Read an Excerpt
Common Ground
How to Stop the Partisan War That Is Destroying America
Chapter One
The People vs. The Polarization of American Politics
Politics—I don't know why, but they seem to have a tendency to separate us, to keep us from one another, while nature is always and ever making efforts to bring us together.
—Sean O'Casey
Voters will tolerate polarization and extreme partisanship to a point, especially if it doesn't affect them directly. But by 2006, polarization was paralyzing government. It came at a time when the country was deeply divided over the war in Iraq, and facing a myriad of problems at home. After years of gridlock and extreme partisanship, the public had had enough; polarization ceased to be an insider's game, and voters rebelled in a rare "wave" election.
Wave elections are ones in which the outcome significantly alters the political balance of power. By the fall of 2006, politicians (particularly incumbents) finally caught up with the extent of the voters' anger. Republican incumbents, realizing that their party's strategy of maximizing the base, which had worked in 2002 and 2004, would not work in 2006, tried to persuade voters that they were not partisan extremists. Partisans, yes; extremists, no. Challengers in congressional races across the country attacked incumbents as members of a "do-nothing" Congress, and they put the blame squarely on polarization. Not to be outdone, even some incumbents who had engaged in the most outrageous polarizing preached the wisdom of "seeking common ground solutions." To enhance this message, candidates reached out to the twomost exciting and sought-after politicians in the country at the time, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack Obama (D-IL). Neither was on the ballot, but both made the evils of polarization a central ingredient of their message. Both are running for president in 2008, and there is no sign that their message will change.
The reelection of Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman in 2006 as an independent provided one of the first campaign tests specifically aimed at polarization . . . and polarization lost. Paradoxically, polarization had forced Lieberman to run as an independent because the Democratic Party denied him the party nomination. For partisans, it wasn't enough that Lieberman had been loyal to their Democratic Party and most of its issues for three decades, or that he had been the party's vice-presidential nominee in 2000. That he differed with them on one issue—Iraq—was enough for the polarizers to dump him.
(We are not suggesting that tenure entitled Lieberman to the nomination, or that the war in Iraq, especially among Democrats, was not a sufficient reason for a primary challenge. But, as we shall see, it was the polarizing tactics in the primary that were destructive and all too commonplace in today's politics.)
Lieberman got his revenge by making party extremists an issue. He won the general election with support from Democrats, independents, and—amazingly—a majority of Republicans. Thirty percent of the antiwar voters, according to Lieberman, voted for him. For these voters, polarizing tactics that attempted to drive a decent man from office were as immoral as the war in Iraq. For several years, many mainstream Republicans had questioned if their party was too associated with religious fundamentalists. In the aftermath of the Lieberman primary, many Democratic Party leaders were raising the same questions about the party's association with a resurgent, cyber-driven left.
Next door in Rhode Island, incumbent Lincoln Chafee, the Senate's most liberal Republican, was challenged by conservative activists who wanted to deny him renomination. The Republican Party leadership in the state supported Chafee but couldn't stop the rebellion on the right, and a primary challenger emerged. Chafee survived the primary, but only after Karl Rove, who might claim a patent on polarization, engaged in a highly publicized effort to save him. Chafee was too liberal for Rove and company, but his primary opponent was too conservative for Rhode Island. In a close race for control of the Senate, saving Chafee was necessary, even critical.
In the general election, Chafee tried to reestablish his independence: "I believe that neither Republicans nor Democrats are always right. I angered Republicans when I voted against the war in Iraq, and Democrats when I voted for legal reform." But the senator's association with the country's most famous polarizer became a major factor in his inability to separate himself from an immensely unpopular president. He lost by a wide margin.
Chafee's message of independence and antipartisanship (echoed by several other incumbent Republicans) could be interpreted as a survival strategy in a bad year for Republican candidates. Such reasoning does not explain why a similar message was adopted by many Democrats, including Chafee's opponent, Sheldon Whitehead, who ran TV ads calling for bipartisanship, and this in a heavily Democratic state where such a message wasn't necessary.
The most telling evidence that polarization may be eroding comes by way of former polarizers who are distancing themselves from the practice. Most political observers agree that Newt Gingrich, formerSpeaker and architect of the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, was a skillful advocate and practitioner of polarization. In fact, some, particularly Democrats, believe Gingrich was the founder of the polarization movement.
When we spoke to Gingrich in the summer of 2006, he freely admitted that polarization had been an important component in the Republicans' 1994 victory. More to the point, Gingrich agreed that it was a declining force in politics. Never one to be slow in recognizing the changing political winds, he immediately had ideas about how to end polarization. That's remarkable, considering that before our meeting, he said he hadn't given the topic much thought!
A conversation with the former Republican Speaker is an eclectic tour de force. Love him or hate him, few come away without a sense of awe. That is both a compliment to the man's intellectual reach and a criticism of the confidence and audacity with which his historical revisionism fits so tightly with his Newtonian view of present-day events. Gingrich is a self-taught historian and the author of several historical novels, which may explain his uncanny ability to convince the listener that what he thought he knew about history was simply wrong.
Common Ground
How to Stop the Partisan War That Is Destroying America. Copyright © by Cal Thomas. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
