(C) Daily Montanan This story was originally published by Daily Montanan and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The antiquated idea of bipartisanship – Daily Montanan [1] ['More From Author', 'June', 'Marc C. Johnson'] Date: 2023-06-24 Bipartisanship in American politics has become such a stretch, such a rare occurrence that when it does occasionally break out – the recent bipartisan debt ceiling agreement, for instance – the notion that competing ideologies can compromise in support of the broad national interest becomes a “man bites dog” story. Here’s National Public Radio White House correspondent Tamara Keith analyzing the deal Democratic president Joe Biden cut with Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy: “This idea of bipartisanship is something that President Biden ran on in 2020,” Keith observed a week ago. “It is certainly something that he is running on again in 2024. It does at times feel a bit antiquated in this time of partisan polarization, like pining for a time when Elvis was still the king. But Biden actually does have a stack of bipartisan accomplishments to point to.” Elvis has left the building and, lo and behold, there is a president in the White House who can cut a deal with the same people who have spent years demonizing him as a shambling old fool. In truth, the old guy provided a graduate level course in how to work across the partisan divide. The debt deal required effort, good faith, persistence and a belief that failure was not an option. Having ended a standoff that had it not been resolved might well have tanked the world economy, Biden lavished praise. “Both sides operated in good faith. Both sides kept their word,” Biden said. And McCarthy, who faced revolt from the fringes of his own party, had to admit that talking directly with Biden had not been all that bad an experience, and as Biden noted “the American people got what they needed.” Keith is an excellent reporter, among the best at defining and deconstructing the often devious and destructive partisanship of our nation’s capital. Yet, as good as she is, Keith, like most political reporters now laboring in the toxic Trump Era, came of age during a generation of political dysfunction – “this time of partisan polarization,” as she correctly describes our times. Keith was born in 1979, seven years after Joe Biden took his seat in the United States Senate. Biden was 30 years old when he took his first oath. The Senate was a different place then. Both parties had conservatives and liberals. The chairs of important committees were really important, much more important than they are today. And a laconic, principled advocate of bipartisanship, Mike Mansfield of Montana, a Democrat, was the Senate majority leader. Mansfield, who left the Senate in 1977 after 16 years as majority leader, defined his era. Mansfield made his career working across that center aisle in the Senate. He had an almost religious devotion to fairness. You can search the archives and find no more than a handful of times when Mansfield criticized a Republican by name. He literally bent over backwards to treat his colleagues with respect and deference. Just to put a fine point on his spectacular career, Mike was no Mitch McConnell. The ”antiquated” approach Joe Biden took to the debt ceiling negotiation was pure Mike Mansfield. In our dysfunctional era when character in political actors is as old fashioned as a 78-rpm record, Mansfield knew that honesty, both with your side and the opposition, was the coin of political capital. If you can’t trust, you can’t negotiate. Biden has often acknowledged the mentorship role Mansfield played in his early career, particularly after Biden’s first wife and daughter were killed, and his two sons injured, in a tragic automobile accident shortly after Biden won an upset first election to the Senate in 1972. By all accounts Biden was devastated by the tragedy and had made up his mind not to assume the Senate seat he had just won in Delaware. Mansfield talked him out of that decision, helped engineer a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee for the inexperienced politician and counseled the grieving father about his obligation to serve. Biden was there when Mansfield, in one of his many great decisions, selected a North Carolina segregationist, Sam Ervin, who also happened to be a worshiper of the Constitution to chair what became the Watergate Committee. The Montanan knew that a partisan investigation of the potential wrongdoing of a sitting president would not be credible if the investigative committee was packed with high profile partisans. The committee Mansfield appointed contained no Democrat with any real national profile and certainly no aspirations beyond the Senate. Mansfield knew that the Watergate scandal held the potential to tarnish the Republican Party for a generation, so he preemptively exonerated the party of any corruption, while letting Ervin’s investigation reveal the facts about burglars and hush money and political cover ups. Biden was in Mansfield’s Senate when the majority leader went every week to breakfast at the White House with Richard Nixon, who never completely trusted anyone. Nixon, savoring the prospect of his long sought diplomatic opening to China, was afraid that Mansfield – a scholar of Asian history – would find a way to show up the White House and undercut his accomplishment. Mansfield didn’t do that, of course, and after Nixon opened the door to China, Mansfield went with his Senate Republican counterpart, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, on a good will mission to Beijing sanctioned by Nixon. Like Mansfield Biden seems to know when to stay quiet. During the tense debt ceiling negotiations, he wasn’t, in contrast to McCarthy, on television every day. He judged the rhythm of the talks, read the room, kept his word and cut a deal. The president said his negotiating team and McCarthy’s “were straightforward with one another, completely honest with one another, respectful of one another.” That was once the way politics could work. The partisan fight about the debt ceiling, a fight about whether to pay the bills already rung up on the national credit card, is as fundamentally silly as it was dangerous. The deal Biden and McCarthy made solved no spending or revenue problem. It did avoid economic calamity, a reality one prays we have learned once again, and finally. At the same time the compromise solution serves to underscore the stark truth that if this messy, contentious democracy is ever to deal effectively with its seemingly intractable problems – immigration, climate change, the debt – it will only happen with politicians who are straightforward with each other, completely honest and respectful. Those characteristics aren’t antiquated. We’ve just gotten used to pretending they don’t really matter. Marc C. Johnson served as chief of staff to Idaho governor Cecil D. Andrus, and is currently a fellow at the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana. His new book on the U.S. Senate in the 1960s – “Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate” – will be published in August by the University of Oklahoma Press. 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