Saturday, May 28, 2011

The Different Between Compromise and Bipartisanship

Compromise is the task of taking strongly held beliefs from two opposing sides and settling on the ones that neither side finds most distasteful. It does nothing to move the country forward or to improve the lives of those who are affected by these compromises. It makes the voting public all that much more polarized in their beliefs toward politicians, and it polarizes the political issues which in the long run only make the government that much more polarized.

The purpose of bipartisanship is to come to the table with the concept of identifying what issues must be addressed and then using every resource at hand to provide the best results for the voting public. It encourages new ideas and new approaches to old problems. It is all about building a system with the input of the people being affected without overwhelming the current system in usage, and without overwhelming the people who must live within any system used.

Our government has failed to practice real bipartisanship in any successful way over the past few decades. In some cases you have to wonder if people even understand the difference between the two practices. We have some real economic issues that face our state and our country. We need our elected officials to put aside their political beliefs in order to work with the other side to improve the lives of all of their constituencies.

We need leaders that are willing to lead and not have meetings where they only visit with one side at a time. The time has come to bring or force members of both parties together to fight and hash out new ways to approach old issues. They need to reach out to all the voting public to look for new ideas that might help them solve old problems. One of the gifts Americans have is to be able to develop new systems when the need arises as long as they are asked to take part in the process.

We don’t need tea parties; we need think tanks of our best and brightest individuals. We need to find new ways of approaching old issues. Americans need to know that they will be part of the process and not just the recipients of poorly thought out plans brought about by compromise that fixes nothing.