As a dad, I am torn between wanting to introduce my children to the world as it is, on the one hand, and providing for them a vision of the world as I want it to be, on the other.
The expressions of this conflict are trivial, but they are unending. Should my wife and I expose our little ones to violent and overblown movies like the Pirates of the Caribbean series, even though we didn't like them, just because their friends are talking about Jack Sparrow on the playground? Should we let them play with water machine-guns like the other kids in the pool, or watch old cowboy-and-Indian movies with damaging stereotypes in them, or use language like "That sucks!" at home?
I mean, what's our problem? Don't we want our kids to have a comfort-level with the world they actually live in? Sure, it's crass. It's violent. It's loud. It's rude. It's constantly trying to sell them something. So what?
Or do we protect them from all that, and instead keep their focus on Suzuki piano lessons, children-friendly poetry (here's a good one for kids!), nature walks, puzzles, with the hope of instilling in them a love for the kind of activities we think are preferable? Would that make them out of touch with their own culture?
The truth is that we don't live by our own standards. After they go to bed you might find us indulging in some terrible, brain-numbing action movie which makes us feel happy. So where do we draw the line for our kids? At the ideal, or not at all, or somewhere in between?
It's a big question, and I find it gets bigger the more I think about it. I look to people like Jon Stewart as possible models: now there's a guy who seems to immerse himself in our crass, consumerist, contemporary culture but is able to stand apart from it too. I wonder how that translates into his parenting?
Okay, what does this have to do with Sarah Palin?
Well, the appearance of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP jolted me back to this question about our relationship to our culture, and my responsiblities as a dad.
Palin represents much of what I detest when I watch TV: that unearned, unreflective, confrontational style with no tolerance of ambiguity or nuance.
If you watch a "reality" show on TV these days, even the snob-sanctioned ones like Project Runway, you see little proto-Palins everywhere: supremely confident, competitive, basically mean people, sometimes laughing at themselves but mostly at others.
She's ignorant of the world and doesn't even care.
As our national politics devolves into a reality TV show I guess this is what we get: the beautiful African-American man with the serious way and the winning smile vs. the former beauty queen who describes herself as a "pitbull with lipstick." Cue the music and the graphics: Project White House. Season 44.
The McCain campaign is attempting to diminish Obama by pitting these two cultural phenomena against each other (while suggesting subliminally that the gray-haired, crotchety war hero is the real choice among grown-ups).
Obama is aware of this attempt to reduce him to a mere "personality" in a ratings-getting contest with Palin; that's why he and Biden are staying clear of her as best they can and keeping up the attacks on McCain's plan for the economy in the last few days. But even if Obama's aware of it, he can't stop it.
So does my resistence to Sarah Palin show that I am "out-of-touch"?
That's why her emergence is clarifying for me. It answers the dilemma I have as a dad about how to raise my kids in the midst of a trash culture. It makes it obvious to me that the problem isn't the stuff all around us. The problem comes if we don't call it for what it is.
What Palin makes me see is that it's not the exposure to our crass culture that is the problem... it is the passive acceptance of it. As long as we're talking freely and critically in our house we can watch whatever warped TV we like (well, okay, with some limits!). It's all grist for the mill, as long as the children know it for that and only that and are still thinking for themselves. Some would call this critical distance from the culture being "out of touch." I would call it being alive.
Critical distance is what I want for my little ones. And it's what I want for my elected officials.
Remember when, day after day, week after week, Karl Rove made Al Gore -- brilliant, far-sighted, truthtelling Al Gore -- into a liar and an exaggerator?
By the last weeks of the campaign of 2000, even though I knew it was all right-wing propaganda, I cringed every time I heard Gore say anything that could be misinterpreted as an exaggeration. I came to associate this longtime public servant, this complicated person, with the baseless attacks on him. They had just come so relentlessly, that the neural pathways in my brain locked me into a loop that I did not even believe.
Then came 2004. That time I was more savvy. I recognized it when it started. There was a week when every day the Bush campaign repeated the word "flip-flop." The substance of the issue shifted daily, even hourly, but the word always came with it. Every spokesperson, every press release, used it. And soon the media was discussing it, with creased brows. Trying to be fair-minded, challenging the assumptions, but discussing it, using the word. Within a month or so, about the time of the Democratic Convention, John Kerry, who had stayed resolute in his opposition to the Vietnam War, who had served in the Senate for so many years, who spoke commandingly and comprehensively in the debates on the issues facing this country, had been tagged: flip-flopper. I didn't buy it, but I heard my brain echo it every time I saw his face or heard his voice.
Now they have determined the characterization of Obama that (they think) will win the election for McCain. Rove has been brought back, and you can practically taste his icky presence on the back of your tongue (sorry for the image). It's in the air: the man with flesh-colored hair is back. What will he force us to associate with Obama, even though it has absolutely NO relation to any evidence?
This time watch for two words: presumptuous, arrogant. This, about a politician who has shown a rare ability to listen, to synthesize, to talk directly to people without condescending to them. Who has worked the gritty church basements of South Side Chicago, came from nowhere through the sheer strength of his mind and openness of his heart (read his books and tell me he is not forthcoming and open), a man who speaks often of the many people he admires, the writers he reads, the achievements of others.
It doesn't matter that the assertion is patently false: Rove, McCain, et al, have their theme. Their meme. And it will be repeated every day until November. Prepare yourself, it's going to be very, very irritating. I'm going to try not to let them into my head this time, not even as an echo. Maybe the third time's a charm? Can we beat this neurological assault?
I am blown away by the strategic brilliance of the Obama campaign throughout these 17 months.
So I assume they know exactly what they are doing about the Hillary Clinton as VP question.
But I want to make one point:
Bringing Clinton on to the ticket in order to attract the Hillary voters in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, South Dakota, Indiana, Florida, etc. makes no sense.
Even if it worked, it would weaken his presidency in a significant way. Obama would never have those constituencies behind him, only behind his Vice President. This would be untenable for a President -- being forever beholden to his VP.
Obama must win those voters to his candidacy through his own merits. Bringing Hillary Clinton on now, with her citing her 18 million supporters as if it is a static number, would eliminate that opportunity.
Making Hillary VP would be a decision based on fear not hope.
Lanky
Thin
Big ears
Morally serious
Sudden big smile
Disarming ability to talk like common man
Good with stories
Raised by mom figure (stepmom for Abe), without close relationship with dad
Self-doubts during youth
Christianity was choice not epiphany, but employed religious language in speeches when useful
Discussed process of reasoning aloud
Cool, cerebral style, but also great speeches Comfortable in skin
Competitive
Unifier
Does not hold grudges
Infuriates people who have repressed doubts, or driven by ideology or false certainties
Recognized by people with serious intent to do good
Not afraid of war, but not eager for it either
Illinois - Springfield connection
Risks of assassination
Young children
Wife is outspoken, strong-willed
Impossible to ruffle
Disorganized in terms of filing, organizing papers, etc.
Slow thought process grounded in first principles
See both sides
Moral ambiguity
Moral modesty
Resolute once decided upon a course
Interested in fairness
Barack Obama's decisive win in Wisconsin makes it increasingly likely that he will be the de facto Democratic nominee, possibly as early as the end of April. If he wins either Ohio or Texas on March 4, and carries the day in Pennsylvania on April 22, then any refusal by Hillary Clinton to concede would be nothing more than a sad and squalid sideshow on the road to his nomination.
I believe that if he makes it past the primary campaign, then Obama will be the next President of the United States. The next month is the turning point.
One angle on this astonishing development that deserves more attention is the way that the actual fulfillment of this promise -- an African-American man elected to the office of President of the United States -- answers a question that has haunted this country from its beginnings.
This question goes to our deepest understanding of what it means to be an American.
While the fact of a black man in the White House could never, in itself, redeem the suffering and injustice and persistent inequities brought on by the institution of slavery, it nevertheless would mean one thing clearly: we would know, once and for all, that the idea of America is true.
This question has haunted us from the beginning: Is it true?
The generation of 1776 no doubt included many wise, generous men and women. We owe to them our form of government and the basis of our culture. But they were also, by today's standards, morally abject, flawed -- monsters.
"Tremble" as he did for his country when he reflected on the great wrong of slavery, Thomas Jefferson did not free his own slaves from bondage while he lived, or even upon his own death.
Others among the framers, though opposed to slavery, were willing to compromise with Southern states and accord slave-owners a 3/5 increase in their representation for every human being they owned. This ugly stab to the body of the Constitution, staring out at us like an open wound when we read its words, was an admission of failure. It hypocritically acknowledged the humanity of each enslaved person while depriving him or her of the full dignity of a person (you are worth exactly 2/5 less than your "master"!); and then, to make matters even worse, it assigned this insulting valuation to the oppressor's gain.
This is not to mention the other unmentionables of that era: the genocidal campaigns against the indigenous people of the continent, the subordinate position of women both personally and politically, the barbarous treatment of criminals or other outliers to society...
But the story did not stop there of course. We congratulate ourselves on the abolitionist movement, the Emancipation Proclamation, the fight for universal suffrage, the civil rights victories of the 20th century. There has been progress, undeniable progress. Yet, for all of the gains made with each generation, we have still been haunted.
Is America more than its contemporaries would have it? Are we moving forward?
"We didn't land on Plymouth rock, my brothers and sisters," Malcolm X famously said, "Plymouth rock landed on us!" The struggles of America's citizenry were so often not chosen; they were forced upon us. We have edged along the rockface of history, but always with tremendous risk, and tremendous resistence.
But is the idea of America true?
The election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America would answer that with a resounding "Yes."
The Presidency is different. It is an office which lies at the center of our national mythology. The White House, too, is different. We follow its holiday decorations and redesigns and the changing of its portraits with an ardor we normally would reserve for our own living rooms. It is a physical space which somehow represents the locus of our own aspirations to good citizenship and strong leadership. The very names resonate: the Oval Office, the Lincoln Bedroom.
To have an African-American take up residence at the White House, and more importantly, make decisions on our behalf as the Commander-in-Chief and Head of State, would be nothing less than a second revolution.
It would mean that the legacy of race in this country, the open wound in the body of our Republic, will have begun to heal. If this -- our secular original sin -- can be overcome, then who knows what future generations can do? The idea of America would be true.
How strangely satisfying to know that future generations, our children's grandchildren, may see us as morally abject, flawed -- monsters!
If you have been reading this blog, then you know that from the beginning I have aimed to balance the personal with the political. But in the last month, ever since my wife was diagnosed with colon cancer, the personal has overwhelmed the political for me.
The immediate concerns of our family have almost completely drowned out the stakes, the strategy, the guesswork, the appeal, of politics.
(Although I have to admit that my wife did tack an Obama sign above her hospital bed, and we did convince one of her nurses, who was wavering, to vote for him in the California primary on Feb 5! But I felt, and continue to feel, as if the ongoing campaign is taking place in a parallel universe.)
So from this new position, far removed from politics, I resume this blog with a question: Do politics matter?
I mean, really matter?
Or are contemporary politics no more than a form of entertainment -- like the Oscars? (Was it McCain who quipped once that Washington D.C. was best described as "Hollywood for ugly people"?)
My conclusion -- which surprises me, considering my state of mind these days -- is that politics do matter.
Sure, the consequential political questions of our time are surrounded by a whole lot of dross. But even with all of our other concerns, my wife and I still find ourselves talking politics at the end of the day. Last night I came out from brushing my teeth with a point about the latent racist innuendos which lie behind the "experience' argument for Hillary. My wife later reminded me of some of the implications of a "President McCain" administration in terms of the survival of the doctrine of pre-emptive war. Earlier in the day we casually agreed about the worrisome implications of the low savings rate of U.S. consumers and the national debt to China...
Okay, this may sound more like politics as therapy (not advisable, I would imagine). But the fact is that these and so many other issues continue to matter to us, for the simple reason that -- despite how silly this sounds to say -- they are part of us.
Well, what is the boundary of the self? First there are our physical bodies, mine and (of more importance right now) my wife's. But nobody would suggest that our bodies should be the outer limit of our concern.
Beyond our bodies, there is our community of close family and friends -- our "loved ones," as the wonderfully descriptive saying goes. This is quite obviously part of who we are. And as soon as I expand my idea of self to include these relationships, then I have opened the circle up to the many concerns and influences which affect these people too.
I find that any attempt to trace the boundaries of the self follows a geometric, not a linear, progression: it soon includes a world, not a single person. And we find ourselves back in the arena.
It is an obvious point, perhaps, that we are not alone, that we are connected to many overlapping communities larger than ourselves. But it takes a terrifying situation like the one I am in now to see that it is really true! Not just pleasing rhetoric -- really true!
In his Meditation XVII, John Donne famously wrote: "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." I hear that truth now.
It is true going from the personal to the political: the unexpected arrival of cancer in my 36-year-old wife is perhaps a bell which tolls for you as it does for us -- in the sense that it may affect your worldview. But it is also true going the other direction, following the political to the personal: McCain and Obama's back-and-forth over the weekend about whether they would agree to public financing in the general election is a bell which tolls for me and my family. It may affect us in ways we can never predict.
