But the years had also taken their toll. Some of it was just a function of my getting older, I suppose, for if you are paying attention, each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws — the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip. In me, one of those flaws had proven to be a chronic restlessness; an inability to appreciate, no matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in front of me.
It was an ill-considered race, and I lost badly — the sort of drubbing that awakens you to the fact that life is not obliged to work out as you’d planned.
I suspected he was right, and that realization ate away at me. For the first time in my career, I began to experience the envy of seeing younger politicians succeed where I had failed, moving into higher offices, getting more things done. The pleasure of politics — the adrenaline of debate, the animal warmth of shaking hands and plunging into a crowd — began to pale against the meaner tasks of the job: the begging for money, the long drives home after the banquet had run 2 hours longer than scheduled, the bad food and stale air and clipped phone conversations with a wife who had stuck by me so far but was pretty fed up with raising our children alone and was beginning to question my priorities. I began to harbor doubts about the path I had chosen; I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream, after years of waiting tables between auditions or scratching out hits in the minor leagues, he realizes that he’s gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuit, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.
Denial, anger, bargaining, despair — I’m not sure I went through all the stages prescribed by the experts. At some point, though, I arrived at acceptance — of my limits, and, in a way, my mortality. I exercised, and read novels, and came to appreciate how the earth rotated around the sun and the seasons came and went without any particular exertions on my part.
And it was this acceptance, I think, that allowed me to come up with the thoroughly cockeyed idea of running for the US Senate.
By the time Fitzgerald announced he would not seek reelection, I was staring at 6 primary opponents, including the sitting state comptroller; a businessman worth hundreds of millions of dollars; Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s former chief of staff; and a black, female healthcare professional who the smart money assumed would split the black vote and doom whatever slim chances I’d had in the first place.
I didn’t care. Freed from worry by low expectations, my credibility bolstered by several helpful endorsements, I threw myself into the race with an energy and joy that I’d thought I had lost.
Whether people were friendly, indifferent, or occasionally hostile, I tried my best to keep my mouth shut and hear what they had to say.
But these moments fade quickly. Except for the few minutes that it take to vote, my colleagues and I don’t spend much time on the Senate floor. Most of the decisions — about what bills to call and when to call them, about how amendments will be handled and how uncooperative senators will be made to cooperate — have been worked out well in advance by the majority leader, the relevant committee chairman, their staffs, and their Democratic counterparts.
It makes for an efficient process, which is much appreciated by the members, who are juggling 12 or 13-hour schedules and want to get back to their offices to meet constituents or return phone calls, to a nearby hotel to cultivate donors, or to the TV studio for a live interview.
But even among these old bulls, such fond memories rapidly dimmed the first time the other side’s political operatives selected them as targets, flooding their districts with mail accusing them of malfeasance, corruption, incompetence, and moral turpitude.
I don’t claim to have been a passive bystander in all this. I understood politics as a full-contact sport, and minded neither the sharp elbows nor the occasional blind-side hit. But occupying as I did an ironclad Democratic district, I was spared the worst of Republican invective.
Later, some reporters would declare me the luckiest politician in the entire 50 states. Privately, some of my staff bristled at this assessment, feeling that it discounted our hard work and the appeal of our message. Still, there was no point in denying my almost spooky good fortune. I was an outlier, a freak; to political insiders, my victory proved nothing.
When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal.
What’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics — the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem.
Like all good conspiracy theories, both tales contain just enough truth to satisfy those predisposed to believe in them, without admitting any contradictions that might shake up those assumptions. Their purpose is not to persuade the other side but to keep their bases agitated and assured of the rightness of their respective causes — and lure just enough new adherents to beat the other side into submission.
Their lives are full of contradictions and ambiguities. And because politics seems to speak so little to what they are going through — because they understand that politics today is a business and not a mission, and what passes for debate is little more than spectacle — they turn inward, away from the noise and rage and endless chatter.
It’s generational. Back then, almost everybody with any power in Washington had served in WW2. We might’ve fought like cats and dogs on issues. A lot of us came from different backgrounds, different neighborhoods, different political philosophies. But with the war, we all had something in common. That shared experience developed a certain trust and respect. It helped to work through our differences and get things done.
Accordingly, liberalism and conservatism were now defined in the popular imagination less by class than by attitude — the position you took toward the traditional culture and counterculture. What mattered was not just how you felt about the right to strike or corporate taxation, but also how you felt about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, the Latin Mass or the Western canon.
