Is There Room for Unity in 2008?

Jan. 29, 2007 — -- Forty is the new thirty. Instant messages are the new email. Blackberries are the new cell phones.

And, after November's political earthquake, bipartisan is the new partisan: it's the political buzzword in Washington these days and one that the bipartisan (naturally!) group Unity '08 wants to ride all the way to the White House.

But is the country ready for a cross-party presidential ticket? Unity '08 thinks so, and that 2008 is a "grand opportunity" to prove it.

They want to draft a bipartisan presidential ticket and they want it to be chosen online in the country's first-ever national primary.

"The goals are simple to state, not as simple to achieve," Doug Bailey, a founding member of Unity '08 explains.

Other members of the group's founding council include former advisers to President Jimmy Carter, Hamilton Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon; as well as Angus King, two-term Independent Governor of Maine. Bailey is the founder of the political newsletter, The Hotline, and was a media consultant to President Gerald Ford.

Bailey describes the country's current political infrastructure as "operating at such a low level that it is unable to deal with the truly serious issues".

And the plan is to "jolt" the way things are done by reaching for the middle, an concept Bailey thinks is sorely lacking in the modern two-party system.

The basic formula used to be that candidates gained the support of their respective parties and went after voters (and issues important to them) in the middle.

No matter who won, Bailey reflects, the issues and positions were ensured a dialogue.

Somewhere along the line, he says, the political framework lost its "common ground" and the way to win evolved into a microstrategy on how to turn out the hard-core base on issues like gay rights or gun control "that are not crucial to the future of the country".

Unity '08 wants to reorganize and repriortize: the group defines "Crucial Issues" (like global terrorism, national debt and energy dependence) as issues on which the future of the country depends; and "Important Issues" (gay marriage and abortion) as vital but unindicative of the fate or future of the country.

Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska is quickly becoming a Democratic favorite.