No easy answer

For a guy who spends his working days talking to people nationwide, it's an especially depressing remark.

"People aren't talking to each other," says Ken Rudin, known as the "political junkie" to millions of listeners of National Public Radio. "Not everybody is willing to open their minds. They're just so convinced of stuff."

Rudin, who addressed members of the Public Relations Society of America's western district conference at The Venetian on Thursday, says he doesn't recall as much polarization in politics at any time in his life as there is today. People crossed party lines to vote for civil rights, or to oppose the war in Vietnam, but today, votes on controversial items such as health care are nearly all along partisan lines.

And the extremes on both sides -- far leftists who decry corporate control of our politics, or far rightists who want government small enough that it can't possibly threaten business -- are drowning out more reasonable voices.

Even conservatives such as U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah (who lost his Senate seat over his vote for the Troubled Asset Relief Program) or U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar (now struggling as a top target of the Tea Party Express) aren't pure enough for the right. And on the left, President Barack Obama has been harshly criticized for being too willing to deal away too much in budget negotiations with Republicans.

"If you're going to have a Democratic Party far to the left, and a Republican Party far to the right, you're going to have a very ugly election in 2012," Rudin said.

Not only that, but you're going to have a hard time running a country that operates under a system designed to bring disparate groups together to arrive at a compromise. While bipartisanship has become an overused news-release line, it's also a practical necessity in a country divided between radically different views of government.

Not that partisanship is all bad: The fringes of the political parties have often functioned as their consciences, reminding Democrats that government should exist as a force for good, helping those who need it most. On the other side, conservatives are there to remind that, uncontrolled, government can do great evil and thus must be restrained and controlled.

Both are useful lessons.

But those forces ought to fuel, not control, their respective parties, and certainly not draw a line in the sand that views compromise and moderation as filthy words, and those who practice the art of politics as squishes or sellouts. When that happens, hope of progress gives way to gridlock.

"Do you want to make an ideological statement, or do you want to win elections?" Rudin asks, sounding a lot like former President Bill Clinton, who once declared he wasn't in the partisan business, but the winning business. "There are some ideologues who would rather be right than win," Rudin adds.  

Clinton himself said as much recently, at the dedication of his boyhood home in Hope, Ark., as a national historic site: "There is a huge difference between having a philosophy and having an ideology. The people who made America had a philosophy," he said. "If you have an ideology you have the answer to the question before you look at the facts."

It's something useful to consider for a state grappling with a budget crisis hamstrung by a "no tax" philosophy that refuses all compromise, or a Congress about to have a knock-down, drag-out fight over whether to raise the national debt ceiling.

The price of intransigence will be paid in human terms, economic suffering and a broken government that seems to get worse all the time.

What's the solution? Somebody at the luncheon asked Rudin that, and he struggled to respond.

Not because he doesn't have an encyclopedic knowledge of American politics, but because it's a question that defies an answer.

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist and author of the blog SlashPolitics.com. His column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at (702) 387-5276 or at ssebelius@reviewjournal.com.