If I had no immediate reasons to pursue revolution, I decided nevertheless that in style and attitude I, too, could be a rebel, unconstrained by the perceived wisdom of the over-thirty crowd.
Eventually, my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I’d begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excess and its own orthodoxy.
Nevertheless, by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, cared for their families, and loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of a common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster. And the more his critics carped, the more those critics played into the role he’d written for them — a band of out-of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first, politically correct elites.
No longer was economic policy a matter of weighing trade-offs between competing goals of productivity and distributional justice, of growing the pie and slicing the pie. You were for either tax cuts or tax hikes, small government or big government. No longer was environmental policy a matter of balancing sound stewardship of our natural resources with the demands of a modern economy; you either supported unchecked development, drilling, strip-mining, and the like, or you supported stifling bureaucracy and red tape that choked off growth. In politics, if not in policy, simplicity was a virtue.
As with their left-wing counterparts, this new vanguard of the right viewed politics as a contest not just between competing policy visions, but between good and evil. In this Manichean struggle, compromise came to look like weakness, to be punished or purged. You were with us or against us. You had to choose sides.
It was Bill Clinton’s singular contribution that he tried to transcend this ideological deadlock, that the categories were inadequate to address the problems we faced.
Still, when I think about what that old Washington hand told me that night, when I ponder the work of a George Kennan or a George Marshall, when I read the speeches of a Bobby Kennedy or an Everett Dirksen, I can’t help feeling that the politics of today suffers from a case of arrested development. For these men, the issues America faced were never abstract and hence never simple. War might be hell and still the right thing to do. Economies could collapse despite the best-laid plans. People could work hard all their lives and still lose everything.
For the generation of leaders who followed, raised in relative comfort, different experiences yielded a different attitude toward politics. In the back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.
I understand the frustration of these activists. The ability of Republicans to repeatedly win on the basis of polarizing campaigns is indeed impressive. I recognize the dangers of subtlety and nuance in the face of the conservative movement’s passionate intensity. And in my mind, at least, there are a host of Bush Administration policies that justify righteous indignation.
I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it’s precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country.
I marveled not at the White House’s elegant sweep, but rather at the fact that it was so exposed to the hustle and bustle of the city; that we were allowed to stand so close to the gate, and could later circle to the other side of the building to peer at the Rose Garden and the residence beyond. The openness of the White House said something about our confidence as a democracy, I thought. It embodied the notion that our leaders were not so different from us; that they remained subject to laws and our collective consent.
20 years later, getting close to the White House wasn’t so simple.
It is to say that after all the trappings of office — the titles, the staff, the security details — are stripped away, I find the President and those who surround him to be pretty much like everybody else, possessed of the same mix of virtues and vices, insecurities and long-buried injuries, as the rest of us. No matter how wrongheaded I might consider their policies to be — and no matter how much I might insist that they be held accountable for the results of such policies — I still find it possible, in talking to these men and women, to understand their motives, and to recognize in them values I share.
This is not an easy posture to maintain in Washington. The stakes involved in Washington policy debates are often so high — whether we send our young men and women to war; whether we allow stem cell research to go forward — that even small differences in perspective are magnified. The demands of party loyalty, the imperative of campaigns, and the amplification of conflict by the media all contribute to an atmosphere of suspicion. Moreover, most people who serve in Washington have been trained either as lawyers or as political operatives — professions that tend to place a premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems.
At its most elemental level, we understand our liberty in a negative sense. As a general rule we believe in the right to be left alone, and are suspicious of those — whether Big Brother or nosy neighbors — who want to meddle in our business. But we understand our liberty in a more positive sense as well, in the idea of opportunity and the subsidiary values that help realize opportunity.
We did not have to go through any of the violent upheavals that Europe was forced to endure as it shed its feudal past. Our passage from an agricultural to an industrial society was eased by the sheer size of the continent, vast tracts of land and abundant resources that allowed new immigrants to continually remake themselves.
But we cannot avoid these tensions entirely. At times our values collide because in the hands of men each one is subject to distortion and excess. Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we’ve seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we’ve seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves.
Values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.
All the money in the world won’t boost student achievement if parents make no effort to instill in their children the values of hard work and delayed gratification.
There is a constant danger, in the cacophony of voices, that a politician loses his moral bearings and finds himself entirely steered by the winds of public opinion.
It helped that he looked so trustworthy, like a small-town doctor, with his glasses and bow tie and basset-hound face.
