End the politics of ‘I win, you lose’

I tried the all-or-nothing route as governor and failed. We’ve now had success on gun violence and policing through collaboration and shared ideas.

This month’s Supreme Court saga was not America’s finest hour. Regardless of how you feel about Brett Kavanaugh, you probably agreed that the whole affair was beneath our democratic institutions.

It’s hard to see it any other way. People are angry, torn apart by the zero-sum game they’ve seen playing out – not just over a court nomination, but in virtually every other public policy debate and election campaign. Zero-sum means “I win, you lose.” It means “win at all costs” and “there’s no space for you.” It’s where any tactic will do in order to win. And in the end, nothing works because of our division. Doesn’t democracy require something finer than that?

Sen. John McCain

How ironic that the deep divisions we witnessed followed a month after America came together to celebrate the life of the late Sen. John McCain, a true American hero who embodied a positive, constructive and thoroughly civil approach to public service. His career showed us that good things can happen when we put aside our own priorities and partisanship to serve a greater purpose – to find “win-win” solutions, where the two sides of any debate can both emerge with the feeling that they have accomplished something positive and were respected by the process.

The alternative is zero-sum. Throughout my career, I have worked it both ways, and I’ve learned from the experience. In Congress I was part of a bipartisan team that balanced the federal budget for the first time in decades. My side didn’t get everything it wanted – neither did the other side – but we were both willing to give a little to achieve something we all believed was important for our country.

The same was true for welfare and Pentagon reform, two other big efforts in which I had a part. Nothing came easy. Negotiations were often complex and animated. But no one had a “my way or the highway” mentality because we all kept striving toward shared goals: helping families become self-sufficient, strengthening our military by making it more efficient, or modernizing our Armed Forces to face new, post-Cold War challenges.

I admit, I have tried the all-or-nothing approach and failed. When I first became governor in 2011, I worked with state legislators to roll back collective bargaining for public employees. A law to supposedly save money for taxpayers left nothing on the negotiating table for hundreds of thousands of unionized public workers. Not surprisingly, it was handily overturned at the ballot box, and the reason was simple: when we try to have it all our way, we inevitably fail.

Shared ideas

I learned from that failure, however, and some of our administration’s best progress in the years that followed came from collaboration and shared ideas. Working together, we helped create 550,000 new private-sector jobs in our state and ensured that that 700,000 more Ohioans get health care. We worked collaboratively with people on both sides of a heated issue to create new standards for community policing and did the same to find common sense proposals for reducing gun violence.

We pooled state and local resources in fighting opiate addiction, and now prescribed opiate deaths are at an eight-year low and heroin overdoses have fallen to four-year lows. We haven’t gotten everything right, but we’ve shown what can happen when people put their own agendas second and strive for goals that benefit everyone.

Republican John R. Kasich has been governor of Ohio since 2011. He will be leaving office at the end of this year because of term limits.