It's Not That Hard

Harvard, a world-renowned university, has a program focused solely on the art of negotiation. Over the years, leaders from around the world have taken courses to find better solutions for negotiating hard challenges. The core concept is based on the notion that everyone possesses an alternative to agreeing that they deem their best outcome. Identifying your own alternatives and those of the other side is the critical component to a resolution. Makes sense, leave it to Harvard to give it a fancy name: BATNA, best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

I shouldn’t opine about Harvard. The closest I came to matriculating at Cambridge was an afternoon visit I made to the Harvard Bookstore. I bought a nice pair of gym shorts; my wife really liked them.

My lack of an Ivy League pedigree is why I will refrain from using the Harvard research to comment on the fiasco that is our most recent partial government shutdown. Instead of research, I will use what people back home would rely on: common sense.

This is one of the few stories that almost everyone should have heard about. If you are right-leaning, your favorite propaganda station is covering this and blaming the other side for the problem. If you lean left, your network of blather points the finger at the right. Both sides are actively telling the story from their own camp of isolation. If you haven’t heard about it on the airwaves but have the misfortune of needing to fly somewhere, the three hours you wait to clear security will give you time to consider what the hell is going on.

In the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke, Strother Martin tells the character played by Paul Newman, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

If only that phrase applied to the congresspeople in Washington. This isn’t about communicating better or who is to blame; both sides own this. This is about them caring about their best personal outcome above all else.

In case you haven’t noticed, Congress cares about Congress. Any lip service given to their constituents about representing the best interests of the people they serve is hogwash — this is still a family column so I will refrain from the word that came to mind.

Let’s consider this closely. The issue they are fighting over is all politics. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. I know you can get your dander up and preach the word according to MSNBC or Fox and point at the other side, but that is fluff. If Congress wanted to solve this, it would do it ASAP. But they don’t want to solve it.

Clearly, in their calculus, they have decided that standing firm serves their interests better than solving the problem. It is as plain as day.

When two good ole boys get to fighting with each other, they are apt to go at till someone points out that fighting isn’t their best outcome. I recall a time when I watched two neighbors bicker over the silliest thing until it became an emotional tinderbox. The path they were on would lead to a physical altercation. That is until their wives sat down quietly with their respective husbands and pointed out that if the war continued between the neighbors, it wouldn’t be the only war they would fight; the war at home would be much worse. You know the expression, “If the wife ain’t happy, nobody is happy.”

Guess what? Those fellas made up and today are together most nights drinking a beer in one or the others driveway.

I’m not suggesting that standing for what you believe in isn’t important. We need our elected officials to have principles. I would just like to think they stand for more than themselves.

Maybe this will never change. Maybe we have reached a point where our politicians can’t divest themselves of their position and their power; have they lost their ability to put their agenda behind the voters? I don’t know whether that is true. But I know we will not find out until we hold them accountable.

You see, voters are guilty of the same thing. We accept poor representation because it is better than a change. We have figured out our acceptable minimum and keep reelecting them.

I have an idea: if you are a Republican and can’t stomach voting Democrat, fine. Next election, choose a new Republican. Don’t continue to reward the person who cares more about themselves than you. And the same goes for the other side.

There can be no clearer example of the broken nature of our Congress than what we are witnessing today. We literally have people working for free, the public waiting in lines for hours, and a system that is on the verge of daily collapse, and congresspeople pointing a finger at the other side because that is better for them than solving the problem. If this doesn’t wake you up and highlights, our representative’s best alternative isn’t to do what’s right for us, it is to do what’s right for them, nothing will.

I am not naïve; power is a drug; drugs are addictive. Our leaders have fallen into the trap of not seeking a compromise; they seek victory. Victory that strengthens their power, not ours. Changing this course will be difficult. It will only happen if voters demand it. If we remind them that the best alternative to a problem should be about us and not them.

One last thing, while this silliness continues, if you get a chance, tell your congressperson to do their damn job.