There’s a saying that senators frequently use when asked to describe their first year on Capitol Hill: “It’s like drinking from a fire hose.”
The description is apt, for during my first few months in the Senate everything seemed to come at me at once. I had to hire staff and set up offices in Washington and Illinois. I had to negotiate committee assignments and get up to speed on the issues pending before the committees. There was a backlog of 10K constituent letters that had accumulated since Election Day, and 300 speaking invitations that were arriving every week. In half-hour blocks, I was shuttled from the Senate floor to committee rooms to hotel lobbies to radio stations, entirely dependent on an assortment of recently hired staffers in their 20s and 30s to keep me on schedule, hand me the right briefing book, remind me whom I was meeting with, or steer me to the nearest restroom.
And in that sense I realized that he really was a proper emblem for the Senate, whose rules and design reflect the grand compromise of America’s founding: the bargain between Northern states and Southern states, the Senate’s role as a guardian against the passions of the moment, a defender of minority rights and state sovereignty, but also a tool to protect the wealthy from the rabble, and assure slaveholders of noninterference with their peculiar institution.
It was as if those in power had decided that habeas corpus and separation of powers were niceties that only got in the way, that they complicated what was obvious (the need to stop terrorists) or impeded what was right (the sanctity of life) and could therefore be disregard, or at least bent to strong wills.
It was the basis of conservative broadsides against liberal academics, whose high priests of political correctness, it was argued, who refused to acknowledge any eternal truths or hierarchies of knowledge and indoctrinated America’s youth with dangerous moral relativism.
The only way to break a filibuster is for three-fifths of the Senate to invoke something called cloture — that is, the cessation of debate. Effectively this means that every action pending before the Senate — every bill, resolution, or nomination — needs the support of 60 senators rather than a simple majority. But throughout the Senate’s modern history, the filibuster has remained a preciously guarded prerogative, one of the distinguishing features, it is said — along with 6-year terms and the allocation of 2 senators to each state — that separates the Senate from the House and server as a firewall against the dangers of majority overreach.
Without the amendment, I said, the law would be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. He turned to me and said it didn’t matter what amendment was attached — judges would do whatever they wanted to do anyway.
“It’s all politics,” he had said, turning to leave. “And right now we’ve got the votes.”
Do any of these fights matter? For many of us, arguments over Senate procedure, separation of powers, judicial nominations, and rules of constitutional interpretation seem pretty esoteric, distant from our everyday concerns — just one more example of partisan jousting.
In fact, they do matter. Not only because the procedural rules of our government help define the results — on everything from whether the government can regulate polluters to whether government can tap your phone — but because they define our democracy just as much as elections do. Our system of self-governance is an intricate affair; it is through that system, and by respecting that system, that we give shape to our values and shared commitments.
I loved the law school classroom: the stripped-down nature of it, the high-wire act of standing in front of a room at the beginning of each class with just blackboard and chalk, the students taking measure of me.
Sometimes I imagined my work to be not so different from the work of the theology professors who taught across campus — for, as I suspect was true for those teaching Scripture, I found that my students often felt they knew the Constitution without having really read it. They were accustomed to plucking out phrases that they’d heard and using them to bolster their immediate arguments, or ignoring passages that seemed to contradict their views.
We consider these rights to be universal, a codification of liberty’s meaning, constraining all levels of government and applicable to all people within the boundaries of our political community.
We also understand that a declaration is not a government; a creed is not enough. The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality; for if everybody is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank or an inherited social order — if my notion of faith is no better or worse than yours, and my notions of truth and goodness and beauty are as true and good and beautiful as yours — then how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres? Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke suggested that free men would form governments as a bargain to ensure that one man’s freedom did not become another man’s tyranny; that they would sacrifice their individual license to better preserve their liberty. And building on that concept, political theorists writing before the American Revolution concluded that only a democracy could fulfill the need of both freedom and order — a form of government in which those who are governed grant their consent, and the laws constraining liberty are uniform, predictable, and transparent, applying equally to the rulers and the ruled.
All of it designed to defuse power, check factions, balance interests, and prevent tyranny by either the few or the many. Moreover, our history has vindicated one of the Founders’ central insights: that republican self-government could actually work better in a large and diverse society, where the “jarring of parties” and differences of opinion could “promote deliberation and circumspection.”
Should we let teachers lead our children in prayer and leave open the possibility that the minority faiths of some children are diminished? Or do we forbid such prayer and force parents of faith to hand over their children to a secular world 8 hours a day? More often than not, if a particular procedural rule — the right to filibuster, say — helps us win the argument and yields the outcome we want, then for that moment at least we think it’s a pretty good rule. If it doesn’t help us win, then we tend not to like it so much.