We don't need to pay attention. The beauty of it is that each of us pays attention to the bells he or she can hear. They ring for us.
And then there's always the more obvious way that politics really does matter: the only health insurance plan which I could find for my wife caps her coverage at $75,000 per year. Clinton or Obama's plans would change that by requiring health care insurers to provide for people without reference to pre-existing conditions. McCain's would not. Simple.
So finally we will have Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, just the two of them, all to ourselves. Tonight they debate in Los Angeles, carried live on CNN to our homes.
The media story which follows from this debate will likely change the results on Super Tuesday. This is a big deal.
My wife and I will be busy putting the kids down to sleep, but we'll record it (and then try and fail to resist the temptation to peek at the post-debate commentary before we finally watch it).
Here's what you should look for in the debate tonight:
When it comes down to it, the difference between Obama and Hillary is one of technique. Their policy positions are very close. But these two candidates propose for the occupant of the White House -- and use in their respective campaigns -- two entirely different techniques for achieving their goals.
The question for the night will be which technique is controlling the debate: clarity or drama.
Obama's efforts are directed towards achieving clarity. He is the great explainer. This does not mean that he speaks in sound-bites. On the contrary, sometimes to get clear you must get complicated. In his efforts to describe and respond to the slew of issues facing all of us, Obama sometimes even delves into nuances. Which frustrates Hillary.
An example from the last debate in South Carolina is illustrative of this. Midway through the debate, Senator Clinton complained that Obama "never take[s] responsibility for any vote." When the audience booed this, she defended herself: "Now, wait a minute... anytime anyone raises [an issue], there's always some kind of explanation... It's just very difficult to get a straight answer, and that's what we are probing for."
I believe that Hillary is genuinely baffled by Obama's refusal to give what she considers "straight answers," which in the language of contemporary politics are answers which either take the form of flat-out denials, or which alternatively throw the question back at the one asking them. She's used to political sparring that resembles a tennis match: Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! Thupp. (Cheers from the crowd.)
Instead, Obama actually gives, as she says -- gasp -- "some kind of explanation." Often his explanations are detailed, and they may require an appreciation of cost/benefit analysis, trade-offs, process, timing, and other factors that go into actual votes. But these are not straight answers in Hillary's playbook. Seeking clarity is not the goal for her; winning is.
Which brings us to Senator Clinton's technique: drama.
The Clintons, as everyone knows, seem to attract drama wherever they go, and they are doing it again in this campaign. All that is missing is the dancing bear. Dramatic episodes -- a stand-off over gays-in-the-military, Robert Reich's refusal to go along with welfare reform, the shutting-down-the-government game of chicken with Newt Gingrich, the Monica Lewinsky affair, the whole hyperbolic and sanctimonious presentation of the (entirely reasonable) Kosovo campaign -- marked Bill Clinton's years in office. And Hillary Clinton's campaign has started to proliferate with mini-controversies involving misstatements and smokescreens.
The advantage that Hillary Clinton takes from this drama is that it requires a champion to set things right again. Emotions get riled up, and we need a leader to tell us where to go from here.
Whoever sets the tone tonight -- clarity or drama -- establishes their imprint on voters' ideas of leadership. Whichever technique prevails -- clarity or drama -- may well signal that this technique will become a familiar mode in the next five years in the life of the American Republic.
I have written favorably about Hillary Clinton in the past. I praised her (and her husband's) commitment to a "rights narrative" of American history here, and I described her as a "seasoned warrior" here.
But the last two weeks have soured me on Hillary so much that I will find it very difficult to vote for her in November if she is the Democratic candidate for President.
What is my problem with Hillary? In a word, character.
We know about the manipulation of Obama's words throughout this campaign. The mostly recent egregious example was the TV ad that her campaign aired in South Carolina claiming that Obama had supported Ronald Reagan's ideas (when, as she well knew, he actually made a fairly commonplace observation about the transformative role Reagan played, and how the ideas of the right about limited government and individual responsiblity have dominated the national discourse since Reagan's ascent in 1980). Simply put, she believes that the conscious manipulation of voters is acceptable in the effort to get elected. I would guess that among her friends she would go further and say that Obama's refusal to do so betrays him as lacking what it takes to be effective in politics.
But let's just take the non-event, the drummed-up media tizzy yesterday, about the supposed "snub" of Hillary by Obama at the State of the Union address on Monday night. The macrocosm is in the microcosm. How did Hillary Clinton respond to this? She lied. In an interview with ABC yesterday she said "Well, I reached out my hand in friendship and unity and my hand is still reaching out."
The facts, of course, are different -- and again, she knows it. Photos clearly show that Senator Kennedy initiated the handshake with Hillary. Simultaneously, Obama turns away to answer a question, or otherwise engage with Senator Claire McCaskill. Senator Clinton never did reach out her hand to Obama. She might have, if the occasion had presented itself. But it didn't, and she didn't.
Now, admittedly, this is a non-event. I feel somewhat silly even writing about such a trival media tizzy. So why did Hillary's commentary yesterday on the supposed "snub" stick in my craw? Because it points to something deeper than politics; it points to her basic character. Anyone with a sense of dignity, anyone with an instinctive refusal to fuzz facts, anyone with class, would simply not be able to pretend that he or she "reached out...in friendship and unity" when the occasion simply did not present itself, and she never in fact did reach out. If she had just said, "Of course I would always reach out to Senator Obama, but there are more important things to discuss," or something like that, she would still have scored political points with me.
But she had to take the extra step and lie.
I don't know that I could bear four (or eight) more years of that kind of weak character in the White House. I certainly would be shocked if someone I knew lied directly to me that way. It would change the relationship forever.
I truly don't know if I could vote for Hillary Clinton for President. Third party, purely symbolic votes would, for the first time in my life, interest me.
And even though it is my own thought, that scares me.
Cass Sunstein is one of the foremost legal scholars in the country. He has written a great explanation of Obama's approach to politics and policy-making, called The Visionary Minimalist. It's worth reading.
See where you come down on the electoral compass. It's a great way to test your political self-image against the actual policy positions of the candidates in this election year.
I fall squarely in the upper left quadrant, and my answers are closest to John Edwards and, after him, Barack Obama. So I guess I am an unabashed lefty after all...
What's curious about my electoral compass-point, though, is that in terms of my political philosophy I am actually a conservative -- in the sense that I believe in anti-Utopian, gradualist change, and lower-case meaning derived from contingent cultural traditions.
But I happened to be raised in Berkeley, so the values that I want to conserve are lefty values, emphasizing freedom of expression and equal opportunity for all, instead of religious authoritarianism or private property absolutism. Other people come to liberalism through a different path -- they break away from their upbringing and embrace a transformative, radical position in support of abstract human rights or the rejection of the Powers That Be. I come to my liberalism the way that 18th century "liberals" like Jefferson did: because it seems to me that it allows the maximum of human flourishing, while responding to our deep down sense of fairness. I do not need to believe that it will ever create a Perfect Union, only that we are always striving together, as the Constitution has it, towards "a more perfect Union."
Where do you fall on the electoral compass? What is the political philosophy that lurks behind your specific policy preferences?
My two boys, 3 and 2, are just getting to the age where they will directly test their wills against mine.
The boys will want something -- say, to soak "just one more minute!" in the bubble bath -- and my wife or I will insist that, no, they can't have it.
You know what comes next: a loud and unruly protest rally. Chants and raised fists. Outrage from all sides. The inevitable divisions and recriminations within the movement. And finally, a plastic frog thrown hard at someone's brother.
Grabbing the culprit and lifting him out of the bath, I feel like "the Man." Part of me wants to join them. A vision flashes before my eyes of myself suddenly plunging into the bath next to them, throwing bubbles in the air, calling for more plastic bath toys. "No justice, no peace!" we'd all scream at their mother as she came running in to see what was going on.
But I resist. I mean, I really want them to get in their pajamas.
Sometimes, as I lift them out of the bath, or deny the refill of apple juice, or separate them without asking for a report of who started it, I see a look in their eyes that seems familiar. I remember being a child myself, and having no say as to the final outcome of a confrontation.
When Mom or Dad laid down the law, when it was time for me and my sister to go to our rooms or get in the car to go to school, there was no arguing. Or rather, there was arguing, but it was a foregone conclusion who would win the argument.
Even in the best of worlds, even if it were possible for the parents to be right and reasonable, under all circumstances, it hurts to be the kid. It makes you feel helpless. You recognize the limitations of your own power to change outcomes. It makes you mad, righteously mad. Door-slammingly mad.
That is exactly what many of us felt on Tuesday night, watching the Hillary Clinton victory speech in New Hampshire. And I'm not alone. It felt as if our parents were winning once again.
And it makes us particularly angry because we've had a lot of that over the past eight years. There was the decision by the Supreme Court (parental figures if there ever were such, in strange "grown up" black gowns, talking to each other in sophisticated language about unfamiliar issues) to hand over the Presidency to George W. Bush, despite clear indications that Gore had... I don't know, just possibly received more votes from the good citizens of Florida than anyone else on the ballot.
Then there were the "adults" who, back in 2003, told us that questioning the drumbeat for war and the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was childish. In fact, Dick Cheney's main persona, from the beginning of the administration to the present, is that of the wiser, more responsible parental figure who tells it like it is to the rest of us squirts. And one of the most notorious "grown ups" in the lead up to the Iraq disaster, Bill Kristol, now has a column in the New York Times, along with that other cheerfully enabling grown up, Tom Friedman.
We're still listening to their lectures, suffering from their hand-slappings, sitting for their pep talks.
In New Hampshire, there was a moment when the younger generation seemed to announce itself. Reporters on the ground talked of Obama rallys which were confident, positive, forward-looking -- celebrations of our new unity as an extended family of Americans. It seemed as if, maybe this time, we would speak for ourselves.
But the grown-ups, the over 40 voters, leaned to Hillary. The over-60 voters stampeded to her. And it was enough to send us to our rooms all over again.
I still feel angry. It reminds me of how my boys must feel sometimes.
So what can we learn from our experiences as children and parents to ease the pain?
No, I will not acknowledge that the grown ups are usually right, and that Hillary Clinton, despite my resistence, is best for the family. No, I will not come out of my room and say "I'm sorry." Is there any other lesson to draw from parenting?
There is one: This too will pass. Kids grow up. As you enter your teenage years the conversation with your parents starts to involve more give and take. You may even convince them on occasion to take your side. And then suddenly, shockingly, you find yourself responsible for your own destiny.
I hope that this is the year for Obama. I resent the results in New Hampshire. I am nervous about the prospect of the so-called "Greatest" generation and their children, the Boomer generation, rolling the rest of us kids once again on February 5, "Super Duper Tuesday."
But at least I know that if not now, then soon. We're growing up, Mom and Dad -- Hillary and Dick -- and we're going to finally get the franchise.
I pledge right now to listen to the political views of my adult kids when I'm 60 and holding on to the status quo.
I am writing with advice. Hillary Clinton's campaign surprised everyone yesterday in New Hampshire, and I'm sure your campaign is taking a fresh look at how to respond to the Clinton "comeback."
Here is my advice, short and sweet: You must challenge her claim that you lack "experience."
So far, your campaign has pretty much conceded that point and offered instead the alternative of choice. But you can't simply let her win on experience. You can still emphasize choice, but you need to chip away at the voters who are concerned, above all, about life history, qualifications, resumes, connections.
From what I gather, you do have the experience which equips you for the Presidency.
I don't just mean the story that your wife Michelle tells so movingly on the stump: how you turned down offers from prestigious law firms so that you could become a community organizer in South Side Chicago; how you brought bipartisan coalitions together in the Illinois State Senate and passed important legislation; the impact you have already made in the U.S. Senate, such as your efforts with Dick Lugar to deal with the threat of nuclear warheads in the former Soviet Union. These are important parts of your experience, but they are not the full story.
I would urge you to discuss, with your characteristic eloquence, your experience teaching Constitution Law at the University of Chicago. Tell voters what that experience means for your qualifications to be President at this moment in history.
Under Bush -- in "war on terrorism" era -- we have seen the erosion of some of the legal safeguards in this country: signing statements, invocations of executive privilege, and a reversal of the welcome trend towards transparency in government. We have also seen the Bush administration dismiss many of the long-held (and hard-fought) commitments of international law and human rights law: the advocacy of torture (under another name of course), the outright evasion of the Geneva Conventions, pre-emptive war. We have seen too, with the Patriot Act and numerous executive orders, direct threats to our rights as citizens: the denial of habeas corpus under certain conditions, the wiretapping of our private phone conversations, insistence on access to information on the books we choose to check-out from public libraries.
It will be incumbent on the next President to know the Constitution well, to have grappled with its clauses, its interpretations, its amendments and its "penumbras." It will also be crucial for the next President to know intimately the precedents of the Supreme Court, decisions which have shaped the boundaries of our political and personal lives, from those written in longhand by Justice Marshall all the way to those word-processed by Justice Thomas and his clerks.
