The Audacity of Hope

our troops, say, or some modest increase in veterans’ benefits—that makes the bill
painful to oppose.
In its first term, at least, the Bush White House was a master of such legislative
gamesmanship. There’s an instructive story about the negotiations surrounding the first
round of Bush tax cuts, when Karl Rove invited a Democratic senator over to the White
House to discuss the senator’s potential support for the President’s package. Bush had
won the senator’s state handily in the previous election—in part on a platform of tax
cuts—and the senator was generally supportive of lower marginal rates. Still, he was
troubled by the degree to which the proposed tax cuts were skewed toward the wealthy
and suggested a few changes that would moderate the package’s impact.
“Make these changes,” the senator told Rove, “and not only will I vote for the bill, but I
guarantee you’ll get seventy votes out of the Senate.”
“We don’t want seventy votes,” Rove reportedly replied. “We want fifty-one.”
Rove may or may not have thought the White House bill was good policy, but he knew
a political winner when he saw one. Either the senator voted aye and helped pass the
President’s program, or he voted no and became a plump target during the next election.
In the end, the senator—like several red state Democrats—voted aye, which no doubt
reflected the prevailing sentiment about tax cuts in his home state. Still, stories like this
illustrate some of the difficulties that any minority party faces in being “bipartisan.”
Everybody likes the idea of bipartisanship. The media, in particular, is enamored with
the term, since it contrasts neatly with the “partisan bickering” that is the dominant story
line of reporting on Capitol Hill.
Genuine bipartisanship, though, assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and that
the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upon
goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majority
will be constrained—by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate—
to negotiate in good faith. If these conditions do not hold—if nobody outside
Washington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs of the
tax cut are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so—the
majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100 percent of what it wants,
go on to concede 10 percent, and then accuse any member of the minority party who
fails to support this “compromise” of being “obstructionist.” For the minority party in
such circumstances, “bipartisanship” comes to mean getting chronically steamrolled,
although individual senators may enjoy certain political rewards by consistently going
along with the majority and hence gaining a reputation for being “moderate” or
“centrist.”
Not surprisingly, there are activists who insist that Democratic senators stand fast
against any Republican initiative these days—even those initiatives that have some
merit—as a matter of principle. It’s fair to say that none of these individuals has ever
run for high public office as a Democrat in a predominantly Republican state, nor has
any been a target of several million dollars’ worth of negative TV ads. What every
senator understands is that while it’s easy to make a vote on a complicated piece of
legislation look evil and depraved in a thirty-second television commercial, it’s very