But it never works that way.

Rep. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Socialist who is the only true independent in Congress, put it well when he said the other day, "Under the guise of bipartisanship, some of the worst legislation imaginable is passed, and we are all supposed to view that legislation as somehow ennobled because some Republicans and Democrats got together.''

President-select George W. Bush, fresh from his sweeping 5-4 victory over Democrat Al Gore on Supreme Court Election Day, is so determined to portray himself as a cross-party consensus builder that he has even learned to pronounce the word "bipartisan.''

Bush has made a great show of trotting out Democrats to extol his virtues, and the wise bet is that he will salt his Cabinet with several members of the party of Roosevelt and Truman. The problem is that all of the so-called "Bush Democrats'' mentioned so far are unreconstructed Dixiecrats whose loyalty to the legacies of the New Deal, the Fair Deal or the Great Society pales in comparison to their loyalty to the Confederacy. "North of the Mason-Dixon line, these Bush Democrats would be conservative Republicans,'' says Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill. "When Bush says he is building a bipartisan coalition, the question you've got to ask yourself is which group within the coalition is more conservative: the Republicans or the Democrats?''

Bush Democrats such as Sen. John Breaux of Louisiana, who had a grand time down on the ranch with the president-select last week, and Rep. Charlie Stenholm of Texas, who has been touted as a possible Bush Cabinet pick, maintain voting records that place them to the right of free-state Republicans such as Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont and Rep. Tom Campbell of California.

The Bush plan in the new Congress is a simple one: Talk up bipartisanship, get 20 to 30 Southern Democrats in the House and perhaps six or seven in the Senate to cast consistent votes for key elements of the Bush agenda -- "fast-track'' free trade negotiating authority, tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, corporate-sponsored "reforms'' of Social Security and Medicare, and new limits on abortion. Then Bush can claim with an Orwellian grin that he -- a president elected without even a plurality of the vote -- has united the country around his agenda.

Bringing together conservatives who call themselves Republicans with conservatives who call themselves Democrats is not coalition-building. It's a con game, designed to fool the American people into believing that a man they did not elect as their president is acting in the national interest.

Sen. Paul Wellstone, the progressive populist Democrat from Minnesota, put it rather well the other day. Noting that the Bush camp had floated suggestions that a number of conservative Democrats might be offered Cabinet posts, Wellstone, the proud recipient of a 100 pro-labor rating from the AFL-CIO, said, "If President Bush is serious about bipartisanship, he'll offer me secretary of labor.''

Wellstone is right. Genuine bipartisanship crosses party lines not for symbolism but to forge honest coalitions between people who disagree on fundamental issues but who each bend to achieve a necessary goal -- along the lines of Britain's multi-party, left-right coalition during World War II. The faux bipartisanship of the Bush camp merely links conservatives who call themselves Republicans with conservatives who call themselves Democrats to create a "consensus'' among those who are already agreed.

Copyright 2000 The Capital Times

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