Overview:
Drawing on decades of journalism and the bipartisan leadership lessons of his mentor, Forrest Gerard, the author reflects on how listening, building relationships, and finding common ground can bridge political differences and create lasting coalitions.
Guest Opinion
I was thinking about something that happened to me when I was young. I was editor of the Sho-Ban News, I was in my early 20s, and wrote a series about the political relationship between the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and surrounding jurisdictions. I remember it as factual, but the stories probably had more of a strident tone (youth being youth, and all). A couple of days after the series was published a county commissioner from American Falls called me and suggested we have coffee. He wanted to listen.
Decades later I was working in Seattle and had a few regular critics of the Seattle P-I editorial pages. They’d often call on the phone and yell at me. (Once my colleagues overheard the shouting, only to learn that it was a member of Congress on the other end.) These were not pleasant conversations and not one of those shouting matches changed a thing.
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I am not sure that coffee with the county official changed anything either, except from that point on, I would call him before a story ran. We’d talk about it. I suppose I’d learn something, perhaps he did too.
I wonder if our politics today is more like that than it was a week ago.
My mentor, Forrest Gerard, often told me about what it was like on Capitol Hill when he first went to work for Henry Jackson. There was a partnership of differences. Republican colleagues met their Democratic counterparts for dinner. Families shared barbecues. Conversations were often.
When Forrest went to work for President Jimmy Carter as the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs one of his first appointments was a Republican, Rick Lavis, who had worked for Arizona Sen. Paul Fannin. So much of the legislation that came out of that era, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Reform Act, or the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, and the Indian Finance Act, were enacted because they had support from both the majority and minority.
This is a message you are hearing over and over from the newly elected Democrats Sen-elect Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan proudly says he will work with anyone to get something done. That’s the secret sauce.
Of course policy disagreements are ok, even necessary. But that doesn’t mean we need to be destructive. The lesson that should stick with us after Donald Trump is that we must look past the language of the enemy and think about instead of how we build a coalition. And then remember that coalitions come and go. And that just means we grab a cup of coffee and start building the next coalition.
Mark Trahant, Shoshone-Bannock, is a journalist with 50 years of experience in Native media. Breaking History adds context to the news. So many things that we think are new, have deep roots in the past. I also post daily Newsrimes.