Two Parties, ONE Solution?

Project ONE Vote launches today with a rare stamp of approval from both political parties: The Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee both endorsed the global anti-poverty initiative today. Can this ideologically sorted country ever get behind a unified solution to poverty and HIV/AIDS?

There are at least four major "non-partisan" efforts to influence the 2008 elections. Two of them -- ONE and Edin08.gov, are funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Another is a consolidated effort to force the presidential candidates to put forth detailed plans to combat global warming. And then there's Unity08, which is creating a ballot slot for a Dem/GOP unity ticket. All seek to bridge differences, assuming that the distance between the two sides is narrow enough for a bridge to be built.

It's easy to initially dismiss ONE as a feel-good vessel for disaffected pols to get the political equivalent of tax write-offs for their "bipartisan" instincts But never before, really, have such well-funded, well-managed, tech-savvy interest groups tried to play a serious role in influencing the contours of the presidential primary debates. One one level, it's hard to see how ONE (and EdIn08.gov) will be all that different: of course the candidates will speak about poverty in a serious way, most will count HIV/AIDS eradication as among their top public health priorities; solutions will involve some combination of public/private initiative, and even Republicans will be hard-pressed to come up with policies that don't, in some way, involve the bureaucracy.

ONE's challenge twofold: one, to turn what candidates pay lip service to into something they worry about. They'll spend millions on television ads in early primary states. They'll deploy their celebrity coterie to whip up the humors of average Americans; they'll use Web 2.0 and social networking tools to complement their top-down communications efforts.

The second is to create a transpartisan set of solutions. That's going to be hard. The politics of poverty is perceived as intractable. Liberal and conservative solutions rarely overlap, and when they do, there are distinct political downsides for at least one of the political parties. Remember, the mass of Americans who want bipartisan solutions aren't the same Americans who vote in primaries. That's why Fred Thompson talks about bipartisan solutions and espouses fairly conventional Republican policies.

Democrats will always integrate the idea of individual responsibility into the framework of government welfare; vice- versa for Republicans. And the lever for "big solutions" will be always tilted against Republicans, because Democrats are still the party of government, and these campaigns are directed, after all, at those who run the government.

Will ONE work? The answer, I think, lies in the relative strength of the modernist evangelical political movement in the Republican Party. Think of Mike Huckabee, ONE campaign's Jack Oliver, Sen. Bill Frist, David Kuo, the National Association of Evangelicals, the "creation care" movement, and the like. How ONE influences them, and how they, in turn, influences others, will determine whether the new president chooses to focus on poverty.