I know that Hillary Clinton is a lawyer too. But she did not teach Con Law. I believe that you can make the case that this is perhaps the most important experience the next President will need domestically: that you know our Constitution and its accompanying body of law. You can make the case -- not legalistically but with honest, straightforward and soaring words -- that you will be the greatest defender of our cherished Constitution, and from no less a powerful seat than the one behind the desk in the Oval Office. This cuts through party lines. It is in every American's interest.
Best wishes for Nevada and South Carolina -- and beyond,
DemocratDad
I am writing this letter with a feeling of genuine sympathy for you, concerning the difficulties you are facing in the campaign. Let me be clear: I am a supporter of Barack Obama. But this letter is not written to score political points or with tongue in cheek; I truly wish to convey my respect and sympathies.
I also want to try to explain to you what is happening in New Hampshire at the voting booths and all around the country in the polls.
I know that you have dedicated much of your life to the advancement of your political goals -- including health care reform, education and preschool programs, and a more progressive tax structure. You worked closely with your husband during your years as First Lady both in Arkansas and Washington D.C.. You led many initiatives and commissions into many important policy areas in those years. And then in your subsequent career you delved deeply into the minutia of legislation addressing all manner of economic, military and social needs and endured the endless wrangling in the Senate. Many of your colleages -- Republican as well as Democratic -- have attested to your civility, your thoughtfulness, your obvious intelligence, your fortitude. You won them over, just as you have won over the voters in New York.
But Democratic voters all around the country are now going in a different direction. You and your campaign, by all reports, are reeling.
Why are voters -- particurly young voters -- turning to Obama in droves? Why does experience seem a liability these days? Why do people constantly reference the "likability" factor when contrasting your candidacy to Obama's?
There are many explanations of course. For one, there is Obama himself. We could also speak of "Clinton fatigue," gender stereotypes, the Republican noise machine and its villification of you over the 15 years, demographic shifts, celebrity culture, your fateful vote to authorize the war in Iraq, your personal style of self-restraint, the infinite power of Oprah, and on and on. But I want to focus on just one of these many explanations, the one which I think is (other than Obama himself) the fundamental one:
Hillary, the nature of public discourse is changing.
People are getting savvy. They recognize what people in public life are doing, behind the masks. They know how to read motives. We are, each one of us, saturated with images of other people in the media. And we have become, each one of us, highly advanced critics, expert detectors of duplicity, pretense, hypocrisy, inauthenticity, ambivalence. Microexpressions have macro-consequences.
I believe that you are truly dedicated to your political goals. The charges -- the Sean Hannity/Rush Limbaugh line of talk -- that you are driven by avarice, revenge, or ambition are silly and hurtful. But in your long time in the public eye you have developed a habit of speaking which hides more than it reveals.
You purse your lips into a half smile. You focus-group your hair style (I am assuming that it has at least been discussed, for its political import, in your inner circle). You speak in measured cadences with a subtext which consistently advances your agenda, be it tactical or strategic.
This is no longer suitable in the media-driven culture. People see too much.
This change first began to have consequences in the 2000 election. Voters judged Gore and Bush on the basis of their personal style, regardless of the content of their speeches. While Gore -- dear, brilliant, sincere Gore -- spoke in his slightly condescending, calculated way to the voters, George W. Bush spoke from his heart. He has, over a lifetime, developed a consistent, down-home Texas-style delivery, which relies on the talismanic power of short, simple words (You're a "good man"; people want "freedom" -- see my earlier post on Bush's... unique way of speaking). Voters responded to this. Whatever his policies, whatever his values even, they recognized a person speaking to them without artiface.
When I say that George W. speaks without artiface, I know that you and many others may reflexively disagree. Of course he is a blue-blooded New Englander who is pretending to be a Texan. There is a certain artiface in his whole persona. But the important point is that he has genuinely adopted it as his own. So he may recite the cues given to him by Karl Rove, and he may have invented his down-home style back in his childhood, but he believes it now. Gore, on the other hand, is famously different with his friends in private -- cutting, sharp-witted, even irreverent -- than he is in public, where he is serious, self-deprecating, and yawn-inducing. (Though I have to admit I still love the guy, even when he drives me crazy.)
My point about you, Hillary, is that you have a double self. So do I for that matter, when I present myself to the world. I hide my goofy side and get very serious (not unlike Gore, I'm proud to say!). There is nothing wrong with this traditional style of self-presentation, this double self, on the face of it. But it is a serious liability in today's politics.
Voters today -- especially the young -- want someone who is a fully portable package, and someone who allows any voter, anyone watching on TV, to inspect the contents held within. The age of secrecy is over. Love him or hate him, George W. makes no bones about who he is and where he stands. Love him, Barack Obama does the same.
Again, my sympathies are with you. You are a gifted person, and you have done and will no doubt continue to do much good. But the culture has shifted, Hillary.
In your emotionally revealing moment yesterday, your voice broke when you spoke of how hard it is sometimes to continue on with the campaign, and why you do it. Let's forget the supposed risk of crying, considering our country's hang-ups about "showing weakness." I was with you as I watched it. For a moment, you seemed to drop your mask and let us see the contents within. But then, before our very eyes, you put the mask back on. You transitioned, almost effortlessly (I only saw your eyes drop for a moment as you made the switch), into a political speech about how "some of us are right and some of us are wrong... some of us are ready, and some of us are not."
It broke my heart to see you do that. For I knew then, that this dual awareness, this calculation of the words you speak for their effect instead of their capacity to represent your inner reality, is your default position. You cannot help it. You cannot break the habit. And for this, voters cannot forgive you.
I will vote for Barack Obama on February 5 in California. But I will think of you too, Hillary, and I will wish you well in your continuing career as a Senator from New York. There are many of us who struggle with this new era, which demands exposure to all of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, all the time.
Best wishes and be proud of all you have done,
DemocratDad
Update: Clinton won New Hampshire! Congratulations, Senator Clinton. This will certainly be an interesting month ahead.
The world is changing. Faster than any of us can track. And one of the ways it is changing is to make us far more accurate at assessing the multiple sources of information demanding our attention every day.
We have to be more accurate. We have to be more selective. If not, we would be swamped with a time-wasting, distracting, confusing barrage of information, and we would go to sleep at night wondering what the hell that was all about.
(Well, okay, sometimes I go to sleep at night wondering what the hell that was all about anyway, but usually there is a specific cause -- say, I happened to land on Fox News for too long before clicking the TV off. It's not a general state of mind...)
We've learned to be choosy about what we let into our heads.
One reason we've had to do this is that our culture is becoming an audiovisual one -- instead of one based on the written word.
This is somewhat threatening to those of us who value the old culture -- those of us who still read for pleasure. An article in the New Yorker last week terrified me on this topic of our changing culture.
The article, Twilight of the Books, discusses the rise of a post-literate culture -- a so-called "secondary orality." The author, Caleb Crain, lists some of the findings of research into the ways in which an oral culture -- one without reliance on the written word -- functions. These findings happen to match up almost exactly with our emerging 21st century culture in the U.S.
Here's the most hair-raising passage from the article:
"[T]he best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to 'think memorable thoughts,' whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliche and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There's no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in 'enthusiastic description of physical violence.' Since there's no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted...[I]t is only in a literate culture that the past's inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth."
Doesn't that describe our current political and popular cultures with eerie accuracy?
I brooded about this for a week, until I realized that this culture of "secondary orality" will generate new skills, new adaptive behaviors, new talents, in the coming years. My children will have abilities far beyond mine to selectively choose what goes into their heads, and what new synthesis they make of it all.
And that brings me to the youth vote.
As is becoming increasingly apparent from the floundering of Clinton and Romney, young people don't buy the old schtick of politicians. When they start with the rhetoric, or dwell too long on their resumes, young people turn their attention away. This is the secret behind the popularity of the satire on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or the Colbert Report, or the Onion. The old written-word style of communication, mimicked by habit even in the speech of older politicians, has become a joke.
Elevated language, and the unreflective role playing that goes along with it (message: "I speak in this self-important manner because I am an important leader of men!"), simply don't translate well into an audiovisual culture.
This is why Obama and Huckabee have a special magic for young people. They may be readers themselves, but they belong -- in every syllable they utter, in every casual, natural smile they flash -- to the new culture. They are authentic, finite, recognizable. And most importantly, they are hearable and watchable.
What struck me most about the amazing speech Obama gave following his decisive win in Iowa last night was his complete lack of giddiness. He was warm, eloquent, authoritative, full of conviction, but he never seemed lost in the moment.
Here he had accomplished something truly historic: an African-American candidate came in first -- beating two seasoned pols -- in rural America, in the heartland, in Iowa for godsakes, which surely competes with Idaho for the title of Whitest State in the Union -- and a red state to boot. (Does that make it pink?) And yet he was perfectly composed and self-aware.
This is a watershed moment in so many ways. In fact, last night we witnessed a watershed waterfall.
Here is a list of some of the watershed moments we witnessed in Iowa:
1. Largest turnout of new voters ever in the Iowa caucus.
2. A campaign that never resorted to negative attacks (the lowest Obama stooped to was questioning whether "Washington experience" is really that important to serving as President -- harsh!)
3. First ever presidential candidate who openly admits that his religious faith represents "a choice, not an epiphany."
4. Second ever presidential candidate who has a parent who was born in a foreign country (the first and only other, as far as I know, was Thomas Jefferson -- father from Wales, mother from England).
5. A new model of manhood for our time.
The last one perhaps needs some elaboration.
I see in Obama, beyond the political accomplishments, a significant cultural marker in terms of our contemporary idea of what consitutes a strong man -- and for that matter, a strong person, regardless of gender.
His opponents -- and the right wing media machine -- have attempted to define him as soft, as naive, as "Obambi," as too young and too inexperienced, but these charges seem to bounce off of him as soon as he speaks. He is slender, polite, quick to smile, even gentle in his way. Yet his impeccable control of what he is saying projects strength beyond question. What's going on here?
If we think of the panoply of ideas about manhood in our culture they tend to cluster around two poles: warrior/chieftan/cowboy or scholar/gentleman. The first group is rough-and-ready, agile of mind when needed, but mostly agile of body. These men bow down to no one. The second group is decorous, high-minded, confident and morally unimpeachable. These men, in many cases, inspire others to bow down to them by their sheer understanding of what lies before us.
Obama belongs to neither group -- or rather, both but more than both. He is tough like a warrior/chieftan/cowboy -- he refused jobs at cushy law firms after Harvard and instead dedicated himself as a commnity organizer to the streets and housing projects and churches of Chicago. We can imagine the icy-cold morning spent in dingy rooms drinking tepid coffee out of styrofoam cups fending off accusations and hacking coughs and disillusionment. No one can fairly accuse him of taking the easy way out.
Yet he is also obviously capable of inspiring a following. President of the Harvard Law Review (and universally loved, apparently). Wildly admired, early in his career, by his colleages at the University of Chicago Law School (Obama taught Constitutional law, a subject which I can safely say is one of the most mentally demanding of any area of expertise I have ever encountered. One of his colleages, Larry Lessig, who taught me Contracts when I was at U of C Law School in the mid-90s, is perhaps the smartest professor I ever encountered in my life -- and he recently endorsed Obama and attested to his brilliance). And, if anybody needed further proof of Obama's ability to inspiire, they need only look to Iowa.
But Obama does not fall neatly into the scholar/gentleman group either. He inspires, yes, but he does not take on the mantle. He remains visibly uncomfortable with the megalomaniacal side of running for President -- see my discussion of his Christmas video. And last night, flush with victory, he spoke to the crowd convincingly of the "movement" they had created together, and not his own path to the White House. Like Lincoln, he seems to draw inspiration from inside, from his own core values and his own visions for the future, and does not require the crowd's roar of approval. (Though, like Lincoln, he appears to thrive on connecting to people in all of their particularity -- again and again he writes of individuals and their influence on him in his memoir of growing up, Dreams From my Father.)
So what is this new pole, this third pole, of manhood which Obama represents?
I would argue that we see in him a model of how to be a strong person in the Information Age. We know now that our world is too large, too full of talent, for any one person to stand heroically above everyone else. We know that if anyone appears to, it is the result of a brilliant marketing strategy more than anything else. We know now that there are Abraham Lincolns and Elizabeth I's everywhere, in small villages in China and far-away cities in Estonia. We see them represented in film; on TV; in throw-away news stories or profiles; in internet vidoes; and when we travel.
So strength is not about fame or worldly success. Nor is it about brute force. In this new era, where the world has both shrunk and expanded, strength is about composure and self-knowledge. This is the only way to navigate the barrage of data in the Information Age; this is the only way to weave together the multiple identities needed in every one person these days (each of us juggles them: world-citizen, American-citizen, perhaps parent, worker, athlete, intellectual seeker, spiritual seeker, pragmatist, consumer of culture, creator of culture, friend, leader, follower, sometimes mentor, sometimes student).
Barack Obama is possibly the next President of the United States. He is also, already, an admirable person.
So the candidates on both sides have released their "Christmas" videos (I say "Christmas," because it is more accurate, although some campaigns hedge and call them "Seasonal" or "Holiday" videos).
