If you’re in the minority party, you have no such protection. You must vote yes or no on whatever bill comes up, with the knowledge that it’s unlikely to be a compromise that either you or your supporters consider fair or just. In an era of indiscriminate logrolling and massive omnibus spending bills, you can also rest assured that no matter how many bad provisions there are in the bill, there will be something — funding for body armor for 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 hard to explain the wisdom of that same vote in less than twenty minutes. What every senator also knows is that during the course of a single term, he or she will have cast several thousand votes. That’s a whole lot of potential explaining to do come election time.
Perhaps my greatest bit of good fortune during my own Senate campaign was that no candidate ran a negative TV ad about me. This had to do entirely with the odd circumstances of my Senate race, and not an absence of material with which to work. After all, I had been in the state legislature for seven years when I ran, had been in the minority for six of those years, and had cast thousands of sometimes difficult votes. As is standard practice these days, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had prepared a fat binder of opposition research on me before I was even nominated, and my own research team spent many hours combing through my record in an effort to anticipate what negative ads the Republicans might have up their sleeves.
They didn’t find a lot, but they found enough to do the trick — a dozen or so votes that, if described without context, could be made to sound pretty scary. When my media consultant, David Axelrod, tested them in a poll, my approval rating immediately dropped ten points. There was the criminal law bill that purported to crack down on drug dealing in schools but had been so poorly drafted that I concluded it was both ineffective and unconstitutional—“Obama voted to weaken penalties on gangbangers who deal drugs in schools,” is how the poll described it. There was a bill sponsored by antiabortion activists that on its face sounded reasonable enough — it mandated lifesaving measures for premature babies (the bill didn’t mention that such measures were already the law) — but also extended “personhood” to previable fetuses, thereby effectively overturning Roe v. Wade; in the poll, I was said to have “voted to deny lifesaving treatment to babies born alive.” Running down the list, I came across a claim that while in the state legislature I had voted against a bill to “protect our children from sex offenders.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, snatching the sheet from David’s hands. “I accidentally pressed the wrong button on that bill. I meant to vote aye, and had it immediately corrected in the official record.”
David smiled. “Somehow I don’t think that portion of the official record will make it into a Republican ad.” He gently retrieved the poll from my hands. “Anyway, cheer up,” he added, clapping me on the back. “I’m sure this will help you with the sex offender vote.”
I WONDER SOMETIMES how things might have turned out had those ads actually run. Not so much whether I would have won or lost — by the time the primaries were over, I had a twenty-point lead over my Republican opponent — but rather how the voters would have perceived me, how, entering into the Senate, I would have had a much smaller cushion of goodwill. For that is how most of my colleagues, Republican and Democrat, enter the Senate, their mistakes trumpeted, their words distorted, and their motives questioned. They are baptized in that fire; it haunts them each and every time they cast a vote, each and every time they issue a press release or make a statement, the fear of losing not just a political race, but of losing favor in the eyes of those who sent them to Washington — all those people who have said to them at one time or another: “We have great hopes for you. Please don’t disappoint us.”
Of course, there are technical fixes to our democracy that might relieve some of this pressure on politicians, structural changes that would strengthen the link between voters and their representatives. Nonpartisan districting, same-day registration, and weekend elections would all increase the competitiveness of races and might spur more participation from the electorate — and the more the electorate is paying attention, the more integrity is rewarded. Public financing of campaigns or free television and radio time could drastically reduce the constant scrounging for money and the influence of special interests. Changes in the rules in the House and the Senate might empower legislators in the minority, increase transparency in the process, and encourage more probing reporting.