Joe Scarborough had a column in Politico earlier this week about bipartisanship. The column itself contained much recycled verbiage from the final chapter of his most recent book. In fact, I even cited this incident in my review of the book on Amazon.com. It still is a lesson in how a determined person with a curious mind can overcome the most opinionated of obstacles.
Which brings us to something that happened on Wednesday in Chicago. After a contentious Senate race that was determined by less than 2% of the votes, the Republican Senator-elect Mark Kirk and the Democratic runner-up Alexi Giannoulias decided to meet up for drinks. I'm sure this will soon be followed by the "Merlot Summit" between President Obama and the presumptive Speaker-to-be John Boehner.
The only issue is politicians have to work together and do so much less begrudgingly than people think. They are in it to get re-elected and if pandering to hate-mongering is the way to do it, so be it. However, that is not in their nature. The conventional wisdom is it's not in human nature either. But I'm starting to question that conventional wisdom when, after e-mailing the Scarborough column to a close friend of polar opposite political leanings, I received the following reply:
"Read it, don't agree with it. When a side wins it won't be wise to let their 'enemies' off the hook."
This reply came from someone I know pretty well and someone I know well enough to know that this individual did not feel the same way after the 2006 and 2008 election results. Where have our politics gone when common sense advice is dismissed by common sense people solely because it requires them to suspend their own political opinions long enough to listen to someone else's point-of-view?
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