Twinkling lights, bright sweaters, warm smiles, knitted stockings and, whenever possible, adorable children, are all featured, as you might expect.
There's been a lot of chatter in the blogs about Huckabee's assertion that "what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ," or Barack and Michelle Obama's inclusion of their girls in the fireside scene, or Hillary Clinton's assortment of policy proposals for the American people...
But let's get away from the politics for a moment. I think it's high time for a critique of these videos, not for their content, but for their use of the medium.
As a filmmaker myself, I consider myself obligated to bear down and watch these babies.
What are the aesthetics of these videos?
In other words, what message do they convey, behind the words. It's a visual medium; we have to remember that what these videos are actually doing is showing something.
Let's start with my favorite candidate, so we can get my own agenda out of the way:
Barack Obama
The first thing I noticed is the tense body language, despite the warm atmosphere.
I believe that this family is genuinely close, so I'm assuming that this is the 5th or 6th -- or 22nd! -- take, and they have grown increasingly tense as the minutes turned to an hour. I've seen it happen.
Perhaps technical issues (sound, lighting, framing) dragged the taping out. Perhaps the girls got restless, or had an argument about who got to sit on their dad's lap.
Whatever the facts, the result is that Michelle and Barack talk in a friendly, but curiously exacting way. Listen to the way Michelle's voice bounces rhythmically with the words of the opening: "We'd-like-to-take-a-moment to thank YOU and your FAMILY for the WARMTH and friendship that you've shown ouuurs." That sounds like someone who has grown weary of saying the same thing.
One visual element also immediately stands out to me: those spooky shadows of stockings on the wall above the fireplace. They are definitely intentional -- I would guess to convey the warmth of candlelight, and to add some texture to the background. But they hang behind this family in such a way as to evoke the aesthetics of film noir. Touch of Evil and Double Indemnity are usually not the best sources of inspiration for campaign videos
The books on the table in front of them suggest upper middle-class coffee table art books -- signaling a home of broad intellectual curiosity. The Christmas tree is discreet -- and notably designed instead of ad hoc (the red and amber theme stands out).
This is a house well under control. No holiday madness here.
As for Obama, he speaks in the same overly exacting way that Michelle does. Worse, it looks as if he gestures too closely to his daughter Malia's face a few times. I know it is an optical illusion (when zoomed in -- which creates a nice tight focus on the subjects with a blurry background -- the distance between objects can seem shorter than it really is), and I know that Obama often gestures this way to make a point, but it made me nervous the first time I watched it.
Then there's the telling moment. The parents have finished speaking and it's time for the girls to add their "Merry Christmas" and "Happy holidays." Watch how Barack and Michelle anticipate the girls' lines -- after all, it is hard not to after multiple takes. They both turn sharply just before their daughters speak. By doing this, they confirm for us -- it hits our subconscious, the eyes miss nothing -- that these are canned lines. It does, however avoid what would be worse: if the parents feigned surprise when their daughters spoke.
The overall effect of the video is actually a grudging one, which is -- and here, perhaps, my agenda is showing -- what I think makes it work. I get the sense, watching this video, that the Obamas are not at all comfortable with the megalomaniacal charm required to pull of a warm Christmas message to the entire nation. A tension fills the air, and it is the tension of a real family being asked -- for political purposes -- to do something patently ridiculous: wish 300 million Americans Merry Christmas.
Okay, let's turn to a Republican:
Rudy Giuliani
Like the Obamas, he sits in front of a Christmas tree. But -- it leaps out at you -- where is his family? Of course we know the answer to that question (reminding voters of Judith -- his divorce, their affair, the puppies -- is not helpful, and his kids are, well, a little distant, shall we say).
Instead of surrounding himself with progeny, Rudy dons a red sweater vest and a red tie. With his glasses and this combo he comes off looking like your friendly neighborhood pharmacist, all decked out for the holidays. It's actually quite winsome. And he can refill your Lipitor prescription if you need that too!
When he says he may get a fruitcake for America, someone off-camera questions him: "A fruitcake?" And Giuliani leans forward with his peculiar, aggressive charisma to someone whom we never see. This is a very post-modern move -- breaking the frame of the film. He can thank Goddard and the French New Wave (although I don't think that would be to his advantage in South Carolina). The effect is funny -- and surprising.
Interestingly, Giuliani is often called "insane," or some other nutty confection, by his critics. And the video of him in drag, kissing Donald Trump, is, one would guess, a political liability. So this mention of wanting to get America a "fruitcake" is a good double-fake move. If he were really a fruitcake he wouldn't be so comfortable talking about them.
The only false note is the Hillaryesque laugh, apropo of nothing, at the end when he says "Happy Holidays."
Giuliani has another ad too, with Santa laughing at his wish that the candidates all just get along. Rudy's wearing the same red and white sweater vest. This video suggests visually that he may be working for Santa Clause -- or at least on the same team. You can watch it here.
Okay, let's go to Hillary Clinton:
Immediately you notice the much-ballyhooed "professionalism" of the Clinton campaign. The video is edited snappily to the music soundtrack. The images -- close-ups of wrapping, cutting with scissors, etc. -- are framed tightly, which is the current standard for Hollywood shot selection. The lighting has that big budget studio gloss to it -- warm and muted all at once, as if this video is an outtake from, oh I don't know, Seabiscuit. The sound design is detailed (listen for that crinkling sound as the cards are placed under the bows -- all added in post). We see a tilt on "Universal Health Care," a pan on "Alternative Energy," a rack focus on "Bring the Troops Home."
And then the music pauses on the reveal of Hillary herself. The room is light...
INT. LIVING ROOM -- DAY
A woman sits comfortably on a couch, wrapping presents.
This scene, complete with throw pillows, captures those private, unnoteworthy moments that women share, taking care of the wrapping of presents, completing a project, preparing something wonderful for the family. The point is that Hillary seems to be enjoying it. Message: she is one of us.
Only there is a slight scratch in the record, so to speak. It comes just at the end. As Hillary exclaims, "Oh!" we are to understand that she has just located the present which matches the card "Universal Pre-K" -- good so far. But then she commits a beginner's acting mistake. She repeats the exclamation as she grabs the present: "Ah!" It rings false. We know that she already had her discovery moment. So what is this second "ah"?
Just like the entire Hillary Clinton for President campaign, this second "ah" suggests that Hillary knew where she was going all along. The double discovery shows that there never was a discovery. Everything has been orchestrated to reveal "discoveries" to us -- the voters -- when they are useful. Hillary is even prepared to experience those discoveries a second or third time (e.g. President Bush cannot be trusted!) when this may score additional political points.
And please, someone in the Clinton video production unit tell me why they froze that awkward frame at the end, with her smile half open, and zoomed in slowly, as she says, "I approve this message." It looks as if she has been caught red-handed, and we have a photograph to show it.
Onward to the Repubicans!
Mike Huckabee:
A red sweater, a white collar. Like Giuliani, Huckabee apparently works with Santa.
Otherwise, it couldn't be more different. There is no French New Wave or cinema of alienation here. The borders are not porous. There is just a straightforward point made: what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Jesus -- oh, and that you can count on Mike Huckabee to say that without apologies or unease of any kind.
Huckabee does everything that the Obamas resisted. He turns on the charm, the eyebrow-lifting, shoulder-shrugging charm of the best kind of salesman, the kind that means it, as he wishes an entire nation to have a "magnificent" Christmas.
Yes, yes, and there is a giant white cross over his right shoulder. Your point?
This video has all the simplicity and folksy charm of the best propaganda. It knows what it is selling (just as its subject does) and it goes about selling it. Its best analog is an Ipod ad on TV -- you always see the iPod up front and center, and there's always music playing on it. Well for Huckabee, Christianity is his music, and bass-player that he is, he knows how to keep a tune.
What about John Edwards:
We see the same Christmas tree hovering over the right shoulder. But this time the candidate is in a black suit, a white shirt, and a dark tie. Sober, unflashy, dedicated to the cause.
The implication of this dress code is that Edwards will be working for you, even during the holidays. He's that dedicated.
The music is unremarkable: a gathering-moment piano piece. But it does raise the stakes emotionally. It seems to be building to something. And Edwards talks directly to us, as Huckabee did. He means it.
There's the problem of his stuffed-up nose, adding a nasally quality to his voice. But otherwise we focus on him and him alone for the duration of the video.
The background does not suggest anything fancy at all. The tree is nondescript, the wood-framed picture on the wall, the wood paneling -- everything suggests a middle-class living room, or even a modest hotel room.
I think this is a strong video. It highlights Edwards' most endearing trait -- his commitment to making things better. Edwards' appeal is emotional (unlike Obama's, which like JFK's is more cerebral). And this ad does all the right things to create a sense of stirring emotion, held back only by the sobriety required to get the job done.
Back to the Republican side:
Mitt Romney
Okay, this is not technically a Christmas video like the others. This is a video of Mitt Romney and his family sledding together. It was posted by the campaign on December 17 -- so it must have been last weekend?
It's a relief to see a video that looks as if it documents a real-life event. Of course it is partly staged for the camera operator, but you do get the sense that there did take place an actual afternoon of sledding at some undisclosed location, with actual members of the Romney family (and their dogs) in attendance.
The video has a documentary feel, but like all good documentaries it tells a story. The story is that Mitt is a man who is different from his sons. They may be more self-aware and willing to open up to strangers (two of them admit to being "lazy"; another says he is "in awe" of his dad). They may be more socially at ease (we see them lounging on the couch without a clear mandate; Mitt is conspicuously absent).
But they never forget that he is their hero.
He is a tireless worker (we see him shoveling snow). He is caring (he reassures a youngster -- his son? -- that he will "do his best" not to let him "hit the pole"). He is frugal (he prefers the gloves from last year with duct tape holding them together). He hates waste of any kind ("Go leave the water running and see how quickly that will last," comments one of his boys).
The story it tells is that of Mitt overcoming whatever obstacles his family meets (snow, poles, failing gear, running faucets). He may not be the most accessible guy, but it is only because he is so busy doing stuff. If you knew him like we know him, he would be your hero too.
It's effective. I wish more political ads took this raw-footage, shooting from the hip documentary form. The distortion is still there, but it's in the editing not the performance of the candidate -- you get glimpses of the real person behind the mask.
Finally, the only other viable candidate in the race:
John McCain
A prisoner of war story. A black and white photo of McCain as a young man. The older McCain's calm voice recounting it. He tells a heartwarming story of a guard easing his misery. And then the image:
A cross drawn in the ground with a stick.
This video has the starkness of a documentary, but the iconographic power of a religious story. It matches Huckabee's white, glowing, "coincidental" cross (formed by the sections of a bookcase) with a genuine, intentional cross, infused with meaning and history.
For my part, I think it is a powerful rejoinder to Huckabee. But the lasting impression of the video is not its image of the cross. The lasting impression is the one left by the black and white images and the unaffected tone in McCain's voice: suffering, hard-earned wisdom, sadness, quiet resolve. Those may be important and moving aspects of his experience, but I don't think they draw votes.
The McCain ad is a Christmas video done in the Ken Burns' style -- elegiac and cold.
*
Well, that completes my round-up critique of the candidates' videos. In then end I would rank them in two ways. Once for my personal preference:
1. Romney's "cinema verité documentary" style.
2. McCain's "Ken Burns' elegiac" style
3. Edwards' "I'm out here working for you" direct appeal
4. Obama's "I-will-sit-for-this-but-this-kind-of-self-aggrandizement-is-forced" style
5. Giuliani's "French New Wave Santa sidekick comedy" style
6. Hillary's Hollywood big-studio style
7. Huckabee's "direct propagandistic" style
Like most people, I try not to think of world history in terms of a timeline of heroes: Pericles, Jesus, Caesar, Elizabeth I, Washington, Napoleon, Lincoln, Lenin, Churchill, etc.
The Great Man Theory of History is not only foolish (history is more complicated than that); it is also insidious. If you believe that change results when a given "change agent" (Bill's term for Hillary the other day) delivers it to the people, as Prometheus did with fire, then you are likely to take a wait-and-see approach to your own responsibilities.
History is about what we collectively make it. It is an algorithm so complex, a code with so many inputs, that no one individual -- whatever his or her particular eloquence, character, or even genius -- can hope to dictate (or predict) where it is going next. (This may be news to Wolfowitz, Perle and others in the neoconservative cabal that led us into the Iraq War with a plan to reshape the Middle East.)
Having said that, I will confess: I have a hero. I even have a bust of him in my house.
His name is Abraham Lincoln.
Bear with me. I'm getting to my endorsement. This is my endorsement. Read on, and you will see why.
Lincoln has been my hero since about the winter of 1995, when I finished the first of the many biographies, monographs, articles, studies, and picture books about him that I have accumulated on my bookshelves since then.
He is not my hero because he "saved the Union" (though for that we should be eternally grateful, to be sure). He is not my hero because he "freed the slaves," since that victory was achieved by countless people, both enslaved and not, and could never be attributed to one man (and anyway, Frederick Douglass and many historians since have some mixed things to say about how long it took for Lincoln to make his important contribution to that effort).
