Jason Grumet opens in 2007 at Union Station, where Howard Baker, Bob Dole, Tom Daschle, and George Mitchell are about to announce the founding of the Bipartisan Policy Center. Instead of focusing on final logistics, the former Senate leaders fall into easy, intimate storytelling, revealing that their bipartisan partnership rests on decades of rivalry, friendship, and mutual respect.

Grumet explains that the BPC’s founders had often fought fiercely over budgets, filibusters, elections, and legislation, but they shared a belief that opponents could still love the country and respect the legislative process. They founded the BPC because they believed America’s democratic institutions were becoming brittle, not simply because politics had grown partisan, but because leaders were abandoning the habits of trust, negotiation, and personal connection that had once made agreements possible.

To show that bitter politics need not prevent governing, Grumet recalls the 1995 government shutdown. While President Clinton and Speaker Newt Gingrich clashed publicly, Democrat Henry Waxman and Republican Tom Bliley quietly negotiated a food quality standards bill; their credibility as a cross-party pair was so strong that Leon Panetta accepted their compromise without needing further details.

Grumet then argues that America has historically made what Alexis de Tocqueville called “repairable mistakes,” but current challenges such as debt, economic insecurity, and immigration raise fears that the system may be losing that corrective capacity. He rejects despair rooted solely in money, media, and gerrymandering, and instead emphasizes Washington’s informal relationships: the ordinary social ties among politicians, staff, spouses, and families that once helped sustain trust across partisan lines.

The introduction distinguishes bipartisanship from nonpartisanship. Grumet argues that democracy needs ideological conflict, but that progress comes when proud Democrats and Republicans negotiate in good faith from their own positions. He points to past bipartisan achievements such as No Child Left Behind, while noting that more recent major laws, especially the Affordable Care Act, have often passed through party-line discipline and intensified cycles of retaliation.

Grumet closes with the example of Sputnik. After the Soviet launch, American leaders could have turned the crisis into partisan warfare, but figures such as Lyndon Johnson helped steer Congress toward fact-finding and national purpose. Grumet argues that America cannot simply hope for another unifying moment; it needs a deliberate plan to rebuild functional partisanship and rediscover principled compromise.