There’s growing evidence that Americans are fed up with the ugly, unproductive partisan warfare served up by Republicans and Democrats. But are they going to rise up and do anything about it?
One avenue was unveiled last week by the organizers of Unity08, who hope to use college students and the Internet to mobilize millions of disappointed voters to nominate a bipartisan third ticket that will compete in all 50 states.
Another possibility is that major candidates for the GOP and Democratic nominations such as Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former Virginia governor, Democrat Mark Warner — and maybe even Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. — might respond to popular disgust, dispense with pandering to and agitating their parties’ base voters and run on moderate, problem-solving platforms.
It’s abundantly clear that America’s major long-term challenges — paying the cost of the baby boomers’ retirement, improving health care, fighting terrorism, becoming energy-independent, closing the inequality gap — won’t be solved except by bipartisan agreement that so far is utterly lacking.
Immigration, now a first-tier issue, may be an exception, but the ideological chasm between the House and Senate suggests that it may only prove the rule.
Meanwhile, of course, the Senate last week took up an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage — a measure solely designed to appease restive, right-wing GOP base voters. That will be followed shortly by a measure to outlaw the burning of an American flag.
When Washington politicians are not serving up trivialities, they’re usually savaging the opposition. In-power Republicans deny Democrats any meaningful participation in governing. Democrats, hoping to gain power, call Republicans nasty names and try to prevent the majority from passing legislation it can run on.
The latest evidence that the public is fed up with all of this comes from a poll commissioned by organizers of Unity08. It comes on top of scholarly research showing that the American public is nowhere near as polarized as party elites are, although the middle may be shrinking.
The Unity08 poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, found that 82 percent of U.S. adults agree that “America has become so polarized between Democrats and Republicans that Washington can’t seem to make progress solving the nation’s problems.”
Seventy-four percent say they are “dissatisfied” with the way things in the country are going, the highest in 13 years, and 72 percent say they’d like a wider choice than just the GOP and Democrats in 2008.
Asked which issues they deem “crucial,” only 22 percent identified gay marriage; 30 percent, abortion; 39 percent, guns. By comparison, 72 percent called education “crucial,” 71 percent said so for terrorism, 68 percent for health care and 62 percent for the increasing national debt.
Unity08 is the creation of former GOP operative Doug Bailey; Hamilton Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon, one-time aides to President Jimmy Carter; former Independent Maine Gov. Angus King and two college seniors, Zach Clayton of the University of North Carolina and Lindsay Ullman of Yale.
Beginning on college campuses, millions of online “delegates” are to be enlisted by the spring of 2008. They will watch rival bipartisan tickets compete and then select one to run in the November election on a third slate, competing with the GOP and Democratic nominees.
“This is very much ‘Field of Dreams’ — build it and they will come,” Bailey told me in an interview. He is hoping that by January 2007, the collection of “delegates” will number 500,000 — far more than the numbers who will participate in early 2008 party primaries — and that by January 2008, the number could be in the tens of millions.
Those numbers conceivably could attract contenders from the two parties who deem themselves too moderate to win nomination — say, Warner or former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani — or a newcomer to the ’08 field, such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg or a nonpolitician in the mold of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who, it must be noted, has said he will never run.
Stanford University’s Morris Fiorina, in the book “Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America” (Longman, 2004) demonstrated that while party operatives and the media want to split America starkly into “red” and “blue,” most Americans — and states — are actually shades of “purple.”
Even on abortion, the hottest of hot buttons, voters generally take a middle ground, keeping Roe v. Wade but also requiring parental consent and restrictions on late-term abortions.
On gay rights, polls show that voters oppose gay marriage by roughly 60 percent to 40 percent but are evenly split on civil unions and on a gay-marriage constitutional amendment. A majority now views homosexuality as an “acceptable lifestyle” — up 20 percent in the past 20 years.
According to the University of Michigan's American National Election Study, only 33 percent of voters identified themselves as “strong partisans” in 2004. Twenty-eight percent said they were “weak partisans,” 29 percent “lean independent” and 10 percent were “independent or apolitical.”
That’s a good base to start with. Maybe Unity08 can sound the call for action.
Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.
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