Mother Jones
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Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) were noticeably pleased with themselves when they announced their new budget deal at a press conference Tuesday evening. The 15-minute session was filled with compliments and bipartisan kumbayas for reaching such a sensible accord. “From the the outset,” Ryan said, “we knew that if we forced each other to compromise a core principle we would get nowhere. That is why we decided to focus on where the common ground is.” Murray backed that up, stressing that the two found success because they ditched ideological rigidity in favor of accommodation. “We have broken through the partisanship and the gridlock,” Murray said, “and reached a bipartisan budget compromise that will prevent a government shutdown in January.”
Compromise, compromise, compromise. It was the word of the day. Even President Barack Obama joined in on the hosannas. “This agreement doesn’t include everything I’d like—and I know many Republicans feel the same way,” he said in a statement shortly after the deal was announced. “That’s the nature of compromise.”
Who doesn’t like an agreement where each side gives a little to get something in return? That’s the basic concept of negotiation that we all learn in kindergarten. The only trouble is our political class has a distorted sense of what constitutes a “compromise.” The Washington Compromise lacks any relation to the actual policies being discussed. It’s just a grade-school level formula you can plug into any scenario. Find the midpoint between two competing plans and you’ve found the centrist goal. The trouble is, not every starting point is created equally.
It’s a simplistic vision of politics, akin to the critics who think all political disagreements can be boiled down to winners and losers, or the persistent Green Lantern notion of presidential power that Obama could accomplish anything if he would just lead already.
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