Lincoln is my hero because of the way he thinks.
Unlike any other person I have encountered in person or in words (with the possible exception of Hamlet!), Lincoln had a gift for sharing the process by which he arrived at a decision. In his legal briefs when he was a country lawyer (as he made the rounds of the Illinois circuit courts on his horse, "Old Ben," and slept in taverns sometimes three to a bed with other litigators), in his speeches and letters as a rising politician, and of course in his major addresses, again and again Lincoln reveals the route by which his mind traveled to its resting place. He brings us along on a journey.
This is the language of democracy. In all of these examples, and in almost everything he wrote or ever said, Lincoln translated his private concerns, his anguish, his fervent hopes, his efforts to find light where there was little, even his defeats, into terms which other people could understand.
He did not just come up with snappy ways of saying things. Many people -- including his opponents, like Stephen Douglas or George McClellan -- could do that. He brought people along, increased their capacity to think, and thereby increased their capacity to feel.
Lincoln knew a secret of human nature that is so often forgotten: our emotions, our passions, are driven by our thoughts (and vice versa, of course, as the philosopher, David Hume, pointed out); they cannot be disentangled. Where some would try to work on our passions to redirect our reason, Lincoln worked on people's reason to redirect their passions.
*
Today we have a candidate running for President of the United States who reminds me of my hero Abraham Lincoln.
148 years after Lincoln ran for the same office, Barack Obama, also from Illinois, comports himself in a similar manner.
Like Lincoln, he is tough and shrewd about what is required to win elections. But he speaks to voters in a transparent way about what he is thinking and why he is thinking it.
All through the summer and fall, in debates and public appearances, Obama answered questions by explaining his process. He avoids soundbites -- well, except to retaliate against an attack some kind or a gambit by an opponent.
He avoids snap judgments. When he makes up his mind -- like Lincoln -- he is resolute (as Lincoln famously wrote General Ulysses Grant in a telegram: "Hang on with a bull-dog gripe, and chew & choke, as much as possible"). But he is not afraid to show that getting to this point of resolution takes a willingness to ponder, reflect, even hold contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time -- F. Scott Fitzgerald's test of a first-rate mind.
Listen to Obama, and you will hear the language of democracy. It is the language of someone who considers you an equal and trusts that you will follow his argument even if you do not agree with it.
As I say, the Great Man Theory of History is bunk. But sometimes a great person comes along, exactly at the right time, to nudge history, just a little, in a positive direction.
I believe that person is Barack Obama.
For my other posts on the 2008 Presidential election, including not a few on Obama, please click here.
As an ambitious 14-year-old in 1983, I was very concerned not to do anything which might sabotage my chances to become President of the United States.
After all, my plan had me first learning Russian, then advancing smoothly in my political career (I imagined that there would be an obvious ladder of sorts, upon which I would climb, rung by rung, to the top). Then, finally, I would sit down to negotiate a nuclear freeze with a grandfatherly Mikhail Gorbachev.
I knew we could work things out, the old Gorb and I.
This ambition peaked my senior year, in 1987, when I did actually go on the first-ever U.S.-Soviet high school exchange, spending 5 weeks in the snow-bound town of Akedemgorodok, Siberia. The LA Times and other papers interviewed me; I was on my way.
I returned to my high school that spring just in time to confront Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush when he came to speak to our student body. "No more bloodshed in Nicaragua, Mr. Vice President!" I urged him as I shook his hand. He asked me to walk with him. I imagined the crowd of students and teachers around us growing hushed as we conferred. He explained to me how the Sandanistas had a "Marxist-Leninist slogan on their coins," how we need to resist this ideology wherever we find it... I said, "But what about self-determination for the Nicaraguan people?" He smiled and rested his hand on my shoulder. Then he said, "Nice talking to you," and his security guards ushered me back to the other side of the rope fence.
We hadn't been able to work it out. I felt my political career slipping away.
But I digress.
As I was saying, I considered myself on a track to the Presidency. I was concerned, though, about one thing: my drug use.
I smoked marijuana occasionally with my friends. That was it. But it was enough, at that time, to wipe out my chances for national office.
So when I smoked, I always felt a pang of concern -- not guilt, concern. What of my future? Whiter my dreams? What if someone takes a picture of us with this weird-looking bong?
The truth is that I was never destined for politics. I appreciate too much the impulse to follow thoughts and experiences to their limits. (See my previous post on "Weirdness and Politics" on that.) And I never could find that ladder.
But a young man named Barack Obama shared the same dream of the White House, apparently even earlier than I did.
And he too, as he recounts in Dreams From My Father, took the occasional hit from a bong. He even tried cocaine. And who knows what else. Here's what Obama writes:
"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed... something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory."
So he confesses that he used drugs. To me that is fine. He didn't endanger himself greatly, or harm anyone else. He used them to escape, and probably to have some laughs.
What is impressive to me is the way that he is willing to talk about it. I know that he must have fretted about the consequences of his drug use when he did it -- after all, he had ambitions even then. But by the time he had grown into a man, when he published his first book at 34, he had claimed it as part of his story, part of his personal growth.
That's the kind of honesty we need on the issue of drugs. That's the kind of honesty we need period.
So when Hillary Clinton's campaign draws attention to Obama's drug use, I believe that they draw attention to his strength. And they put her campaign in an unattractive light.
Mitt Romney, whose succesful career with Bain Capital essentially thrived on his talent as a salesman, aims above all to please.
When asked about interrogating terror suspects in a Fox debate in May he answered, outside of any considerations of practical need, that he would "double Guantanamo." When asked about immigration in the more recent CNN/YouTube debate he insisted that, unlike Giuliani, he would not condone any exceptions for illegals to report crimes or go to school -- lest we create sanctuary cities, sanctuary states, a sanctuary nation. He also claimed on that evening that he believes every word of the Bible -- "Yes!" he said to Anderson Cooper's direct question -- despite the position of his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which holds that it contains a multitude of errors, corrected in the Book of Mormon.
When Romney goes there, he goes there. Until he goes somewhere else. What we have here is a candidate whose strength is in his cheerful accomodation to almost anyone -- any potential customers, in the broad sense of the word -- who will advance his interests.
He is the "weatherman" that Bob Dylan sings about in Subterranean Homesick Blues (the one that "you don't need...to know which way the wind blows").
That's what is perhaps most troubling about Romney's speech yesterday. He is merely the weatherman, but the actual weather is coming our way.
I first noticed the barometer dropping when the Democratic candidates sat for a "Forum on Faith" in June and answered questions from Soledad O'Brien about their private religious views. Hillary spoke of "prayer warriors." Hmm. I didn't know about prayer warriors. Edwards insisted that "we are all sinners."
Oh, I thought. Thank you. Glad to be informed of that.
Then I thought I might have felt a first raindrop fall when, in a September debate on MSNBC, the Democratic candidates were asked their favorite Bible verse. No one flinched at the inappropriateness of this question, even though, to my ears at least, it verged on religious test for office. Think about it: Could you, if so inclined, actually decline to answer this? Would Tim Russert simply nod and go to the next candidate? Of course not. The next question would have been: Why? Are you not a believer? And that's getting pretty close to a religious test.
Obama helpfully mentioned Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. ("Love your enemy," I guess -- he's still rubbing it in that he will meet directly with the heads of state of North Korea and Iran where Hillary would dither).
Now I know it is not news that the candidates for President, on both sides, have religious convictions. But what is news is that their convictions are being foregrounded in their campaigns. Would it be such a stretch, even in this campaign, to imagine a candidate sporting a "cross pin" or a "crucifix pin" on the opposite side of his coat from the obligatory post 9-11 American flag pin? (You can imagine the... shall we say, disapprobrium, that would follow on Fox News if Obama, or any other candidate, suggested that he need not wear a cross on his lapel to prove his faith. Go at 'em Sean Hannity.)
The climate is indeed a-changing, and in more ways that one. Essentially what we saw yesterday was Romney announcing the weather -- a gathering storm of faith -- on TV.
And Huckabee? Huckabee is the weather.
Yesterday he claimed that his rise in the polls is the direct result of "thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much." (Watch the video here.) Their prayers -- and God's resulting attentiveness to caucus-goers in Iowa -- are lifting Huckabee up, in what can only be described as a sacred updraft, to the highest seat of finite power in this world.
You can read Romney's full speech here or watch it on his website here.
As an atheist and a father of three young children, the speech Mitt Romney delivered at the George H. W. Bush presidential library today shocked me to my core.
If this is the drift of this country, towards a politics that explicitly excludes my standing as a worthy citizen because I do not believe in one of the major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism or Islam, then I seriously do not know what I will do to sustain for myself, and instill in my children, the strong sense of belonging that I currently feel as a citizen.
I cherish my country; I cherish our history, our laws and our principles, including the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, guaranteeing freedom of speech and the separation of church and state. As a non-believer who believes that it is this life which matters, my sense of morality is inextricably tied to my sense of belonging as a citizen.
Indeed, this sense of belonging runs deep. I consider myself to be unavoidably emeshed in the concerns of my fellow-citizens (as well as, more broadly, the concerns of all of the people on this planet). That is my challenge and my inspiration as I try to live my life well, and guide my children to do the same.
In the speech he gave today, Romney threatened to take part of my core identity away from me.
This is a direct quotation from his speech:
"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."
Although he addressed the speech to all Americans, he was not talking to me when he gave this speech. Romney made it perfectly clear that as President he would represent non-believers like me with reluctance at best. We do not fit into his idea of Americans; we are an after-thought.
If the two political parties in this country are headed towards the conclusion that, as an atheist, I am not a true American, then my family and I will, in effect, be sent into political exile. For me (as for the ancient Athenians, who also valued political partipation as a part of the core of a person's identity), exile robs life of its meaning.
Romney, unwittingly or not, for reasons of political expediency or not, threatened me with political -- and therefore, for a non-believer, spiritual -- exile in his speech today.
My first reaction, upon reading the words of the speech, was to feel my heart beating faster, as if I was facing a threat to the safety of my family. It's strange how our bodys' survival instincts, buried deep in our brains, warn us before we even have time to reflect on why.
My second reaction is to redouble my commitment to working for a future where, some day, Romney's view on the central place of religion in American life is considered a relic of a time when a great country, founded on the basis of equal consideration for all people, was held in thrall to a destructive, exclusionary myth called "faith."
He didn't care about the build-up, the back story. He didn't care to hear our justifications or even our apologies. He just wanted it to end.
My sister and I were fighting. It was noisy. It was interfering with his peace.
"Hands!" he would say sharply, cutting through whatever high-stakes argument one of us was making, by way of words or actions, at the moment.
We both knew what "Hands!" meant. It meant we had to drop what we were doing, and I mean immediately -- mid-punch, mid-kick, even mid-obscenity. We had to walk over to wherever he stood and stand side by side. We had to raise our hands, palms down, next to each other. At which point he would slap the tops of our hands, hard.
If you pulled your hand away, you had to do it again, and again, until you kept it there.
On its own terms, Dad's approach to discipline worked: that single word "Hands!" generally ended our fights. And the message was unmistakable: He was the grown-up and we were the kids.
Mom was different. She would pull us apart, and even as she did so, she would get involved. She would take turns listening to our grievances. She would patiently wait out our tears, our tantrums, and our tales of unmatched woe, cruelty and terrible misunderstanding. She would even sympathize with both sides.
Sometimes she did manage to pin the blame on one or the other of us. Usually, though, she found a way of reframing our fight to partially exonerate and partially blame each of us. Among her many gifts, she has an amazing ability to reframe almost anything and make it positive.
On the rare occasions when she hit her tolerance threshold, Mom would call for "Hands!" like Dad. When this happened, my sister and I would begin giggling even before extending our hands. We eagerly awaited the Kabuki dance of my mom trying to act severe but then slapping our hands in the most painless and half-hearted manner you could ever imagine. Not only did she tend to favor whoever she considered the victim of that particular altercation, but even if she had determined that you had started it, the slap you got to your hand was something you might have paid a professional to do to you at a luxury spa.
The bottom line was that we were treated as equals. She was a referee, and we were the players, but we were all playing the same game.
What do I think of these two very different understandings of discipline in retrospect? How will I respond as my children enter the fighting years?
I think both are useful.
So far, I find myself favoring my mom's approach. I want to know what happened. I try to see it from both boys' perspective (Adeline, at 7 months, gets more furious with her rattle than her brothers, so I can't include her in this).
I hope never to resort to hand-slapping, but if I ever do then I can imagine that, like for my mom, my ambivalence about it will be the cause of much hilarity.
I think that my mom's approach to discipline, which is more egalitarian and breaks down the boundaries between parents and children, establishes a comfort-level with talking things out which will bode well for a lifetime of close relationships.
At the same time, I find myself aware that there is a benefit in also establishing a clear boundary between the childrens' needs and the grown-ups' needs in our home. In this respect I find myself drawn to my Dad's approach with surprising frequency -- even if I haven't resorted to a "Hands!" yet.
