Editorial: Intolerance blemishes discourse

Wednesday, Aug. 18, 1999 | 9:45 a.m.

GOP presidential contenders on Monday were still putting their spin on Saturday's Iowa straw poll results, but hopefully they took the time to read the text of a speech given Monday by another presidential candidate, who skipped the Iowa beauty contest. Arizona Sen. John McCain's remarks on intolerance, delivered before the Anti-Defamation League of Los Angeles, should be heeded by presidential aspirants, elected officials, political commentators and any American who believes that politics has become too coarse and partisan.

McCain said that "sharp and intolerant" rhetoric by politicians helped encourage the kind of bigotry that resulted in a white supremacist's shooting rampage in Los Angeles and others like it across the country recently. Unlike so many of his colleagues in Congress -- both Democrats and Republicans -- who take reactionary positions on issues, McCain is a political freethinker. For instance, while he is an unabashed conservative, he understands the need for some government intervention, including campaign finance reform and sensible restrictions on the tobacco industry, positions anathema to the GOP leadership. So the public will take seriously his view that many politicians have bred an environment of "disaffection, contempt and hate that poisons" this nation.

"Our differences are too defined with too much venom. Partisanship is all consuming, and we stigmatize political opponents as villains. There's too much 'us' and 'them' in our political discourse and not enough 'we,' " McCain said. In addition to fostering hatred, this vitriol in Washington also has created legislative gridlock. While the statehouses aren't immune to this phenomenon, the state legislatures are rarely wracked by partisanship. Maybe it's something in the District of Columbia's drinking water that causes this perennial outbreak of "partisanitis" that degenerates into an almost incurable legislative paralysis.

Regarding partisanship itself, the public is smart enough not to be shocked when political parties express their differences over issues. After all, parties serve an important purpose, offering a unified set of ideas that aid in legislation getting passed. What the public objects to, though, is the shrill debate that makes every topic a life-or-death issue, with no sense of proportion. When Congress gets back to business in September after its August recess, it is hoped that Democrats and Republicans can check this rhetoric at the door and find common ground on important issues, such as campaign finance reform, gun control, HMO reform, tax cuts and the budget. If the public is lucky, and Congress actually passes common sense legislation, maybe this contagion of consensus-building and rational dialogue can spread to the presidential campaigns, offering vote rs a debate on the issues that are important to them and ignoring the usual sideshows that have marked modern campaigning.