I’ve often wondered whether the Founders themselves recognized at the time the scope of their accomplishment. They didn’t simply design the Constitution in the wake of revolution; they wrote the Federalist Papers to support it, shepherded the document though ratification, and amended it with the Bill of Rights — all in the span of a few short years. As we read these documents, the seem so incredibly right that it’s easy to believe they are the result of natural law if not divine inspiration. So I appreciate the temptation on the part of Justice Scala and others to assume our democracy should be treated as fixed and unwavering.
The Founders and ratifiers themselves disagreed profoundly, vehemently, on the meaning of their masterpiece. Before the ink on the constitutional parchment was dry, arguments had erupted, not just about minor provisions but about first principles, not just between peripheral figures but within the Revolution’s very core. They argued about how much power the national government should have — to regulate the economy, to supersede state laws, to form a standing army, or to assume debt. They argued about the president’s role in establishing treaties with foreign powers, and about the Supreme Court’s role in determining the law. They argued about the meaning of such basic rights as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and on several occasions, when the fragile state seemed threatened, they were not adverse to ignoring those rights altogether. Given what we know of this scrum, with all its shifting alliances and occasionally underhanded tactics, it is unrealistic to believe that a judge, 200 years later, can somehow discern the original intent of the Founders or ratifiers.
And just as I recognize the comfort offered by the strict constructionist, so I see a certain appeal to this shattering of myth, to the temptation to believe that constitutional text doesn’t constrain us much at all, so that we are free to assert our own values unencumbered by fidelity to the stodgy traditions of a distant past. It’s the freedom of the relativist, the rule breaker, the teenager who has discovered his parents are imperfect and has learned to play one off of the other — the freedom of the apostate.
And yet, ultimately, such apostasy leaves me unsatisfied as well. Maybe I am too steeped in the myth of the founding to reject it entirely. Maybe like those who rejected Darwin in favor of intelligent design, I prefer to assume that someone’s at the wheel. In the end, the question I keep asking myself is why, if the Constitution is only about power and not about principle, if all we are doing is just making it up as we go along, has our own republic not only survived but served as the rough model for so many of the successful societies on earth?
It was Jefferson, not some liberal judge in the 60’s, who called for a wall between church and state — and if we have declined to heed Jefferson’s advice to engage in a revolution every two or three generations, it’s only because the Constitution itself proved a sufficient defense against tyranny.
It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstraction and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity.
The rejection of absolutism implicit in our constitutional structure may sometimes make our politics seem unprincipled. But for the most of our history it has encouraged the very process of information gathering, analysis, and argument that allow us to make better, if not perfect, choices, not only about the means to our ends but also about the ends themselves. Whether we are for or against affirmative action, for or against prayer in schools, we must test out our ideals, vision, and values against the realities of a common life, so that over time they may be refined, discarded, or replaced by new ideals, sharper visions, deeper values. Indeed, it is that process, according to Madison, that brought about the Constitution itself, through a convention in which “no man felt himself obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he was satisfied of their propriety and truth, and was open to the force of argument.”
What does this say about our democracy? There’s a school of thought that see the Founding Fathers only as hypocrites and the Constitution only as a betrayal of the grand ideals set forth by the Declaration of Independence; that agrees with early abolitionists that the Great Compromise between North and South was a pact with the Devil. Others, representing the safer, more conventional wisdom, will insist that all the constitutional compromise on slavery was a necessary, if unfortunate, requirement for the formation of the Union.
We remember him for the firmness and depth of his convictions — his unyielding opposition to slavery and his determination that a house divided could not stand. But his presidency was guided by a practicality that would distress us today, a practicality that led him to test various bargains with the South in order to maintain the Union without war; to appoint and discard general after general, strategy after strategy, once war broke out; to stretch the Constitution to the breaking point in order to see the war through to a successful conclusion.
Eventually I asked him what advice he would give me as a new member of the Senate.
“Learn the rule,” he said. “Not just the rules, but the precedents as well.” He pointed to a series of thick binders behind him, each one affixed with a handwritten label. “Not many people bother to learn them these days. Everything is so rushed, so many demands on a senator’s time. But these rules unlock the power of the Senate. They’re the keys to the kingdom.”
So few people read the Constitution today. I’ve always said, this document and the Holy Bible, they’ve been all the guidance I need.