I sometimes hear myself empasizing to George (who is 3 and 1/2) that he should do what I say because I have reasons for what I say. Grown-up reasons. And sometimes, when he is fighting with Cole (who is 2) I tell him that, frankly, I don't always need to enumerate all of my reasons to them; that can come later... Maybe the reason is only that their mother and I are at wit's end after a long morning of demands, whining, mishaps, spills, and squabbles. That's reason enough!
I think it is healthy for children to know that their parents listen to them. We can even change our minds and admit that we were wrong, if that is the case. But it is also healthy for kids to know that their mom and dad are the ones who get to call the shots. At least this will set them up to assume their own authority when they raise their own children. It will feel familiar to them.
*
What's the political angle into all of this?
An article in this week's New Republic, by Jeffrey Rosen, reviews Supreme Court Clarence Thomas' new memoir, My Grandfather's Son, and a new biography on him as well. Rosen points out that over the past 20 years or so politicians have been reeling with the ever more egalitarian drift of our culture. The larger-than-life profile of the leader has disintegrated in our celebrity culture. Now we are all just doing "our thing." You may be a Movie Star, you may be a Senator; I have chosen another path... So what have you done for me lately?
In this way of looking at it, as a culture we seem to have abandoned any pretense of the "grown-up world." We are all just kids now ("Do you wear boxers or briefs, Mr. Clinton?").
Rosen's point is that Thomas has ruined his stature as a Supreme Court Justice by publishing his self-pitying, self-congratulatory memoir. It's like a parent telling his kids why he's so great. It has brought him down to size.
The article made me think: Which national politicians out there still retain a quality of being "grown-ups" -- standing slightly apart, as parents stand apart from the boundary-less disputes of their children? Perhaps McCain. Perhaps Hillary. Perhaps Obama. Perhaps Dodd. Certainly Russ Feingold... Certainly Jim Webb... I can't think of any others. The rest stoop too low or reveal too much.
To take it a step further: Who are the politicians who combine this stand-apart, "grown-up world" quality (my dad's approach, good for establishing priorities) with a sense of equal-standing, of genuine interest in the views of the voters (my mom's approach, good for establishing trust)? Who brings both understandings to his or her commitment to public service?
You've guessed my answer. It seems to be the theme this week.
No, it's not the question of whether it is useful to say, as Obama does (but Hillary pointedly does not), that as President he would meet with the heads of enemy states, such as North Korea and Iran, without setting pre-conditions.
I am talking about a much deeper difference than these, although these (and almost every policy difference between them, however seemingly unrelated and trivial) are in fact expressions of it.
The deep difference is this: Hillary is about ends; Obama is about means.
If Democrats and informed citizens of all kinds believe that the political scene in Washington D.C. is too corrupt, too complex, and too compromised for them to play a significant role in it, then naturally they will gravitate towards a champion, a seasoned warrior, someone they can send in fully armed, on their behalf. They will choose someone whom they can send into a dark, dusty hole, with confidence that after the sounds of clanking armor and the anguished screams subside, she will step back into the light to declare, say... the passing into law of a modest reform guaranteeing that private health insurance companies will, beginning in 2012, not preclude applicants based on pre-existing conditions.
Hillary is about getting it done (just don't tell us how you did it!).
If, on the other hand, Democrats and informed citizens across this land believe that the political scene in Washington D.C. still presents opportunities for change, that "we the people" may still have a significant part to play in that miraculous movement from inchoate ideas to collective agreements backed up by force (what we commonly refer to as law-making), then they will want someone to represent them, someone to lead them en masse, someone to articulate and explain their positions, say... that, despite the objections of U.S. corporations doing business in China, existing law already authorizes inspections on the ground at Chinese factories to ensure that they are meeting environmental and labor standards.
Obama is about outmaneuvering his adversaries to meet them on his own terms (just don't disappoint us!).
The real choice between Hillary and Obama depends on how bad you think things are.
Do you see politics as a contest for hardened warriors, an endurance event, a blood-bath? Is it now, and will it forever be, a dark and dusty hole?
Or do you see politics as a Town Hall, a calling, a colloquy of concerned citizens? In other words, as we go into battle, can we talk about it?
The contrasting labels thrown at Hillary and Obama -- "experience" vs. "change," "realistic" vs. "naive," "the toughest one on the stage" vs. "the audacity of hope" -- all point to this deep difference. It lies under every utterance of these two highly self-aware people.
So where do you stand? Have you given up yet?
If so, then Hillary is "your girl," as she said in one debate -- but not just any girl, she's your Amazonian warrior, having chopped off one of her breasts to handle the bow more easily, aching to do battle in your name.
Or do you still believe? Then Obama is "your guy," as he responded in the next debate -- your guy, dressed in a simple suit, a man of the people, walking at your side as you enter the chamber.
Check out his steep incline in the latest poll from Iowa.
And then there's this!
I guess when everything is humming, singing in Hindi is second nature.
So what lies ahead?
Four words: Iowa and New Hampshire.
Five words: Just one month to go.
If he gets past Hillary in these two states, he will be the next President of the United States.
If the country has a chance to get to know him during the general election, he has already won.
Imagine his serious, graceful, measured style in contrast to the wide-eyed, goofy style of Huckabee, or the arrogant world-weariness of McCain, or the downright oddness of Giuliani, or the vacuous optimism of Romney... In the end, I trust that a majority of voters would overcome whatever hang-ups they might have, and vote for Obama.
What a new day it would be for this country -- and for humanity! A community activist and Constitutional law professor as the leader of the free world. Someone who is dedicated to telling the truth, above all. Someone who knows that right and wrong are terribly important and also terribly difficult propositions.
My 3-year-old George went to school today saying that he was "the Grinch."
We watched the Dr. Seuss animated movie a few nights ago. He seemed impressed with the way the Grinch had discovered love and compassion -- and grown his heart by 3 sizes -- at the end. He particularly liked that the Grinch had joined the Whos of Whoville for their Christmas meal.
But by this morning, George's thoughts at turned to the first incarnation of the Grinch, the one with a heart the size of a walnut, the one who "keeps swinging his dog around," as George fondly remembers it.
The first clue that George had gone retrograde on the Grinch was when he was putting his socks on. From the hallway where I was wrestling with his brother Cole, I heard a low, gravely voice coming from George's room: "You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch!" came the hair-raising refrain.
By the time we were loading him into the car, he announced with a roar that he was indeed the Grinch. He raised his hands in the air and wiggled his fingers, roaring again in case we missed it the first time. I said that the Grinch should be the "nice" Grinch at school. He gave me a look as if to say I was a fool...
"I am the mean Grinch!"
It was the way he smiled when he said it that got me imagining the trouble he may cause at recess today.
Which brings me to my subject: the pleasure of power.
We all know the thrill that comes with overpowering someone. We get it when we win a game of skill, say a video game or a ping-pong match, or a sport. We get it when we argue a point forcefully, winning an argument outright (rare, but don't you remember those few times when it happened?). There is something intensely pleasurable about the demonstration of power.
I remember after 9-11 seeing a newsclip of a burly man on the Brooklyn Bridge shouting out, "The people in the Middle East better watch out, we're coming to get you!" The newscaster said something anodyne about the strong feelings of the people of New York. But sitting on my couch all the way out in California, I felt the same feelings of rage, and a desire to overpower anyone who could have done what they did.
I believe that this recalibration of my own sense of the world, this tweaking the dials to allow more interest in the use of power, affected my outlook in the two years leading up to the Iraq War. Even knowing that the French were probably right, that we should give the inspectors more time to find the WMDs, it still pissed me off that they wouldn't back up Colin Powell in the U.N. with the second resolution.
I mean it pissed me off disproportionately. I didn't go so far as to refuse French fries, as did some, but I realize now that as a result of 9-11 I viewed events in the world for some time through a lens of power.
But this urge is ultimately infantile, not to mention self-defeating. We know that as parents we need to teach our children to reign it in. We rely on their teachers and other adults to help in this process. Schoolyard bullies (or "mean Grinches") are universally disliked.
So when we see it in a grown adult, seeming without shame or discomfort, it makes us uneasy.
Watch this clip of Mayor Giuliani speaking at a Town Hall meeting in June of 2001.
Consider. Even though the man asking the question may be overreaching, watch how quickly Giuliani falls into calling him and his co-workers (and tax-paying residents of New York City) "idiots" and "morons". It appears to be a comfortable place for him to rest.
Andrew Sullivan, who writes a wonderful blog (which I must confess I am addicted to for its combination of serious thinking and daily links covering the breadth of our culture), has written the cover story for the Atlantic Monthly this week. In it, he makes the case for Obama.
As readers of this blog know, I am an Obama supporter as well. I even drew lessons from his campaign style on how to raise my kids without lying to them (see "Obama's Example for Parents: It's better to Hedge than to Lie"). When you take a Presidential candidate's style to be a lesson for your kids, and you're not Chris Matthews on a book tour, that is serious support.
But I can't agree with Sullivan's premise that Obama's main appeal is that he transcends the resentments and divisions of the Boomer generation. I think that is wishful thinking, a product of a desire on Sullivan's part to escape history, a classic Romantic, indeed "Transcendentalist" urge.
The truth about Obama is that he is a symbol of the victory of one side. Obama's candidacy is the Iwo Jima, if you will, for the side of the Boomer war that has, after more than four decades, "overcome some day": the hippies, the war protesters, the drop-outs, the integrationists, those hairy, messy, starry-eyed kids who moved to San Francisco with flowers in their hair (well, the ones that got past the drugs).
Why do I say this? Because his validity as a candidate shows that Americans now see racial integration as a given; they see kindness as part of the male identity; they see religion as something to discuss with reference to the play of cultural traditions instead of the received, exclusive, timeless Word of God. Obama articulates what Sullivan calls a "conflicted and resilient identity," one that relies on his own power of narrative to weave it together. His identity is a journey, and in understanding it this way he marks himself as a product of the Boomer obsession with personal identity, an obsession labeled ennobling by those on one side, and narcissistic by those on the other.
"[This book] was a genuine display of internal doubt and conflict and sadness. And it reveals Obama as someone whose “complex fate,” to use Ralph Ellison’s term, is to be both believer and doubter, in a world where such complexity is as beleaguered as it is necessary."
Exactly. The side of the Boomer generation which supported Vietnam, which rejected the sexual revolution and the bra-burning, which detested the idea of America as a place of flag-burning, civil disobedience, ruptures in the social framework, in short, the side of the Boomer generation that is still behind Bush because, well, he's a "good man," that side does not believe in a world where "complexity is as beleagued as it is necessary." They believe in a world of clear rights and clear wrongs, God, country, and (generally speaking, white, heterosexual) family.
If Obama's candidacy means anything it means that those days are soon to be over. That's why I like it. Obama is visible history on the move, not its transcendence.
The great French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, who may have had more influence on the framers of our Constitution than any other one thinker, wrote famously of three basic kinds of government:
1. Despotism (rule by force)
2. Aristocracy (rule by the few), and
3. Republican Government (rule by the people).
He suggested that each of these forms of government has a principle which supports it and which must be active for it to thrive.
Despotisms, or dictatorships, operate on the principle of fear, with recourse to the use of physical coercion to get what they want.
Aristocracies, or monarchies, operate on the principle of honor, with status or rank being of paramount importance to their subjects.
Republics, or democracies, operate on the principle of virtue, with each citizen demonstrating (through voting or other forms of civic engagement such as forming a group of like-minded people) concern for the interests of his or her fellow-citizens.
These points made a strong impression on me when I first encountered them. It amazed me how Montesquieu was able to take a step back and study our systems of self-rule from the vantage-point of a scientist. (Alexis de Tocqueville is another Frenchman who followed in this approach.) In some chapters of his most influential book, The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu even discusses ways in which different types of soil or climate may determine which form of government that prevails in a given country.
When you read The Spirit of the Laws you can't help but ask how well the form of government prevalent in your own country is functioning.
He makes political science seem so clinical, as if we are merely examining the health of our respiratory system by listening to our breathing in a few standardized places. Just a regular check-up.
But when we perform this check-up on ourselves, we find there are some worrying wheezes and rumbles going on in there. This passage from The Spirit of the Laws particularly chilled me when I first read it back in 1994 (and it does even more today, seven years into the Bush administration's cronyism and ceaseless talk of "tax relief"):
"When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community. The objects of their desires are changed; what they were fond of before has become indifferent; they were free while under the restraint of laws, but they would fain now be free to act against law; and as each citizen is like a slave who has run away from his master, that which was a maxim of equity he calls rigour; that which was a rule of action he styles constraint; and to precaution he gives the name of fear. Frugality, and not the thirst of gain, now passes for avarice. Formerly the wealth of individuals constituted the public treasure; but now this has become the patrimony of private persons. The members of the commonwealth riot on the public spoils, and its strength is only the power of a few, and the licence of many."
Yikes. To think this was written some 260 years ago.
I bring up an 18th Century French Enlightenment philosopher now, partly for its own interest, but also because it strikes me as a useful way of reflecting on our approaches to parenting too.
