WHAT BIPARTISAN MEANS

Conservative author David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush, recently offered a succinct and accurate response to the many politicians and pundits

urging the president and his party to reach out and find compromise with the Democrats. He also offered a means out of the current standoff.

“Much of this advice is beyond absurd,” Mr. Frum writes in the Wall Street Journal. “Elections are how democracies decide things.” A mandate, which the president received Nov. 2, “is not a grant of power to the president; it is a commission of trust from the people. President Bush has not merely the right to pursue conservative domestic economic and social policies; he has a duty to do so.”

That was what was at stake in the election. President Bush, with a domestic agenda starkly different from Sen. John Kerry’s, won more Electoral College votes and more popular votes, a record number. If Democrats and moderates want their policies included in the nation’s agenda, they will have to persuade the public that on specific issues, theirs is the superior idea.They cannot expect the president suddenly to agree with their thinking now.

For foreign policy, however, the situation is different because there, Mr. Frum argues, partisan dissension hurts the effectiveness of the policy itself. It does this, for instance, by harming U.S. credibility abroad and giving confidence to its enemies while weakening its own war-fighting resolve. His answer is to revive the House and Senate bipartisan, informal foreign-policy meetings with the White House. He suggests the president learn from bipartisan commissions that could propose rules and laws to govern the war on terror and overseas.

One of his more important observations applies not just to foreign policy, but to leadership of the nation over the next four years. Mr. Frum writes, “It’s essential to acknowledge mistakes and learn from them. But in this war, the Bush administration knew that any attempt to identify and fix errors would be savagely exploited by domestic opponents.”

This belief feeds a Democratic frenzy and a Republican arrogance, and spills into every area of policy. It is crippling such basic requirements of government as creating a budget and making progress elsewhere very difficult. Watch Al Gonzales, the president’s nominee for attorney general, get grilled in the Senate over his advice on the Geneva Conventions and subsequent events at Abu Ghraib prison. Mr. Gonzales, in hindsight, may well wish he better understood the possible, terrible outcomes there – but could

he admit it? Listen for talk about the effects of a growing deficit; you’d think Democrats had always been deficit hawks and that Republicans weren’t aware of any problem at all.

It would be silly to suggest that Democrats give up on their beliefs or that Republicans renounce their policies. This isn’t about ideas, but how they are argued. Sometime during those congressional-White House bipartisan meetings Mr. Frum suggests, party leaders need to cut a deal. Neither can operate very well in the narrow debating space they’ve allowed each other. Both would benefit from backing off. Their policies might improve, too.