08/15/12: Changes start at the bottom

This op-ed appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on the date shown.

I MADE the mistake of watching “Meet the Press” Sunday. Just a few minutes in, I remembered why I stopped watching this — and a lot of other political shows — in the first place. No longer a conversation where ideas are discussed, the show devolved into a shouting match between two guests, as the host looked on.

It was just like “The Maury Show,” sans the burly security guys to break up the fight.

Not that the argument mattered, anyway. The entire show consisted of candidate mouthpieces, then so-called pundits, voicing nothing but party talking points. Talking points that have become nothing but half-truths and sometimes outright lies.

As I’m wont to do, I turned to Twitter and ended up in a much better conversation with a local political operative. At 140 characters a pop, we had a more substantive discussion than the talking heads on TV, despite our differences in political philosophy.

In fact, the conversation with my young friend gives me hope for the future. She mentioned the lack of honesty and integrity, two words certainly missing from the political discourse of the day.

It is a lot easier to demonize the other party than to admit that perhaps they might be right on something. That’s what each party’s machinery would like us to do.

And they have been quite successful at it: Partisanship is at the highest levels since the Pew Research started tracking such information in 1987. Nearly all of the increase, according to the survey released last June, has occurred during the last two presidencies.

Lost amid all the shouting is fact that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party simply represent two, albeit competing, views on how our country should be run.

Neither is always right nor always wrong. And both have the best interests of our country at heart.

In a perfect world, policy would trump politics. And in doing so, we would draw from the best ideas of each party and implement them. Instead, we engage in a dysfunctional “winner-take-all” process that results in nearly all of us losing, as nothing ends up getting done.

The people agree on one thing: Washington is a mess. Congress has, according to the latest Gallup survey, a “historically low” approval rating of just 16 percent. The record is 10 percent, set last February.

“I try to be the change I wish to see in the system,” my friend wrote in one tweet. As do I — and I believe that change starts at the bottom, by electing local representatives who, as they move up the political ladder, take with them the lesson that putting the business of the people first is of utmost importance.

Voters in Virginia Beach, Portsmouth and Suffolk will have that opportunity in November.