Tolstoy may have opened Anna Karenina with his assertion that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." But the truth is that we have to look more closely at the structures of authority, the system of self-rule, adopted in each family, if we want to determine the particular ways it is happy or unhappy.
We don't have elections in my family, thank god. But I would like to think that the active principle supporting our family is virtue -- concern for one another. So I guess I would like to imagine that my own family has the form of a Republic.
My thought is that perhaps family values really do guide people in their politics, beyond the media's focus on the "hot-button" issues gay marriage, abortion, or sex education. Family values are actually based on deeper understandings within each family.
Those who live in a state of fear at home (with the threat of physical punishment) may vote more willingly for a strong executive, a big military build-up, a government which emphasizes security. Giuliani has postitioned himself as the star of this "father knows best" role. The columnist Jimmy Breslin described him as a "small man in search of a balcony," which says it all.
Those who live under extreme strictures of place and status at home ("because I said so!") may vote more willingly for a government run by oligarchs, see corporate influence as a boon, and embrace big tent parties. I would say that Clinton and Romney are vying for this role. Clinton with her obfuscations on the campaign trail, so as to preserve her lattitude once she is our Inevitable Leader, and Romney with his sense of giddy excitement about bringing big business into the center of American life.
Those who live in families which value the views of all members may be more willing to vote for those who emphasize these open, democratic (some would say "socialist") values in public life, in the form of progressive taxation, universal health care, public education, and absolute freedom of speech. I would say that Kucinich lives up to this role the best; though Obama, Edwards, Biden, Richardson, Dodd, and even McCain all make claims to it.
Anyway, I think it's useful to take Montesquieu's approach to look at our own families, and examine both the outward show of our family's interactions, as well as the principle which holds it together.
Every family would no doubt insist that love is what holds them together, but it is more interesting to take a more fine-grained approach and ask what motivates our most common, every-day interactions.
When a father takes it as granted that he "knows best," what does that teach that father's child about his or her role in the world at large?
Perhaps you watched the Democratic debate on MSNBC last night, and you heard many of the candidates talk at length about their foreign policy experience, the bills they wrote in Congress, their experience negotiating with dictators (if I hear Richardson talk once more about how he went "head to head" with Saddam I think my own head might explode), in short, all of the stuff they have done.
If you are anything like me, you felt... what's the word... glassy-eyed?
The strange and wonderful thing about democracy is that it is entirely forward-looking. Sure, we want to know the basics of where a person has been, but our vote goes to the person who we think will, from this point going forward, represent our views best.
You can't rest on laurels. Past performance is not relevant. I was watching for who they are now, not who they were or have been.
An experience I had as a dad last night, which happily coincided with the Democratic debate, brought this point to mind.
Just as the debate started, at 6 pm, you could find me outside on our front deck, with Cole and George, a large pumpkin, a sharp knife and a trash bag. As the sun set, I carved a goofy, toothy face into one side of the pumpkin and then scraped out the pumpkin pulp and seeds and transfered them to the trash bag. George was willing to reach in and grab handfuls of "mushy" pumpkin to help; Cole chose to abstain, responding to each of my offers that he reach in the pumpkin with a soft-spoken but definitive "no."
Then I had an idea. I asked George to go get one of his Batman shirts from upstairs. He brought it down. Carefully following the design on his shirt, I carved Batman's bat logo on the opposite side of the pumpkin.
George got so worked up that he was running circles by this point, screaming about how the "ghost Batman" would be coming to our house that night. Understanding but a few words of George's monologue, Cole nevertheless got worked up into a fever pitch himself. As I lit the candle inside the pumpkin, the two of them were spinning around like two Sufi mystics.
Cut to a half hour later. They are both now in pajamas, their teeth brushed, tucked in bed. They begin issuing various demands, each boy using his own variation of "Daaaaadddyy!" in a rising vocal pattern not unlike the rhesus monkeys of the Himalayas.
Cole wanted a "rock hug" on his chair. George wanted another story. Then when Cole was finally down, George started shouting for Daddy to show him the moon. We went out to see the moon. No moon (fog). At which point Cole woke up again... what with the noise... and needed another "rock hug." Then he insisted on making some unintelligible point about his bunny, to which he wanted me to respond appropriately. Then George wanted to read another book. Which request woke up Cole again.
My wife, downstairs, was doing the dishes and oblivious to all of this.
I tried to get stern. I pleaded with George not to wake up his brother again. I pointed at him in a vaguely threatening way, without any idea what the consequences of more noise would be except to plead with him some more. Now both were crying. I went to Cole again. George started shouting something about his night light, which was on as usual.
And that's when the thought came to me: But weren't they happy, these two little sons of mine, a half hour ago? Didn't I deserve some quiet, and a gentle "Goodnight, Daddy," now? Did I or did I not carve a fucking bat logo into the back of the pumpkin?
But I couldn't play that card. I couldn't make the technical point that the day was a good one, and Dad is tired because he's been attending to your needs for two hours straight, and Dad deserves a break.
They're only two and three. They're tired. They feel like fussing. And anyway, that was old news.
Past performance is not relevant. Being a Daddy is always now.
And like an elected office, it requires a permanent campaign, always looking forward to the new day.
One of the interesting things about politics is the way that, despite the constant, fervent effort of politicians to make sure it does not, life, in all of its weirdness, finds a way to rear its head.
Just think of Jefferson's Sally Hemmings scandal, JFK's tryst with Marlene Dietrich (now there's a creepy story), Nixon's White House tapes which revealed his pathological hatred of Jews, Nancy Reagan's astrological readings, Clinton's unusual use for a cigar, and most recently, Larry Craig's tap routine. Although they try to keep their bosses air-brushed, consultants and handlers can't keep the odd sexual proclivities and other rough-edges of personality down. You can't squelch life.
I had a dream once, during the height of the Clinton presidency (before the Lewinsky impeachment proceedings in his second term), in which I got to have a casual talk with the man himself. We were walking across a street somewhere, on a nondescript, sunny day, and I asked him if he ever experienced moments when he just wanted to throw his hands in the air and say, "Oh well, whatever!"
Considering the enormous responsibilities of the office, it seemed to me a natural human reaction to have -- one which you would then overcome and get back to work.
Well, in my dream Clinton just fixed me with a cold, steady look. He stopped walking, so as to make his point all the more forcefully. I felt a rush and stopped in my tracks to face him.
"No, I don't have that urge, Tom. Never. I always take my responsibilities seriously."
In the dream, I knew right away that we had hit against the limits of our communication as two very different people. He was a politician to his bones. It was impossible for him to admit human foibles, irrational moments, the possibility of the absurd. It would violate his deepest picture of himself as a public servant. Whereas I valued more than he did staying alert to the weirdness of our experiences -- and trying to understand that weirdness as best we can. My outlook emphasized inquiry; his, continuity.
Both outlooks are important. But it is interesting, I think, to reflect on which we value more, which we prioritize, for our children. Do we want our child to make outlandish gestures towards free inquiry? Or would we rather that our child gains the respect of his or her peers and authority figures for the ability to fit into social groups and, if challenging their norms, doing so in the accepted languages of those groups?
This distinction will be more obvious when my children are teenagers... Do I really want him to post that hilarious but obscene video he made with his friends on YouTube? But everything we do as parents even in these early years teaches which outlook we favor in our home.
As food for thought, I'll end by giving you two poems by politicians. Both poems were written before the politicians' careers took off. Both poems were written when they were still open to weirdness, as expressed in the personal imagery of their poems, the use of rhythm, meter and juxtaposition to open windows into aspects of life (regret, sadness, fury, disorientation) which as politicians they learned to edit out.
The first is from Lincoln, written in 1844:
My childhood's home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There's pleasure in it too.
O Memory! thou midway world
'Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise,
And, freed from all that's earthly vile,
Seem hallowed, pure, and bright,
Like scenes in some enchanted isle
All bathed in liquid light.
As dusky mountains please the eye
When twilight chases day;
As bugle-notes that, passing by,
In distance die away;
As leaving some grand waterfall,
We, lingering, list its roar--
So memory will hallow all
We've known, but know no more.
Near twenty years have passed away
Since here I bid farewell
To woods and fields, and scenes of play,
And playmate loved so well.
Where many were, but few remain
Of old familiar things;
But seeing them, to mind again
The lost and absent brings.
The friends I left that parting day,
How changed, as time has sped!
Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray,
And half of all are dead.
I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.
I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms,
And feel (companion of the dead)
I'm living in the tombs.
The second is from Barack Obama, from 1981:
Underground
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.
Telling the truth can be problematic. We all know that.
I propose that we take a personal example and a political example in turn, and see what they show us about the importance of having respect for the truth -- in life and in politics.
First the personal example:
My two-year-old, Cole, looks up at me, his face smeared with chocolate. His eyes fierce.
"'Nother cookie!"
I know what he wants. He wants another chocolate chip cookie, and dammit he shouldn't have had even the first one, because it is bedtime. And he's tired.
And now he is shouting for "'nother one," jumping up and down, pointing to the cupboard where he knows that, earlier in the day, we hid the tupperware containing the cookies meant for tomorrow's party.
Have you been there? Is this familiar? If so, then you may know what happens next.
I blurt out: "Cookies all gone!" It just comes out before I can check myself: "All gone!"
Cole glares at me silently for a moment. Then even louder than before: "'Nother cookie!"
"Cookies all gone!" I insist.
I meet his gaze, my eyes widening in that give-away, "Who me?" expression I always get when I'm bluffing. His eyes narrow into a suspicious squint.
And he gives up. He sinks to the floor, muttering about cookies. I scoop him up and head upstairs for pajamas, storytime, and bed.
But it sits wrong with me later. I lied to my child. I lied to Cole. He knew it. And he knew I knew it. It can never be made good, not ever... something is broken, lost.... (okay, I'm tired -- I get dramatic when I'm tired). I go to bed.
But in the cold light of day, I think it over. Outright lying is always wrong -- even trivial lies like that one.
It would be better, if I can handle it emotionally, to suffer the outburst, the tantrum, whatever the consequences. Pick him up and take him away from the kitchen. Do what I need to do. But don't lie.
Why do I say this? Because I believe that the most important thing that I can do as a parent, other than love my children, is to establish unquestioned honesty in my communication with them. Without this, I would quickly lose a sense of how to adjust to my children's changing needs. They would stop telling me what's on their minds, and our communication would be broken.
If I allowed the little lies, the little distortions, to build up into a kind of static in our communication, my children would gradually develop a more cavalier attitude towards my word. They would begin to assume that behind what I said is really only my authority and, worse, my concern for expediency.
Even if lying about the cookies worked in the short-term with Cole, it was the wrong way to go. I should have picked him up, kicking and screaming, and carried him upstairs.
*
So now I want to turn to a political example to show how we can get by without lies. It's hard to do, and we may as well turn to someone who has the motivation to lie all day long but the good heart that keeps him from doing it.
Barack Obama has many problems which trigger this same truth/expediency dilemma. Here's one of them:
Obama personally opposes discrimination of all kinds against gays and lesbians. Yet many people in the country have a prejudice against homosexuals, and they feel threatened at the prospect of gay marriage...
Obama knows that if he speaks out for full legal rights for gays and lesbians, which of course would include access to the institution of marriage with not only its privileges but also its symbolic value, he would instantly lose many potential voters. This is true in the Democratic primaries, but even more so in the general election.
So what does Obama do? He hedges.
How do I know this? I saw him do it.
On February 19 this year I went to hear Obama speak at a fundraising event in San Francisco. There were about 80 to 100 people there. He was asked about gay marriage (or "marriage equality" as I recall the questioner phrased it).
In that small setting, without ever saying so outright, Obama made it very clear that his decision not to support gay marriage was based on political expediency. In an attempt to get us to understand his predicament, he drew an analogy.
He mentioned that under the miscegenation laws which existed in the 1960s (before Loving v. Virginia in '67) his own mother and father could not have married in many states. And so he understood personally the importance of "marriage equality".
But then he drew the audience's attention to the work of Martin Luther King Jr. in the early 1960s -- those same years leading up to Loving v. Virginia -- on issues such as voting rights, employment discrimination and education. He told us that he had asked himself many times, if he had been in King's position in 1963, would he have "leaned" on the issue of miscegenation -- or would he have postponed it?
His answer of course was that he would have put it off -- even if it meant that his own parents' marriage would have remained illegal in many states.
This pragmatic argument -- coupled with a rueful mention of the mixing of the term "marriage" with religious traditions in many people's minds -- was the best he could offer. In effect he was saying, I can't do this now -- I can't even say anything more... We have to wait.
Strangely, his tone was so personal and thoughtful that, from what I saw, he won the crowd to his side -- at least in the moment.
It helped that he finished his answer with a direct look at the questioner and then a scan of the audience as a whole, saying very clearly, "I will continue to listen to my gay and lesbian friends on this." It almost felt as if he was winking at us in some solemn way (I can't say it, but I am with you!).
What impressed me about Obama's answer at the time was that he did not lie to us. Admittedly, he did not say outright what he hinted: that he personally opposed discrimination of all kinds, including marriage. But he didn't say that he was opposed to gay marriage either. He did a dance in which he managed to avoid lying while avoiding the truth.
