By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com 

INDIANAPOLIS – The late Andy Jacobs Jr. had a problem with a certain kind of campaign rhetoric.

“Why do so many candidates have to say, ‘I will fight for you?’” he said to me once when we were shooting the breeze. “Why can’t they say, ‘I will work for you?’ Or, better yet, ‘I will work with you?’”

Andy – I’m going to use his first name because we were friends – was a wise man.

His wisdom was born of experience. In addition to serving in the U.S. House of Representatives for 30 years, he was a decorated veteran, a Marine who had been wounded in the Korean War.

Andy didn’t have a romanticized view of either combat or conflict. He wasn’t a pacifist. He knew there were times to fight and things worth fighting for – primarily when either his country or innocent people were threatened.

But the list of things to go into battle over didn’t extend to most causes of political disputes: tax cuts, program expansions, who claimed which piece of turf, who got which slice of the pie.

He was smart enough to know that a solution to a problem was almost always better than a “victory.”

Solutions to problems don’t have winners.

More important, solutions to problems don’t create losers.

For that reason, solutions don’t foster resentment. They don’t plant the seeds for the next battle.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Andy’s words these days.

We now are locked in another campaign season in which political parties and political candidates do everything they can to pit American against American. Republicans and Democrats both are desperate for victories. They want wins.

Not solutions.

I’m not naïve about elections. They are designed to prod people to make choices, to pick party 1 over party 2, to choose candidate A rather than candidate B.

As such, they invite, even encourage, comparisons between the people running for office and where they stand on the issues. Elections are meant to foster debate about who we are, where we stand and where we want to go.

Nor am I blind to the fact that, when it comes to accessing government support, there often are billions of dollars at stake, reason enough for many people to succumb to temptation and forget or ignore their best selves.

Even so, some things should be beyond the pale.

It’s one thing to assert that someone is wrong or mistaken or misguided.

It’s another thing altogether to say that he or she is evil.

There is a world of difference between arguing, in good faith, over the solution to a common problem and asserting that, because a fellow citizen disagrees with one way or another to solve that problem, he or she is less than American.

Or that his or her views don’t merit consideration.

Or respect.

Because your neighbor doesn’t want to see millions of Americans to suffer without healthcare coverage doesn’t mean that he or she hates freedom.

Similarly, because another neighbor believes tax cuts will foster economic growth and create a prosperity that will benefit almost everyone, that doesn’t mean he or she is blind or insensitive to human suffering.

So many of the challenges before us call for collaboration rather than conflict.

Our task isn’t simply to foster economic growth or to extend health care to all Americans but to try to do both.

After all, the preamble to our Constitution doesn’t call for us to “provide for the common defense” or “promote the general welfare” or “ensure domestic tranquility.”

No, it charges us to do all those things.

Our founding document pushes us to solve problems, not indulge in senseless squabbles. The Constitution prompts us to work with, rather than fight against, each other.

What we need now from our leaders are solutions, not winners, losers and a never-ending list of justifications to keep skirmishing.

Andy Jacobs understood that, better than most.

That’s why we sure could use his voice right now.

FOOTNOTE: John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits” WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.