partisanship has been one of his calling cards ever since his famous keynote address at the Democratic convention in 2004, when he said there is “no blue America or red America, but a United States of America,” a sentence he repeated often along the trail. In addition, he has given two very high-profile Cabinet positions to men presumed to be Republicans, Robert Gates and James Jones.
SMART POLITICS
While he is in many respects an ideological liberal, Obama is also what the political philosophers would call a civic republican, a believer in the “small-r” republican form of government’s unique ability to define and advance the common good. He understands, as some of your more fire-breathing liberals don’t, that post-partisanship is smart politics — co-opt the middle, co-opt even some Republicans and you end up occupying most of the space on the political spectrum and isolating your opponents on their clangorous little fringe.
How can Obama govern from this posture of moderation and compromise?
Sometimes he’ll be able to, sometimes he won’t. And sometimes he won’t want to. Some measures will have to be passed over conservative opposition, such as healthcare. Some fights cannot, and should not, be avoided.
But he can take a few symbolic steps to establish a different tone in Washington — to differentiate himself from Bush, inhabit the moral high ground and isolate his conservative opposition. Here are three modest suggestions.
First, Obama should go to Oklahoma and give a speech. Why Oklahoma? Because it is the only state in the union in which Obama did not win a single county. All 77 of Oklahoma’s counties went for John McCain. Even Cleveland County, which is home to Norman, seat of the state university and thereby redoubt of a typically liberal professoriate, went 62 percent for McCain. And that was one of Obama’s better counties.
OKLAHOMA
Obama should go to an Oklahoma county where he won only 15 percent or 20 percent of the vote and give a speech saying: You voted against me and that is your right, a right I will defend as guardian of the Constitution, but I’m here to say that though you’ll disagree with me, I will work every day in what I perceive to be your interests and you matter to me as much as the people of Manhattan or San Francisco or even Chicago matter to me.
Second, Obama should pay calls on several agencies in and around Washington whose missions were deeply corrupted under the current regime. He should go to CIA headquarters in northern Virginia and tell the career spooks: You will be left to do your jobs and to exercise your best professional judgment. No one from my White House will apply pressure to attempt to force any set of political outcomes.
He probably didn’t do all that much better on election day in Langley (where the CIA is based) than he did in Oklahoma, so the impact of such a visit would be profoundly powerful. And he should give the same kind of speech to the government’s scientists, whose reports on climate change were scrubbed and sometimes even changed by Bush’s White House, and its law enforcement officials, who were expected to carry out rancidly political prosecutions.
To each of these venues he should take with him the relevant high-ranking congressional legislators of both parties, so that the message is bipartisan.
Third, he should make it a point to get as much Republican support as possible for an early major initiative. The stimulus package, for example, will be the law of the land whether it passes with 60 senators (the majority needed to cut off debate) or 80. But two Republicans voting with him would be window dressing, whereas eight or 10 would mean it was genuinely a bipartisan measure.
THE RUB
What would have to be included or excluded to get eight or 10 Republicans to sign on is the rub. But as the cliche goes, he’ll never be stronger than on his first day in office and he should use that leverage to make support for his program as broad as possible, as Ronald Reagan did from the other side in 1981 on his tax and budget package.
Moves like these would drive some liberals up the wall because they’d see them as too accommodationist. But I can assure you, they would drive hard-core conservatives even farther up the wall. Conservatives would know exactly how much trouble it spelled for them if a Democratic president made good on rhetoric that every new president employs, but none of them lives up to. And who knows, it actually might change the tone, at least for a little while.
Michael Tomasky is editor of Guardian America.
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