As I said, he hedged.
*
This, I think, is the way to go as a parent (when you can't just tell the truth -- which remains the first and best option). It feels dodgy of course. When your kid looks you in the eye and demands "'nother cookie!" it is hard to worry about finessing the point. But finesse is exactly what you need.
If you say, "We're not going to have any more cookies!" in the melancholic tone of "All gone cookies!" for example, you have avoided lying.
You child may get confused. But he doesn't glare at you, knowing that you intentionally used words to express something untrue.
There is a difference, and the difference is a matter of respect.
That's why I am determined to avoid outright lying to my children on any point, however small.
I know that in the teenage years it's going to get a lot more difficult to trick my children with tone. The art of hedging will have to become increasingly advanced.
Perhaps I'll just have to face more temper tantrums...
But come to think of it, with a relationship based on telling the truth, perhaps, even when the truth hurts we will still be able to look each other in the eyes and resolve to disagree. We will have learned to have that kind of mutual respect.
(I'll have to get back to you on that one in about 10 years -- I can hear those of you with teenage children saying softly, "Good luck.")
Alice Walker endorses Obama -- and mentions how his experiences as a dad may be significant to his politics. Having a daughter (or two) makes you see the world differently. I would agree with that.
Just over a year from now, Hillary Clinton may be elected the 44th President of the United States of America.
My first reaction to that prospect is relief.
But once I get over my relief that it is not President Guiliani or President Thompson, what about President Hillary Clinton herself?
I feel mixed.
First, the good. I would argue that there are, to put it very bluntly, two competing narratives in American history: rights and power.
The Clintons, whose political education took place in the civil rights era, are part of the "rights" narrative.
This narrative, the Clinton narrative (and my narrative), goes something like this:
From its pinched beginnings (see the denigration and destruction of the indigenous people's way of life, the institution of slavery, etc.), America has steadily expanded the rights accorded to its citizens. Our ideals continue to live precisely because they are still unfulfilled ideals which require new efforts every day to acheive them. The Clintons' narrative is one of progress through process.
By contrast, under Bush and Cheney, we have had seven years of a "war" narrative. This shadow narrative of America, which takes aggressive form on Fox News every day, emphasizes above all the history of this country's ever-expanding power -- political, economic and military. Our greatness is our greatness.
So rather than think of ourselves as humble citizens, we are encouraged to think of ourselves as fighters for the cause of Freedom in a conflict waged overseas (so as not to interfere with our other "sacred" role as cheerful consumers).
History is written by the victors, so the war narrative looks pretty grand in retrospect. The genocide of the Indians was, well, an unavoidable consequence of Manifest Destiny. We crushed the British, the Mexicans, the Spanish, the Kaiser, the Nazis and the Japs, and our ideological figurehead Ronald Reagan vanquished the Soviet Union. (We'll skip over the Koreans, the Vietnamese and a certain bearded irritant named Fidel Castro.) We stand against Europe and the Arab World to defend our friend Israel and its efforts to establish a... well, if not a pluralistic democracy, then at least a stategically important outpost of empire. And so on.
Insofar as she rejects this war narrative in favor of a rights narrative, the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton is good.
But here's the bad part. Over her past seven years as a Senator from New York, Hillary Clinton has:
authorized the war with Iraq (which has led to a foreign policy disaster that is still unfolding);
refused to renounce the K Street culture of lobbyists in D.C. (the number of lobbyist has grown exponentially);
recently voted in favor of a resolution declaring the Iranian Republican Guard a "terrorist organization" (paving the way for a reckless military escalation sometime in Bush's final year);
and on the campaign trail, used the now familiar political techniques developed over the 1990s by the Republican Party (quoting out of context, knowing distortion of the facts, repetition in the face of denials) to label Senator Obama as "naive and irresponsible".
None of this is shocking.
Each of these can be explained by reference to that hoary old phrase: bare-knuckle politics. Clinton is willing to make concessions to the war narrative as necessary to secure political gains.
She knows that, as a woman running for President (as she has been all along in the Senate), she cannot seem weak on security. Hence the Iraq war and recent Iranian Republican Guard votes. She knows that money drives politics in Congress. Hence the position on lobbyists. She knows that she needs to get through the crowded field of the primaries to be the one Democratic candidate. Hence her treatment of Obama.
Indeed, the tone is familiar. The Clinton's, for all of their concerns about civil liberties and equality and inclusiveness, for all that they value the "rights" narrative of America, are ruthless political players if nothing else. They decided long ago that means justify the ends in politics.
Is this the only way to power in the current political world? I don't know. I do know that, if they are right, then the political model upon which this Republic is based is simply broken.
Who can feel triumphant about the future of America if politics has devolved into a charade, a game, a contest of wits. If that is so, how can we expect policy to lead to progress?
*
Here's where the parenting side of this post comes in. I would ask the moms and dads out there to look at their own homes as an analogy to this country as a whole. Can you raise healthy, loving, confident children in a household that functions on white lies and subterfuge? Even with the best intentions, parents who lie to their children undermine the basis for their family's love and closeness. Then they wonder why the children grow apart and stop calling.
In their many concessions to power, the Clintons concede too much.
I will vote for her if she is the nominee. I will feel relief and even a little exhilaration. But I will also feel a sense of sorrow. America the ideal will have to wait. We'll be back in the right narrative for this country, but it will be one with little momentum, little pace, and lots of maneuvering.
Watching the Republican Debate tonight on CNBC, I was struck most of all by the production values, and what they say about how our media distorts our lived experience, even in this supposedly "unfiltered" setting of a live debate.
Just as in every TV debate I can remember, the candidates were placed against a red, white and blue, luminous backdrop. Patriotic design elements (stars, stripes, etc.) appeared to dance around their heads.
The faces of these older white men looked well-tanned (read: made-up), and their eyes flashed pleasingly in the lights. The graphics that introduced them to the viewers were swift and expressive. The snatches of music that led into advertisements -- and grabbed us again after breaks -- were, frankly, invigorating.
The candidates' answers, of course, were uniformly banal, just as the Democrats' answers are in their debates.
What is going on?
Well, here's what I think. What we are seeing is something profound: a picture, if you will, of our society's blinkered values, presented in flashing lights and smiling faces.
We have grown accustomed to a picture of the world, as presented on TV, that is protected from suffering. This picture does not show garbage loosely strewn across the floor. It does not show skin cells that are infected and pink, or lacerations on cheeks, or stubbed toes with cracked nails. It rarely shows tears, or if it does they are stylized (Paris Hilton shielding her tender face from paparazzi). They are not the snotty tears, the snorting gasps and choked-off shouts that we experience in our private lives.
Where on that stage could possibly fit anything recognizable from daily life? Where would we indicate -- in that spare, "patriotic" design -- the odd mix of cultures which we now see in most American cities, large and small?
We're so used to it that it is easy not to see anything is amiss. But while Romney and Thompson share a laugh over whether the debate seems like an episode of "Law & Order" (ha ha!), the country's homes are filled with people who actually don't have health care, who actually smoke marijuana, who (some of them) actually talk in languages other than English, who actually can't pay for a new transmission for the car and so will have to take the bus to work for the foreseeable future.
I don't mean to sound righteous at all. I live in that privileged world which the media does represent on our TV screens -- the "high-protein land" (as the band Pavement once memorably put it). I drink cafe lattes, never question paying utility bills, call friends long distance, worry only occasionally and indulgently about financial ruin.
But without sounding righteous, I can say that I do recognize my world as uncommon, an anomaly. A fraction of us (including most of the people in the national media) live like proverbial royalty, while the rest of the country has a far more immediate sensory experience of poverty, filfth, unwanted noise.
To look at the Republicans debate is to know where they stand. And the same goes for the Democrats (perhaps Gravel excepted, since every time he speaks he angrily attacks the frame). The politicians, as presented by our media, are just as "clean" as Senator Biden controversially described Obama. They stand in opposition to darkness, smelliness, toughness, dryness -- in short, the world as lived by most of the people in it.
How do we teach ourselves and our children to break through this shimmering barrier of media and see behind it? It seems to me that we must actively seek media alternatives. I welcome suggestions.
Barack Obama has spoken at length about the anguish he sometimes feels when he considers how his political career takes him away from time he would otherwise spend with his two girls, Malia (9), and Sasha (6).
I can hardly imagine how painful it must be to lose so many opportunities to witness and participate in your children's development. When do our responsiblities to our careers, to the world outside, outweigh our responsiblities to our own family?
I happen to admire Obama greatly. I have read both of his books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. I consider him a brilliant, searching, driven, caring man, as well as pretty much the ideal candidate for President.
All that said, I find it difficult to understand how he could leave his children so often.
I find it hard to imagine leaving my kids even for a weekend.
But I suppose that it is a question of the possible influence that you can wield.
In the cost-benefit analysis for Obama, the benefits (leading the nation from the White House in a time of global terror; changing the American narrative of race forever) are far greater than they are for me. And our costs (time lost with our children) are the same. The little brass weights on the "benefits" side of his scales are simply heavier than mine.
The quick conclusion to draw from this is that I should get a life, maybe run for office somewhere, anywhere!
But another way of looking at it is this: How sad for Obama that this great responsiblity, drawing him away from his private life and the presence of his loved ones, has become unavoidable for him.
Perhaps, as a person who has shown a commitment to thinking carefully about consequences, he feels he has no choice. Certainly his public service is something to be praised.
But cannot we also feel sorry for him?
Thinking along these lines I find myself suddenly aware of the strange undercurrent of sadness that flows through gatherings of politicians. Take any debate -- scan the faces of Guiliani, Romney, McCain, Brownback, or Clinton, Edwards, Obama, Gravel, Biden. Or a press conference on Capitol Hill -- Reid, Pelosi, McConnell, Graham, Kennedy, Stevens. Isn't there a palpable sense of loss amid all of the urgency, the clarion calls to action, the passion? These people are driven to fulfill what they see as their responsiblity; they carry on their shoulders the burden of power. Most have actively sought it; for some, it arrived through a chain of events only partly of their choosing. But whatever the history, they are now in a position in which their private lives are severely diminished. And public concerns dominate their waking lives.
This of course goes back to any chapter in the life of our republic. Jefferson famously complained about spending any time away from his home in Monticello. Lincoln wept openly and trembled as he stood speaking to his friends and neighbors on the morning he left Springfield for Washington D.C. Even our current G. W. Bush (a hard man to sympathize with, but I'm trying to be inclusive) gets a jauntier step when he's back in Crawford.
Those whom we ask to lead must lose something that we take for granted: home. For those who, like Obama, cherish the intimacy they have with their loved ones, it must be nearly unbearable at times. For those who don't, I imagine that, sometimes imperceptively, they cross over into a life that is permanently public -- and unmoored from the deepest kind of attachments.
Maybe the pained expression that appear sometimes on Obama's face when he is on the campain trail, or the lines that became deeply etched in Lincoln's cheeks and brow as he drew apart from Mary and his sons (and lost Willie) during his time in the White House -- maybe these signs are the best indication we have that a leader is still psychologically whole.
This blog will explore the intersection of politics and parenting. I invite other dads, moms, or anyone else who is interested, to contribute to the conversation. My intention is to write every day on some issue which connects politics with parenting.
Why "Democrat Dad"?
I am a citizen and a Democrat, and I believe that these are not mere labels. They are important aspects of myself.
Why is my political identity so important that I feel compelled to write a blog about it? Well, I believe that we all have a responsibility to take politics seriously.
Those of us worried or enraged or disillusioned about our country cannot simply escape, drop out, or (romantic as it sounds) "drop off the grid," without losing much of what we cherish about ourselves.
I agree with Aristotle here (see his Politics) that human beings, choosing to exist outside of their community, are abdicating part of themselves. They are living as either "god or beast" -- the lives of monks or hermits, but not something that is recognizable to me.
My values are informed by the opinions of others; and this is not a point of shame. We are social creatures. We respond to praise and blame. Our participation in society is a pre-condition of language and a basis for morality.
I am enamored of our country and its laws. When I think of it... when I picture the whole whirring, clicking machine going like crazy on any given day... I am inspired to believe the best of my fellow-citizens and our future, all over again.
Through multiple decisions at many municipal, state and federal levels, through checks and balances of the different branches of government, through experments in legislation taking place concurrently in the states and in Washington D.C., through elections for offices ranging from a seat on the local school board to the Presidency of the United States -- through all of this never-ceasing activitiy -- our system of law provides what I like to think of as a perfect fit.
Think of it as a complex, ever-adjusting, digital map of the analog curve of our collective needs. And it is all thanks to the best "software" ever designed for the organizing of human beings and their diverse interests: the Constitution.
I am a citizen of this country, and proud of it. And politically, I am a member of the Democratic Party.
Hence, Democrat Dad.
Please join me. I look forward to thinking through parenting from a political perspective -- with you as my fellow-parents and fellow-citizens. Fellow Democrats of course are invited. Republican Dads and Moms too! Let's get started!
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