In President Barack Obama's most recent State of the Union Address, President Obama gave somewhat of a laundry list of things he wanted to get done, some plans that he or his people had put forward, and addressed a variety of issues. While I wasn't giving the President my full attention, and so I didn't catch a whole lot of what he was talking about, I did notice an underlying theme of compromise. President Obama would talk about a bi-partisan committee with one plan or another, or tell Congress to compromise on this issue, or announce that if Republicans would do this, he would get the Democrats to do that.
Regardless of one's political view, I'd hope you realize that compromise within our government is extremely important. Compromise helps ensure that a government designed to represent all it's people, and not just those who voted in the majority, does just that.
I was able to give the Republican response by Senator Marco Rubio much more of my attention and so I noticed a lot more. Intermixed with Senator Rubio's touching stories about his neighbors, and how parents feel when they have a child, I got the strong sense that the Senator's message was essentially 'screw compromise, POTUS doesn't know what he's doing'.
Now it might seem that I'm all like 'oh Republicans never compromise' and 'Democrats are our saints and saviors because they are willing to compromise,' but this isn't the case, I'm just using the recent example of the SOTU and Republican response to make a point about the importance of compromise.
It seemed to me that Sen. Rubio spat on the idea of compromise because he doesn't think that Pres. Obama knows what he is doing. Fine then, but even if Pres. Obama is totally incapable as President (and I'm not saying he is or isn't) you should still be able to compromise with him on certain issues instead of just refusing to compromise at all (in fact, use compromise to change the policies you think are crap into something that is at least a little bit better) and getting nothing done, Republicans and Democrats alike should be more willing to compromise.
Regardless of which party is in power, they should still compromise. They shouldn't use the power they have to browbeat the other party into submission or pass some petty, anti-X bill or law. That's not okay, don't be a jerk like that.
