Wait, Coaching at Notre Dame Involves Less 'Bitter Partisanship' Than Public Service? (Uh-Oh)

SOUTH BEND -- The remark revealed as much about the state of American politics as it did about the speaker.

"I wanted to be a public servant," the new Notre Dame football coach, Brian Kelly, says in the current Sports Illustrated, "but what drove me out was bitter partisanship."

An implied question follows Kelly's statement like a forlorn dog: How representative is his opinion among other public-spirited citizens?

During the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, political savants and pundits worried that an anything-goes attitude in the news media about a politician's private life might deter certain potential candidates from running. Although some White House aspirants grumbled that they weren't vying for sainthood, just elective office, the new, tell-all environment became a factor in political calculus.

Increasingly, however, the preoccupation with the private -- John Edwards, John Ensign, and Mark Sanford are conspicuous recent examples -- competes with broach-no-opposition partisanship as a leading concern. Is it worth it to endure the often humiliating hurly-burly of contemporary electioneering to engage in lockstep, party-line allegiance instead of measures of broader, view-merging compromise?

Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill are now so far apart on most votes that the phrase "across the aisle" is the quaint way of saying the equivalent of the distance between one lane of the Beltway and the farthest other lane, going in the other direction.

It's almost comical to listen to the White House talk about achieving "bipartisanship" if a singular Republican senator (say, Olympia Snowe) sides with the Democratic majority on any piece of controversial legislation. One person does not genuine consensus make.

Ironies abound in this polarized climate. Last week's Washington Post/ABC News poll asked respondents to identify how they think of themselves politically -- with 37 percent in the independent category, 32 percent as Democrat, 26 percent as Republican and 6 percent as other or no opinion. As recently as September, the independent percentage was 43 percent.

Although the largest numbers in such samplings eschew a party label, partisanship becomes more intense and sharp-edged. Even the Christmas season can't bring a forced bonhomie of Congressional comity, as we repeatedly saw in the Senate health care debate and voting.

The full flowering of base, partisan politics is one of the more dubious legacies of this decade as it lurches into history. What's most troubling, though, is the transfer of this thinking and action from campaigning to governing. Legislation covering all the people becomes the product of the polarization -- leaving large numbers of those same people boiling with fury but out in the cold.

In such an atmosphere, pronounced swings are bound to occur in electoral contests across the country with greater and greater regularity. How else can citizens, especially the true independents, try to right what they perceive to be policies overly tilted in one direction or the other? Arriving at anything resembling "common ground," that elusive place of broad public support, would challenge Sisyphus.

To take a somewhat longer (and, alas, more academic) view: It really is a curious situation. At the same time candidate-centered (as opposed to party-propelled) campaigns predominate, fierce partisanship becomes the ultimate consequence.

Interestingly, just as the media helped bring individual candidates to the fore at the expense of the party structure and establishment, now the opinion-driven -- and, yes, highly partisan -- media (delivered via radio, television and the Internet) hammer home messages from the left and right. The center cannot hold, because it doesn't seem to exist.

No wonder someone aspiring to be "a public servant" decides collegiate football coaching will be less of a battle than contemporary politics. Yet, given the circumstances, how many others won't decide to run -- or even to vote?


Robert Schmuhl is Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Chair of American Studies and Journalism at the University of Notre Dame, where he directs the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics & Democracy.