Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
—George Jean Nathan, drama critic, 1958
IF WE LOOK BACK AT THE IMPORTANT EVENTS AND LEGISLATIVE achievements of the twentieth century, one political reality stands out. Virtually all successful solutions to issues foreign and domestic depended on bipartisanship. Putting partisanship aside was never easy, but when the times demanded consensus for the general welfare, Democrats and Republicans rose above party and ideology. That didn’t mean partisanship ceased to exist or that there was no polarization. What it meant was that bipartisanship was a powerful factor in politics, and, when exercised, overwhelmed the forces of polarization.
From regulating monopolies to protecting workers, from confronting the Great Depression to expanding trade, from world wars to rebuilding Europe, from civil rights to women’s rights, Republicans and Democrats mostly found consensus. Bipartisanship required compromise that was at times both painful and politically dangerous.
Today’s Democrats and Republicans rarely find bipartisan consensus on anything, mostly because they don’t look for it. Cooperation across party lines is now regarded as a sign of weakness and disloyalty. Parties constantly prop up “the base,” which is supremely ideological and fundamentally unforgiving of anything it regards as compromise.
The reigning philosophy of both parties can be summed up this way: better to go down in defeat while standing on principle than to achieve at least part of the objective through consensus and live to fight another day.
Why is bipartisanship seen as a weakness today, but for most of the last century it was thought of as good politics and even courageous? It is mostly because ideology (or faux ideology) has replaced reason, and reasonableness has given way to fighting (which raises more profiles in the 24/7 cable-news era, as well as more money). Republicans and Democrats are so divided along stark ideological lines that consensus and bipartisanship are nearly impossible to achieve.
In the past, a broad spectrum of ideologies existed within each party that led to natural coalitions between the parties. Coalitions of like-minded Democrats and Republicans produced a significant body of bipartisan public policies, and laws to enforce them. Finding common ground on policy tended to produce laws that represented the thinking of a larger share of the American political demographic, and as a result more Americans benefited.
A Bipartisan Success Story
The Panama Canal Treaties, negotiated in the Ford and then Carter administrations, were simultaneously an important foreign-policy issue and an explosive domestic one. The Canal Treaties required sixty-seven votes in the Senate for ratification. Bob Beckel was in charge of the White House effort to ratify the treaties in the Senate.
President Carter called a group of us—including the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and Barry Goldwater (R-AZ)—into a rare Saturday meeting. The subject of the meeting was drug trafficking by Samuel Torrijos, the brother of Panamanian head of state Omar Torrijos. A top secret CIA cable had leaked, which revealed that a sealed indictment against Samuel Torrijos for facilitating shipments of cocaine to the United States, had been handed down. Carter (nor anyone else in the meeting) was aware of it.
Samuel Torrijos had resigned as Panama’s ambassador to Spain and was returning on a ship scheduled to dock in the Panama Canal Zone, then a United States territory. American officials were waiting to arrest Torrijos, but he had been tipped off and his ship diverted to Panamanian territory, where the United States could not touch him.
The drug revelation could not have come at a worse time. Carter asked the senators for help. Goldwater told the president that he opposed the treaty, but he opposed leaking intelligence even more, and he did not want the treaty to fail on the basis of selective leaks.
Barry Goldwater was nothing like the Goldwater portrayed in the ’64 campaign. He was razor sharp, courteous, and above all a patriot. For Goldwater, partisanship had no place in the affairs of state, especially when it concerned national security.
I walked Goldwater to his car, and thanked him for his help, especially since he opposed the treaty. He stopped, put his arm around me, and said, “Bob, Carter is my president and commander in chief, too. This [the leak] is not right. Don’t thank me; just promise me if something like this ever happens to a Republican president, you’ll stand up for him.”
Goldwater did as he promised. He rebuked treaty opponents, and secretly threatened to vote for the treaty if any more intelligence leaked. The drug issue caused a major upheaval that almost destroyed ratification. It did not in the end because Barry Goldwater kept his word.
The Panama Canal Treaty passed the U.S. Senate 68 to 32.