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For Obama, bipartisan aims, party-line votes

A desire to build cross-party consensus in Senate rubs up against political perils of compromise.

By Ariel Sabar | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the April 17, 2008 edition

Page 1 of 4

Washington - It was an unusual choice for a candidate seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. But in the first television ad of his campaign, Barack Obama let a Republican, a colleague from his days in the Illinois Senate, do most of the talking.

"Republican legislators respected Senator Obama," state Sen. Kirk Dillard, a John McCain supporter, said in a spot that aired in Iowa last June. "Senator Obama worked on some of the deepest issues we had, and he was successful in a bipartisan way."

GOP leaders in Illinois excoriated Mr. Dillard for the cameo, but Obama's message was clear: Though critics may accuse him of inexperience, bipartisanship – and a hawk's eye for common ground – is one area where his record matches his rhetoric.

A look at that record reveals a more complicated picture. As Obama moved from Chicago to the Illinois statehouse and then Capitol Hill, his early idealism became more pragmatic and calculating. While his message of unity has changed little – if anything, he has refined and enlarged it – his voting record in recent years has been decidedly partisan.

As a young community organizer on the South Side of Chicago in the mid-1980s, Obama taught poor residents how to press City Hall for cleaner neighborhoods, safer streets, and new jobs. As a state senator, he worked across the aisle to reform ethics laws and brokered deals between police and civil-liberties groups on measures to curb racial profiling and wrongful murder convictions.

But the record also shows more than a passing familiarity with old-school politics. He played hardball to win his first election, apprenticed himself to a scion of Chicago's Democratic machine, and voted "present" more than 100 times in the Illinois Senate in what critics have described as a dodge of controversial issues.

In the US Senate, he scored few bipartisan victories beyond a measure establishing a website for the public to track government spending. One nonpartisan study rated his voting record in 2007 as the Senate's most liberal, and Republican colleagues have accused him of putting politics before principle on ethics and immigration bills – charges his campaign denies.

"To judge from his voting, he's still pretty partisan," says Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Princeton University in New Jersey. In a polarized Senate, he says, "it's hard to be bipartisan. That said, that's the challenge he's going to face as president. If his record doesn't match what his promise is, can he achieve the promise, even if it's genuine?"

A plea for a "different kind of politics" has been a linchpin of Obama's message from the day he took the stage at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America," he said in that star-making speech. "There is a United States of America."

But even as he moves closer to the Democratic nomination, surveys show that voters remain concerned about his experience. Obama has countered that while he may lack a conventional political résumé, he has "the right kind of experience," rooted in his multicultural upbringing, his grass-roots organizing, and a record of consensus-building.

"Occasionally, I would partner up with even my most conservative colleagues to work on a piece of legislation, and over a poker game or a beer we might conclude that we had more in common than we publicly cared to admit," Obama writes, in his 2006 book "The Audacity of Hope," of his days as a state senator. "Which perhaps explains why, through my years in Springfield, I had clung to the notion that politics could be different."

"If enough of us took that risk," he writes, "I thought, not only the country's politics but the country's policies would change for the better."

A review of his record reveals that Obama sometimes – but not always – took such a risk himself.

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