And sometimes someone will grab my hand and tell me that they have great hopes for me, but that they are worried that Washington is going to change me and I will end up just like all the rest of the people in power.
And yet year after year we keep the rascals right where they are, with the reelection rate for House members hovering at around 96%.
One place to start my inquiry was to understand the nature of ambition, for in this regard at least, senators are different. Few people end up being US senators by accident; at a minimum, it requires a certain megalomania, a belief that of all the gifted people in your state, you are somehow uniquely qualified to speak on their behalf; a belief sufficiently strong that you are willing to endure the sometimes uplifting, occasionally harrowing, but always slightly ridiculous process we call campaigns.
Moreover, ambition alone is not enough. Whatever the tangle of motives, both sacred and profane, that push us toward the goal of becoming a senator, those who succeed must exhibit an almost fanatical single-mindedness, often disregard their health, relationships, mental balance, and dignity. After my primary campaign was over, I remember looking at my calendar and realizing that over a span of 1.5 years, I had taken exactly 7 days off. The rest of the time I had typically worked 12 to 16 hours a day.
With Malia sick and unable to fly, I missed the vote, and the bill failed. Two days later, I got off the red-eye, a wailing baby in town, Michelle not speaking to me, and was greeted by a front-page story in the Chicago Tribune indicating that the gun bill had fallen a few votes short, and that state senator and congressional candidate Obama “had decided to remain on vacation” in Hawaii.
And so, less than halfway into the campaign, I knew in my bones that I was going to lose. Each morning from that point forward I awoke with a vague sense of dread, realizing that I would have to spend the days smiling and shaking hands and pretending that everything was going according to plan. In the few weeks before the primary, my campaign recovered a bit: I did well in the sparsely covered debates, received some positive coverage for proposals on health care and education, and even received the Tribune endorsement. But it was too little too late. I arrived at my victory party to discover that the race had already been called and that I lost by 31 points.
I’m not suggesting that politicians are unique in suffering such disappointments. It’s that unlike most people, who have the luxury of licking their wounds privately, the politician’s loss is on public display. There’s the cheerful concession speech you have to make to a half-empty ballroom, the brave face you put on as you comfort staff and supporters, the thank-you call s to those who helped, and the awkward requests for further help in retiring debt. You perform these tasks as best you can, and yet no matter how much you tell yourself differently — no matter how convincingly you attribute the loss to bad timing or bad luck or lack of money — it’s impossible not to feel at some level as if you have been personally repudiated by the entire community, that you don’t quite have what it takes, and that everywhere you go the word “loser” is flashing through people’s minds. They’re the sorts of feelings that most people haven’t experienced since high school, when the girl you’d been pining over dismissed you with a joke in front of her friends, or you missed a pair of free throws with the big game on the line — the kind of feelings that most adults wisely organize their lives to avoid.
Imagine then the impact of these same emotions on the average big-time politician, who (unlike me) has rarely failed at anything in his life — who was the high school quarterback or the class valedictorian and whose father was a senator or admiral and who has been told since he was a child that he was destined for great things.
It was strange. Here he was, a former VP, a man who just a few months earlier had been on the verge of being the most powerful man on the planet. During the campaign, I would take his calls any time of day, would rearrange my schedule whenever he wanted to meet. But suddenly, after the election, I hate to admit it, because I really like the guy. But at some level he wasn’t Al Gore, former VP. He was just one of the hundred guys a day who are coming to me looking for money. It made me realize what a big steep cliff you guys are on.
Most of the other sins of politics are derivative of this larger sin — the need to win, bu also the need not to lose. Certainly that’s what the money chase is all about. There was a time, before campaign finance laws and snooping reporters, when money shaped politics through outright bribery; when a politician could treat his campaign fund as his personal bank account and accept fancy junkets; when big honoraria from those who sought influence were commonplace, and the shape of legislation went to the highest bidder. If recent news reports are accurate, these ranker forms of corruption have not gone away entirely.
More often, though, that’s not the way money influences politics. Few lobbyists proffer an explicit quid pro quo to elected officials. They don’t have to. Their influence comes simply from having more access to these officials than the average voter, having better information than the average voter, and having more staying power when it comes to promoting an obscure provision in the tax code that means billions for their clients that nobody else cares about.
As for most politicians, money isn’t about getting rich. In the Senate, at least, most members are already rich. I’t about maintaining status and power; it’s about scaring off challengers and fighting off the fear. Money can’t guarantee victory — it can’t buy passion, charisma, or the ability to tell a story. But without money, and the TV ads that consume all the money, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose.
