Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com
Mom asked, “You didn’t make anyone mad today, did you?” I didn’t have the heart to answer truthfully.
She kept asking.
I kept fibbing.
For 27 years, I negotiated and maintained educator contracts. It was adversarial, and I probably made people mad almost every day. Each side had competing interests.
It could get intense.
But I can’t remember a time, even during the toughest meetings, when negotiations devolved into shouting insults. That just didn’t happen. There was posturing, pontificating, but no ad hominem attacks. We sometimes had bloody tongues from biting off the clever, cutting words we wanted to say. I learned it was more important to collectively problem solve instead of tossing insults across the table.
Bargaining contracts isn’t like negotiating a car deal. In a car deal, both parties can walk away. They can use any trick to win. After all, the buyer knows there’s another car dealer a few blocks away, and the seller knows, there’s probably another gullible buyer around the corner willing to pay sticker price. There’s no long-term relationship. It’s transactional. Neither side needs to worry about the relationship.
Negotiating contracts is different. If you cheated or lied to win, you lost big during the next round of bargaining.
If you insulted the other side one year, the deal for the next would be doubly difficult. I may have been the spokesperson, but it was their contract. During the day, they worked as a team to teach kids. That’s essential. If we spent the night insulting one another, what would the school day look like?
I learned early in my career that while it might be cathartic to vent, there could be serious consequences. An insult that hits the mark can start a cycle of bullying that’s hard to stop.
Both political parties need to learn the same lesson.
I don’t clutch pearls over negative campaigning. I’ve been there and done that. But for me, negative campaign messages must be true and be about issues voters care about.
Shouting insults makes bipartisan governing later difficult.
To put it another way: campaigning by insult, insults voters.
To that end, Democratic politicians need to stop insulting former President Donald Trump by calling him Hitler. He isn’t. Hitler slaughtered 6 million Jews. To make that comparison cheapens the horror of the Holocaust. The same politician may later need to make a deal with a president they called Hitler. It’s difficult to make a deal with someone you’ve demonized.
By the same token, Republican politicians need to stop using racial insults against Vice President Kamala Harris. Calling her a “DEI hire” is racist and sexist, implying she isn’t qualified and was chosen only based on her race and or gender. It’s a mean lie with no place in our politics.
JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, has lobbed more insults. He has claimed a woman who hasn’t given birth to children is “less qualified to lead.” That’s a special kind of inappropriate. Calling a person a cat lady isn’t the winning message he thinks it is.
It’s also never a good idea to deify any candidate. They never measure up to God, and worshiping any politician insults all religions.
Calling out this type of political behavior can result in the same problem parents have when they try to stop their children from fighting. “He/she started it!”
It’s time to end it.
Only the voters can do that. Most people want politicians to respect the other side long enough to solve real problems together. That’s how collective bargaining worked best, and that’s how governing should look.
Top image is by Christos Georghiou, available via Shutterstock.