StoryCorps takes aim at Congress with eye on political common ground

A new program aims to take “one small step” toward bridging the partisan divide in Congress, simply by having lawmakers talk to each other.  

For 20 years, the nonprofit StoryCorps has been documenting the stories of some 700,000 ordinary Americans, with a copy of the audio recordings going to both the participant and the Library of Congress as part of a nationwide oral history effort.  

“People think of it as, ‘If I had 40 minutes left to live, what would I say to this person who means so much to me?’ We're kind of collecting the wisdom of humanity,” Dave Isay, StoryCorps’s founder and president, told ITK.  

Another initiative, called One Small Step, emerged from the nonprofit in 2017 when, Isay said, “Things really began fracturing in the country.”  

“We started experimenting with putting people or strangers across the divide together, not to talk about politics, but just to get to know each other as human beings under the premise that it's hard to get up close,” said Isay.  

Now, StoryCorps’s One Small Step, in partnership with The Hill, is going a step further, by facilitating conversations in Congress. The new project pairs up lawmakers, along with senior staff members at the Capitol, for chats with their political opposites.   

The political odd couples engage in 30-minute talks with each other, either in-person or virtually.  

Isay, a Peabody Award winner, admitted he was at first “very resistant” to trying to take One Small Step to the halls of Congress: “I think that we all have our own biases. [Mine] was that members of Congress couldn't and wouldn't do this and wouldn't be able to get off their script.”  

Larry Kramer, the president of the Hewlett Foundation, funded the project and ultimately was able to convince Isay to give the congressional sit-downs a go.  

One of the first conversations, which debuted at an event hosted by StoryCorps and The Hill earlier this month, happened between Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Dean Phillips (D-Minn.).  

Burchett recalled how polarization has even infiltrated the elevators at the Capitol.  

“I don't know if you've seen this, but I've been in elevators when people will get in and see somebody in there, and then they'll turn around and get out,” Burchett exclaimed to Phillips. “I’m like, ‘Are y'all 12? We got a frickin’ country to run, man.’”  

“Frankly, I think it's a dereliction of duty to avoid conversation in a place that's designed to provoke it and promote it,” responded Phillips.  

“The people unwilling to talk to one another are the problem. Period. Doesn't matter your politics,” Phillips told his GOP colleague. The two even joked about their vast political differences.  

“I'm a conservative. I mean, look at my voting record,” Burchett said.   

“I can't even see your record because it's so far to the right — my peripheral vision,” Phillips quipped.  

“At the end of the interview, the spoiler is, they say, ‘I love you,’ to each other,” Isay said of the conversation between Burchett and Phillips. “I've heard every kind of interview through StoryCorps that you could possibly hear, and this one made me so happy it made me want to cry. You know anything is possible.”  

Right now, StoryCorps is gathering more volunteers in Congress, mostly through word of mouth.   

The majority of Americans, Isay said, want to see elected officials come together and not treating their political opponents as “as enemy to be vanquished.”  

A 2019 Public Agenda-USA Today-Ipsos poll found that 90 percent of respondents said that it was important for Americans to try to seek common ground with their political foes, with another 83 percent calling divisiveness a “big problem.”  

Lawmakers, Isay said, must find a way to “not just respond to the loudest voices and most extreme voices, but regular people who just want us to find a way forward.”  

“Our democracy can't survive in a swamp of mutual contempt,” Isay, 57, said. “So we have to fix this problem or our entire democracy is at risk.”  

One Small Step Congress, Isay said, “is not about centrism at all” or lawmakers singing kumbaya with one another.  

“It's just about treating each other as human beings,” Isay said, “no matter where you are on the political spectrum.”