I spent much of last week talking with Republicans about Social Security reform, but I didn’t expect to find myself salivating over the phone. I was in a hotel room in St. Paul when I connected with Sen. Lindsey Graham. As he spoke, I could hear Irish music in the background. I could hear laughter and conviviality. It turned out that he was calling me from a pub in Dublin.

I can’t tell you how much I wanted at that moment to be in an Irish pub and possibly not even talking about entitlement reform. But Graham was going on passionately about his bill.

Graham has campaigned in his home state, South Carolina, on the need to reform Social Security and move to private accounts. “I’ve had every demagogic ad you can think of run against me,” he said as Guinness fantasies danced in my head.

Graham added that he would love to embrace the sort of bill that his New Hampshire colleague John Sununu is proposing, which would create private accounts and wouldn’t reduce benefits or raise taxes to pay the transition costs. But like most smart Republicans I spoke with this week, Graham realizes that you can’t pass a major entitlement reform without significant Democratic support.

“If John can get Democratic support, count me in,” he was saying, as a great roar of laughter arose from the pub behind him. But he knows that most Republicans will never agree to a bill that balloons the deficit and transforms a beloved program if it doesn’t have bipartisan backing to give them political cover.

So Graham’s bill would raise payroll taxes on the affluent to cover transition costs. This idea is going to be tough for many Republicans, he said, but both parties have to cross some Rubicons. He’s received some encouragement from senior Republicans and some important, though so far private, support from Democrats.

This was the first time in my life I heard a person in a pub talking about benefit index formulas, so it was an important milestone on my descent into pathetic wonkery. But as Graham was enthusing, I couldn’t help thinking about how the Social Security reform debate might transform the culture in Washington.

Over the past few years, attention has focused on things, like tax cuts, that can be pushed through with partisan majorities. But in the second term, Bush’s top initiatives will require bipartisan compromises while making divisions within the parties more apparent.

Whether they like it or not, Republicans and Democrats are going to have to meet privately in rooms and negotiate with each other. They’re going to have to develop some level of trust so they can make unpopular suggestions and know they won’t read about it in the next day’s papers. They are going to have to compromise, reach a deal and then stick together in the face of the special-interest onslaught.

The Social Security issue changes the incentives. The rule is compromise or fail. If the president is to avoid a debilitating defeat, the atmosphere has to change.

In the past when it came time to build these sorts of grand coalitions, we would have seen centrist deal-makers in the Howard Baker mold rise to take the lead. But those centrist types are gone, and now it will be up to realistic partisans like Graham, who, it should be recalled, was one of the aggressive House managers during the Clinton impeachment.

And indeed, during the past couple of weeks we’ve begun to see that even in this polarized age, there are little green shoots of what you might call a negotiating culture sprouting up. The White House has been much more flexible in talking about the shared sacrifices that will be required to make the system solvent. Democrats have so far been given little inducement to take risks, but even so, several important Democrats know that their party can’t merely be the party of the status quo. They have to embrace some kind of reform.

Maybe the context for old-fashioned coalition-building no longer exists. There aren’t as many cross-party friendships as before, nor as many master deal makers. But somehow we’re going to have to fix Social Security so the baby boom generation doesn’t imprison its children in a fortress of debt. We’re going to have to bring the entitlement system into the era of longevity. And if this culture of negotiation is to be recreated, I’m thinking of a pub — far away and in a happy, happy place — where it just might start.

Reach Mr. Brooks at dabrooks@nytimes.com.