There are still some votes to be counted and races to be decided here and there, but the essential result of the 2010 mid-term election is clear enough: President Obama has been given a large dose of The Federalist Papers’ cure for politicians blinded by ideology or ambition. He and his Democratic congressional allies misread the 2008 election as a mandate for transforming the land of the free into a European welfare state, epitomized in his obsessive pursuit of Obamacare. On Tuesday, voters thundered “Stop!” by choosing legions of candidates promising to take fresh ideas and new blood to the nation’s capital, with many inspired by the Tea Party movement to seek public office for the first time. The message is clear: Main Street Americans want out-of-control federal spending, regulation, and debt ended, taxes cut, federal power restrained by state and local authorities, and liberation of the free enterprise economy that creates jobs and prosperity. And they’ll brook no more apologies to foreign dictators for America’s alleged sins on the world stage.
Obama remains in the White House, but for the next two years he must deal with the 112th Congress, a legislature certain to be nothing like the rubber stampers who led the 111th to the bottom of public esteem. Conventional wisdom predicts gridlock, with nothing being accomplished. That could be the case, but it doesn’t have to be if our leaders rediscover the uniquely American craft of political compromise. The Founders made it the very heart of our constitutional republic with separation of powers within and among the several levels of government, regular elections and staggered terms of office, and the security created by a multiplicity of competing interests. As James Madison explained in the Federalist in 1787 during a debate on the then-proposed Constitution, our leaders would be forced to compromise their narrow interests in favor of the public good. “Ambition would be made to counter ambition,” so that enduring majorities could only “coalesce on behalf of justice and the general good.”
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But not just any kind of compromise will do. Obama will be fatally weakened in 2012 if he forgets that agreeing merely to slow the continued growth of government will be properly seen as calculated obstruction. Republicans will also be wrong to assume that elections are all-or-nothing propositions. Americans want less spending, less regulation, less government, but they also expect their elected leaders to forge ahead in that effort forcefully and with due regard for the difficulties along the way. That means they must compromise. The measure of how they perform will be the degree to which they accomplish what the people expect them to do, which is to send Washington to the fat farm.
