Breaking the Lock

My TAP post-election column is how bipartisanship done right could break the neocon lock on Washington by pulling Republican pragmatists into the progressive coalition:

This creates an important opportunity for Obama to co-opt the pragmatic faction of the Republican coalition into his own. Endorsements by Powell and former Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, combined with Sen. Chuck Hagel’s refusal to endorse and the under-noticed absence of Sen. Richard Lugar as a McCain surrogate in Indiana even as the state achieved “swing” status, hint at what might come down the road. And, clearly, talk, widespread in Washington, of keeping Robert Gates on as Secretary of Defense is motivated by similar sentiments. The sense is that Gates, co-author of a 2004 task-force report calling for engagement with Iran, knows that a bigger break with neoconservatism than what we’ve seen thus far is necessary.

By the same token, tapping a Hagel or a Leach for secretary of state or U.N. ambassador could serve to illustrate that a multilateral foreign policy isn’t just the preference of cultural liberals from the coasts but reflects a real judgment about American security that the heartland can and should embrace.

But the trick with these bipartisan concepts is to make sure that the credibility is flowing in the right direction. Bill Clinton’s choice of former Sen. Bill Cohen, a Republican, to head the Defense Department mostly seemed to signal the idea that Democrats weren’t up to the job. The new administration needs to do the reverse — build support for progressive policies by showing that it can be supported by a politically diverse group of people. The key to that is combining a bipartisan approach to personnel with a bold approach on substance. Bringing Republicans into the administration to implement a timid agenda would suggest that Obama doesn’t really believe in himself. But bringing Republicans into the administration while acting decisively to fulfill Obama’s campaign pledges on withdrawal from Iraq, diplomacy with Iran and Syria, and steps toward global nuclear disarmament would be just what the doctor ordered. All are good ideas on the merits, all are politically risky, but all have nontrivial levels of support among pragmatic Republican foreign-policy types. Bringing a few Republicans on board to help sell those ideas would provide political cover in the short term and help decisively cleave this bloc of elites from the conservative coalition and bring it into the progressive one.

The key is to resist the temptation to put foreign affairs on the back-burner while working on (admittedly important) domestic issues. Doing everything is a tall order, but these are tough times and the opportunities available to an administration that’s willing to marry boldness to bipartisanship in foreign affairs could be huge.