I Remember Bipartisanship

What is the meaning of bipartisanship now? Young people have never seen it, and the rest of us are forgetting what it looks like.

I have some thoughts based on having breathed and paid a little attention for a certain number of years. Perhaps a broad view of the subject will spark a productive discussion.

From WWII until the election of Richard Nixon, there was a great deal of bipartisanship.

There was no war between the parties. They disagreed, they puffed up like pouter pigeons, but for the most part they worked out their differences in all three branches of government.

It all took place behind the scenes according to a political gentlemen's agreement. I have a generic image in my mind of a Congressman, a conservative columnist, a liberal judge and a high-level White House aide having dinner at Katharine and Phil Graham's house, during either a Republican or a Democratic administration.

Their after-dinner conversation morphed into decisions, bills, laws, and news, but you couldn't tell it from the outside. To the rest of us it was just events taking place. There was a sea change in the mid-sixties, when the turmoil was constant and wrenching. We made it through the assassinations, the civil rights movement, social change, and the beginning of many of the programs that survive today to help the poor, thanks to the War on Poverty. Then we elected Richard Nixon, the man who had no friends.

It's reasonable to say that a room with leather chairs, brandy, and cigars is no place to decide the fate of the nation. But they were not each other's enemies. The privileged classes didn't have Franklin Roosevelt to kick around any more, and they didn't hate the rest of us. The fourth estate and the three branches were finding a way to manage  the new post-war, Cold War, backyard barbecue world.

But Richard Nixon resented them all with a low-level white-hot flame that eventually burned his house and, in a way, the country. And we haven't found a replacement for the brandy and cigars. The flame continues to burn, but for different reasons.

We no longer have a man with a fatal flaw at the helm, but a man who has no redeeming features. This could only have happened by a series of turns due to changing circumstances, without the anchor of friendship and shared intellectual love of governance to keep the ship of  state afloat.

We can't go back to a gentlemen's agreement, but there has to be a cooperative agreement among the factions. If they won't do it, we have to. Kos, us, Keith, Sibel, Luke, Michael Moore, the candidates and hundreds more who must be dedicated enough to do whatever is necessary. We're taking on water. It's up to us to keep the ship afloat, because the people at the helm don't care what happens to the passengers.