One week of TV ads in the Chicago media market would cost approximately half a million dollars. Covering the rest of the state for a week would run about $250K. The final budget for the primary would be around $5M. Assuming I won the primary, I would then need to raise another $10-15M for the general election.
I went home that night and in neat columns proceeded to write down all the people I knew who might give me a contribution. Next to their names, I wrote down the maximum amounts that I would feel comfortable asking them for.
My grand total came to $500K.
Absent great personal wealth, there is basically one way of raising the kind of money involved in a US Senate race. You have to ask rich people for it.
It was not fun. Sometimes people would hang up on me. More often their secretary would take a message and I wouldn’t get a return call, and I would call back 2 or 3 times until I either gave up or the person I was calling finally answered and gave me the courtesy of a person-to-person rejection. I started engaging in elaborate games of avoidance during call time — frequent bathroom breaks, extended coffee runs, suggestions to my policy staff that we fine-tune that education speech for the 3rd or 4th time.
At the end of 3 months, our campaign had raised just $250K — well below the threshold of what it would take to be credible. To make matters worse, my race featured what many politicians consider their worst nightmare: a self-financing candidate with bottomless pockets. His name was Blair Hull, and he had sold his financial trading business to Goldman Sachs a few years earlier for $531M. Undoubtedly he had a genuine, if undefined, desire to serve, and by all accounts he was a brilliant man. But on the campaign trail he was almost painfully shy, with the quirky, inward manner of someone who’d spent most of his life alone in front of a computer screen.
Still, I can’t assume that the money chase didn’t alter me in some ways. Certainly it eliminated any sense of shame I once had in asking strangers for large sum of money. By the end of the campaign, the banter and small talk that had once accompanied my solicitation calls were eliminated. I cut to the chase and tried not to take no for an answer.
As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1% or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2K check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cursed by a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and antigun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment.
Still, I know that as a consequence of my fundraising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in a very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99% of the population — that is, the people that I’d entered public life to serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for every senator. The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions. You may fight it, with town hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old neighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from ost of the people you represent.
And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you don’t want to have to go through all the misery of raising all that money in small increments all over again. You realize that you no longer have the cachet you did as the upstart, the fresh face; you haven’t change Washington, and you’ve made a lot of people unhappy with difficult votes. The path of least resistance — of fundraisers organized by the special interests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops — starts to look awfully tempting, and if the opinions of these insiders don’t quite jibe with those you once held, you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning the ropes. The problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be fought.
There are other forces at work on a senator. As important as money is in campaigns, it’s not just fundraising that puts a candidate over the top. If you want to win in politics — if you don’t want to lose — then organized people can be just as important as cash, particularly in the low-turnout primaries that, in the world of gerrymandered political map and divided electorates, are often the most significant race a candidate faces. Few people these days have the time or inclination to volunteer on a political campaign, particularly since the day-to-day tasks of working on a campaign generally involve licking envelopes and knocking on doors, not drafting speeches and thinking big thoughts. And so, if you are a candidate in need of political workers or voter lists, you go where people are already organized. For Democrats, this means the unions, the environmental groups, and the prochoice groups. For Republicans, it means the religious right, local chambers of commerce, the NRA, and the antitax organizations.
Still, the impact of interest groups on candidates for office is not always pretty. To maintain an active membership, keep the donations coming in, and be heard above the din, the groups that have an impact on politics aren’t fashioned to promote the public interest. They aren’t searching for the most thoughtful, well-qualified, or broad-minded candidate to support. Instead, they are focused on a narrow set of concerns — their pensions, their crop supports, their cause. Simply put, they have an ax to grind. And they want you, the elected official, to help them grind it.
My staff would shake their heads. Get one answer wrong, they explained wrong, they explained, and the endorsement, the workers, and the mailing list would all go to the other guy. Get them all right, I thought, and you have just locked yourself into the pattern of reflexive, partisan jousting that you have promised to help end.
Say one thing during the campaign and do another thing once in office, and you’re a typical, two-faced politician.
But I suspect that the union leaders won’t always see it that way. There may be times when they will see it as betrayal. They may alert their members that I have sold them out. I may get angry mail and angry phone calls. They may not endorse me the next time around.
