A Call for More (Strange) Bedfellows
By Andy Burness, July 3, 2012
Sometime before the turn of the century… (I wrote it that way to make it sound long, long ago), there was an incipient movement to expand school-based health centers in America’s most needy public schools. The argument then—still valid now—was that many poor kids lacked access to basic health care, and that taking health services to the kids, as opposed to taking the kids to the emergency room or a doctor’s office, made a lot of sense.
It was seen politically as a liberal idea—another government-funded attempt to mend the safety net for the poor, with very little support from more conservative policy makers. Except in Los Angeles, where two local politicians—one very progressive and the other very conservative—joined forces, and took their advocacy on the road, all over the country. Their message was simple: we may agree on very little, but we agree on the need for opportunity for all our children, and there’s no opportunity for anything if your child is sick or living with an untreated chronic condition.
These two women were strange bedfellows—ideological opposites who found common ground on one topic, and parlayed their singular bond to become far more powerful advocates than either could have been with just their political allies.
The fundamental theme for me here at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where the chattering class overflows tents and auditoriums in search of wisdom from some really smart people, is that we need more people like these women to break the political gridlock that stifles potential progress in virtually every aspect of American life.
There are hints of progress. Republican Vin Weber and Democrat Jane Harman are working on an op-ed piece calling on the President and the Congress to move the currently moribund Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan. California and some other states have created a primary system where the top two vote-getters—independent of party—are the two final candidates, forcing the winner to appeal to the political center.
And, there was broad acceptance of the need to reform college education, paying most attention to what we can learn from colleges other than the elite four year colleges that comprise a tiny percentage of the students in America today. Eduardo Padron, president of Miami Dade Community College, the nation’s largest post-secondary institution, couldn’t stop talking about public-private partnerships and the critical role business plays as a collaborator with his school.
In a conversation with a colleague here, we agreed that next year, there ought to be a learning track called “Beyond Ideas” so that the focus can be on solutions, not just problems. But, we don’t need to wait a year to get started. We can and must work now with unlikely—or at least new—bedfellows if we’re really serious about winning broad public support for our policy goals.