Time now for something new — cooperation

Pete Townshend may have penned the quintessential one-line commentary on politics, but the puzzle remains: Does the new boss have to be the same as the old boss?

That's the $13.7 trillion question today as an Election Day ground shift shakes up the composition both of Congress at the national level and of the legislature at the state level. If traditional trends apply, the GOP will certify its newfound control in the U.S. House and its gains elsewhere in Illinois and the nation by pressing new lawmaking goals, and Democrats will respond with procedural roadblocks whose end result is all too predictable and familiar gridlock.

However, if either party sees the election results as a mandate for one policy or another, it is seriously mistaken. The election that swept Barack Obama and a historic swarm of Democrats to national power just two years ago was no more a mandate for nationalized health care than Tuesday's impressive showing for Republicans is a mandate for a draconian tax agenda.

What Americans want, indeed what they profoundly need, are legislative bodies that work together to solve problems. They want health care reform and they want tax reform. But they want solutions that achieve the ends while taking into account their effect on everyone. In Illinois, we have not seen that kind of government for decades. In the 1990s, Republicans managed the controls of government with near-complete suppression of Democrat interests. For most of this decade, Democratic leaders have done much the same thing suppressing Republicans.

The result is that comfortable budget surpluses have been transformed into historic deficits, politics at both the capitol and the street levels have become more polarized, and the state's economy, like the nation's for similar reasons, has become overwhelmed with bankruptcies, foreclosures and joblessness.

These circumstances cannot continue. But continue they will if Republicans and Democrats play the political game the way they have been playing it, as an exercise in public-policy muscle flexing whose successes last only until the people rein them in at the next election. For, if the Republican mandate of 2010 means anything in the context of the Democratic mandate of 2008 and of all the previous mandates of the past two decades, it can only be that Americans want government to work. And government works not when one party attempts to impose its will while the other does all it can to thwart it but when both parties acknowledge that success requires good-faith cooperation.

The fact is that no American today wants a $13.7 trillion budget deficit. No American wants double-digit unemployment. No American wants to endlessly send the nation's young men and women into an indeterminate foreign war. And no one party can solve these or the nation's other ills by itself.

Nor can any of us accomplish anything by constantly shouting epithets at each other. Whether politician or private citizen, we must all find a new rhetoric, one built on facts and participation, not cliches and intransigence.

So, if victorious Republicans are truly committed to reshaping American politics, they will talk more about sharing than exercising power. Likewise, where Democrats remain in control, their approach must be to invite the opposition into the conversation and accept its contributions with sincere engagement.

In Illinois, both parties can demonstrate their resolve through a new, fair approach to creating legislative districts. But whatever the issue whether it be taxes, health care, pension reform, campaign finance or any other state or national issue our new Congress, our new legislature, indeed our new county governments will do us all the best service by proving Townshend wrong and giving us a new boss that looks nothing like the old.