And perhaps, if that happens to you enough times, and you almost lose a race because of a critical constituency is mad at you, or you find yourself fending off a primary challenge who’s calling you a traitor, you start to lose your stomach for confrontation. You ask yourself, just what does good conscience dictate exactly: that you avoid capture by “special interests” or that you avoid dumping on your friends? The answer is not obvious. So you start voting as you would answer a questionnaire. You don’t ponder your positions too deeply. You check the yes box up and down the line.
Simple math tells the tale. In the 39 town hall meetings I held during my first year in office, turnout at each meeting averaged 400 to 500 people, which means that I was able to meet with maybe 15K to 20K people. Should I sustain this pace for the remainder of my term, I will have direct, personal contact with maybe 95K to 100K of my constituents of the time Election Day rolls around.
In contrast, a 3 minute study on the lowest-rated local news broadcast in the Chicago media market may reach 200K people. In other words, I — like every politician at the federal level — am almost entirely dependent on the media to reach my constituents. It is the filter through which my votes are interpreted, my statements analyzed, my beliefs examined. For the broad public at least, I am who the media says I am. I say what they say I say. I become who they say I’ve become.
In Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his self-study and ultimate mastery of language and of law, in his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat — in all of this, we see a fundamental element of the American character, a belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.
“There is nothing wrong wit Barack Obama’s resume, but it is a log-cabin-free zone. So far it is also a greatness-free zone. If he keeps talking about himself like this it always will be.” Ouch!
Still, I was reminded of what my veteran colleagues already knew — that every statement I made would be subject to scrutiny, dissected by every manner of pundit, interpreted in ways over which I had no control, and combed through for a potential error, misstatement, omission, or contradiction that might be filed away by the opposition party and appear in an unpleasant TV ad somewhere down the road. In an environment in which a single ill-considered remark can generate more bad publicity than years of ill-considered policies, it should have come as no surprise to me that on Capital Hill jokes got screened, irony became suspect, spontaneity was frowned upon, and passion was considered downright dangerous. I started to wonder how long it took for a politician to internalize all this; how long before the committee of scribes and editors and censors took residence in your heard; how long before even the “candid” moments became scripted, so that you choked up or expressed outrage only on cue.
How long before you started sounding like a politician?
In that sense, the episode hinted at a more subtle and corrosive aspect of modern media — how a particular narrative, repeated over and over again and hurled through cyberspace at the speed of light, eventually becomes a hard particle of reality; how political caricatures and nuggets of conventional wisdom lodge themselves in our brain without us ever taking the time to examine them.
The spin works, though, precisely because the media itself are hospitable to spin. Every reporter in Washington is working under pressures imposed by editors and producers, who in turn are answering to publishers or network executives, who in turn are poring over last week’s ratings or last year’s circulation figures and trying to survive the growing preference for PlayStation and reality TV. To make the deadline, to maintain market share and feed the cable news beast, reporters start to move in packs, working off the same news releases, the same set pieces, the same stock figures. Meanwhile, for busy and therefore casual news consumers, a well-worn narrative is not entirely unwelcome. It makes few demands on our thought or time; it’s quick and easy to digest. Accepting spin is easier on everybody.
But at least some of the decline in civility arises from the fact that, from the press’s perspective, civility is boring. Your quote doesn’t run if you say, “I see the other guy’s point of view” or “The issue’s really complicated.” Go on the attack, though, and you can barely fight off the cameras. Often, reporters will go out of their way to stir up the pot, asking questions in such a way as to provoke an inflammatory response.
The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those — like the WH press office — who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.
Today’s politician understands this. He may not lie, but he understands that there is no great reward in store for those who speak the truth, particularly when the truth may be complicated. The truth may cause consternation; the truth will be attacked; the media won’t have the patience to sort out all the facts and so the public may not know the difference between truth and falsehood.
From what I’ve observed, there are countless politicians who have crossed these hurdles and kept their integrity intact, men and women who raise campaign contributions without being corrupted, garner support without being held captive by special interests, and manage the media without losing their sense of self. But there is one final hurdle that, once you’ve settled in Washington, you cannot entirely avoid, one that is certain to make at least a sizable portion of your constituency think ill of you — and that is the thoroughly unsatisfactory nature of the legislative process.
I don’t know a single legislator who doesn’t anguish on a regular basis over the votes he or she has to take. There are times when one feels a piece of legislation to be so obviously right that it merits little internal debate. At other times, a bill appears on the floor that’s so blatantly one-sided or poorly designed that one wonders who the sponsor can maintain a straight face during debate.
