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As a young and enthusiastic supporter of George W. Bush's election to the presidency, I remember being annoyed by a bumper sticker that popped up all over America in early 2001: "I Miss Bill." Now, in 2023, as the Republican mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, I find myself frequently feeling the way those disappointed American drivers did. Especially relevant to today's polarizing times is President Clinton's theory of triangulation, which neutralizes polarized politics in pursuit of the common good.
Such bipartisanship is is viewed as ancient history these days, with neither Democrats nor Republicans are in the compromising mood. Yet what Bill Clinton achieved through triangulating a middle ground between the loudest extremes was astonishing: He kept us out of war, presided over massive economic expansion, and produced the only balanced budgets we've enjoyed in the last half century.
So why don't we talk about Clinton that way? Clinton's legacy suffers from the same challenge all of us who seek common ground face: He didn't treat the other side as a personal enemy, a hated foil to whip up support against. He was just exceedingly competent, creative and successful. And because of this, he lacks a noisy extremist crowd cheering his victories over the hated other side.
No less than Clinton's old foil, Newt Gingrich, recently made the case that the real choice in current American politics is between reason and extremism. And that's true even on the local level.
Across the country, candidates are running for local office on anti-abortion platforms and other national issues—matters over which no mayor or city councilor has any control, but which succeed in motivating angry voters to show up on Election Day.
Yet none of these issues have anything to do with municipal government.
In 2016, I was elected mayor of a quintessential American city in the heartland as a committed nonpartisan with support from all parties. And I have dedicated my administration to testing the theory that people of diverse beliefs can still work together to solve great challenges.
We've had much success with this approach, and we did it with a willingness to truly listen to differing points of view, a willingness to set aside ego, and a willingness to agree on a solution so that we can move forward as a community.
Yet we had to pursue this approach through a gauntlet of fury from both ends of the political spectrum. Thankfully, noise does not equal a majority. When I sought re-election in 2020, I was opposed by candidates to the Left who were angered by my support for law enforcement and candidates to the Right who were angered by my support for COVID-19 mitigation practices like masking.
We won by the largest re-election landslide in decades in the first round, without the need for a runoff, because a majority of Tulsans wanted properly funded police and trusted the guidance of medical experts on how to slow the spread of a deadly virus.
But after nearly seven years working to establish commonality among people inundated with excuses for division, I have reached one clear conclusion: Those of us who seek to put a flag in common ground are in the worst spot in American politics.
As Clinton and many before him knew, the art in governing comes from finding those threads of agreement that can bring people together and build progress over time. But the easy sugar high for candidates and elected officials is to hate "them" and get one of the extremes on your side. If more registered voters happen to be on your side, you win—even though your constituents lose.
Those of us in the lonely middle find ourselves hated by not one but both extremes. We have no angry rabble to defend us from the other side.
On one day in June 2020, my family was driven out of our home by a combined protest of Black Lives Matter activists and Second Amendment "auditors" who stood with assault rifles a few feet away from my kids' basketball hoop, both extreme ends of the political spectrum with seemingly nothing in common except their anger at me for being somewhere in between them.
I still believe most Americans want government to work. They don't want to hate their neighbors. They don't want us to waste our time and energy bickering while other countries surpass us.
But we need more candidates who will offer a positive vision. We need more candidates—both locally and nationally—who have the courage to say they will work with the other party to address great challenges. That starts by finding the middle ground.
G.T. Bynum is the mayor of Tulsa, OK.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
