Unity isn't all it's cracked up to be
Even a consensus-building, problem-solving president can't solve political gridlock.
It's been a tough-fought campaign, with lots of strong candidates and piles of good ideas. But I think I've made my decision. I'm supporting the candidate of division. Frankly, I've got unity fatigue.
That seems to be one of the chief buzzwords of this election. Unity. Barack Obama invokes it more frequently than John Edwards mentions "mills." My in-box, meanwhile, has only recently recovered from the torrent of messages sent by "Unity '08," a collection of political has-beens and never-weres who kept promising that if I would only click right here, I could use the power of the Internet to create a bipartisan presidential ticket that would solve problems ranging from the healthcare crisis to global warming.
How exactly would they solve them? Single-payer healthcare? A carbon tax? They never said. But they promised that whatever they chose, it would be bipartisan, and I'm not a partisan, am I?
Unity '08 has, thankfully, dissolved. But the dream lives on. Two of its founders have wandered off to create a "Draft Michael Bloomberg" movement because, if you don't count Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, this presidential cycle suffers from a dearth of rich technocrats from New York. To be fair though, it's not just the ZIP Code that qualifies him for the job. "He's not an ideologue," enthuses Gerald Rafshoon, a former Jimmy Carter aide who's running the We Like Mike movement. "He's a problem solver. He has also run things."
Ah, yes, "a problem solver," the close cousin of the unifier. Mitt Romney's a problem solver too, or so he tells me. Clinton says she's in "the solutions business." Who could be against that? An end to problems. It's a vision we could, dare I say it, unite around.
What accounts for all this talk of unity and bipartisanship and non-ideological problem solving? Speechwriters have no end of hoary terms of uplift to choose from. There's "individualism" and "family," "values" and "faith." So why are unity and competence so crucial to this year's message?
The short answer is that the candidates have no other choice. Washington these days is rived by partisanship, but that's not necessarily anything new or even particularly worrisome. In Washington, partisanship is like the San Francisco fog; it rolls in, hangs out for a while, and everyone goes about their business. The problem is, in this case, it's created total, impenetrable gridlock.
