Common Solutions

Watch the story in the Feb. 12 show.

When you ask political people in the know why our politics are so full of conflict these days, a couple of things usually come up: money and beliefs. 

Recently, former Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman and former North Dakota Democrat Sen. Heidi Heitkamp addressed both issues in a talk at Portman's Center for Policy Solutions at the University of Cincinnati.

On Heitkamp's mind, campaign money and how much of it goes to waste. “I used to tell my consultant 80% of what we spend is wasted. He goes, yeah, but you don't know which 80%, right?”

If there's a silver lining, though, Heitkamp is not of the mind that money makes the political world go round, at least when it comes to winning elections.

“If having money gets you elected to the Senate, I would have been re-elected. I had plenty of money," Heltkamp says. "I think we have this exaggerated sense of the fact that whoever has the most money wins. That's not true.”

Meanwhile, Portman says, common ground can be hard to find sometimes.

“How do you find common ground?" Portman says. "If you disagree personally or you have a values-based objection to something? How can you find common ground with someone? And I agree with you on that. But most of the issues don't fall in that category.”

Both Portman and Heitkamp were part of a bipartisan working group of senators who managed to pass hundreds of bills across the Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies.

“Things like national parks," Portman says. "They needed to have an infusion of money because they were falling apart. It's sort of an infrastructure bill. So we went to the offshore oil revenues and took it out of there.

"For the parks, it's not really an issue of the heart. I mean, it is for me. I love the parks, but it's not an issue where I had any qualms about it. It was just, how do you get from no to yes, and how do you get enough people to support you on it?"

For both former colleagues, consistency is key.

“Then you just keep at it," Portman says. "And I remember in the infrastructure bills, six times, at least half dozen times, it was dead on arrival. It was. The media literally wrote reports saying, this bill is dead.”

But even the senators had to concede that on some issues, especially the ones politicians tend to campaign on these days, many can't meet in the middle.

While things might look bleak for our politics, at least we now know money and beliefs aren't always the stumbling blocks to policy solutions.