But most of the time, legislation is a murky brew, the product of one hundred compromises large and small, a blend of legitimate policy aims, political grandstanding, jerry-rigged regulatory schemes, and old-fashioned pork barrels. Often, I was confronted with the fact that the principled thing was less clear than I had originally thought; that either an aye vote or a nay vote would leave me with some trace of remorse.
Few, if any, face the same dread finality of decision that confronts a Senator facing an important call of the roll. He may want more time for his decisions — he may believe there is something to be said for both sides — he may feel that a slight amendment could remove all difficulties — but when that roll is called he cannot hide, he cannot equivocate, he cannot delay — and he senses that his constituency, like the Raven in Poe’s poem, is perched there on his Senate desk, croaking “Nevermore” as he casts the vote that stakes his political future.
Genuine bipartisanship, though, assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and that the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upon goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majority will be constrained — by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate — to negotiate in good faith. If these conditions do not hold — if nobody outside Washington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs of the tax cut are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so — the majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100% of what it wants, go on to concede 10%, and then accuse any member of the minority party who fails to support this “compromise” of being “obstructionist.” For the minority party in such circumstances, “bipartisanship” comes to mean getting chronically steamrolled, although individual senators may enjoy certain politically rewards by consistently going along with the majority and hence gaining a reputation for being “moderate” or “centrist.”
What every senator understands that while it’s easy to make a vote on a complicated piece of legislation look evil and depraved in a 30-second TV commercial, it’s very hard to explain the wisdom of that same vote in less than 20 minutes. What every senator also knows is that during the course of a single term, he or she will have to cast several thousand votes. That’s a whole lot of potential explaining todo come election time.
For most of my colleagues, their mistakes trumpeted, their words distorted, and their motives questioned. They are baptized in that fire; it haunts them each and every time they cast a vote, each and every time they issue a press release or make a statement, the fear of losing not just a political race, but of losing favor in the eyes of those who sent them to Washington.
In some ways, the longer you are in politics, the easier it should be to muster such courage, for there is a certain liberation that comes from realizing that no matter what you do, someone will be angry at you, that political attacks will come no matter how cautiously you vote, that judgment may be taken as cowardice and courage itself may be seen as calculation.
We spoke about Google’s mission — to organize all the world’s information into a universally accessible, unfiltered, and usable form — and the Google site index, which already included more than 6B web pages.
The state and the city have given Maytag at least $10M in tax breaks over the last 8 years, based on their promise to stay. But it’s never enough. Some CEO who’s already making millions of dollars decides he needs to boost the company stock price so he can cash in his options, and the easiest way to do that is to send the work to Mexico and pay the workers there a sixth of what we make.
Retraining is a joke. What are you going to retrain for when there aren’t any jobs out there?
On the drive back to Chicago, I tried to imagine Tim’s desperation: no job, an ailing son, his savings running out.
Those were the stories you missed on a private jet at 40K feet.
There’s no doubt that globalization has brought significant benefits to American consumers. It’s lowered prices on goods once considered luxuries, and increased purchasing power of low-income Americans. It’s helped keep inflation in check, boosted returns for the millions of American now invested in the stock market, provided new markets for US goods and services, and allowed countries like China and India to dramatically reduce poverty, which over the long term makes for a more stable world.
But there’s also no denying that globalization has greatly increased economic instability for millions of ordinary Americans. To stay competitive and keep investors happy in the global marketplace, US-based companies have automated, downsized, outsourced, and offshored. They’ve held the line on wage increases, and replaced defined-benefit health and retirement plans with 401(k)s and Health Savings Accounts that shift more cost and risk onto workers.
The result has been the emergence of what some call a “winner-take-all” economy, in which a rising tide doesn’t necessarily lift all boats.
Rather than vilify the rich, we hold them up as role models, and our mythology is steeped in stories of men on the make — the immigrant who comes to this country with nothing and strikes it big, the young man who heads West in search of his fortune. As Ted Turner famously said, in America money is how we keep score.
The result of this business culture has been a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history. Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative, and the efficient allocation of resources.
In broad outline, government action has take 3 forms. First, government has been called upon throughout our history to build the infrastructure, train the workforce, and otherwise lay the foundations necessary for economic growth.
He promoted policies — from strong patern laws to high tariffs — to encourage American manufacturing, and proposed investment in roads and bridges needed to move products to market.
For Lincoln, the essence of America was opportunity, the ability of “free labor” to advance in life. Lincoln considered capitalism the best means of creating such opportunity, but he also saw how the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society was disrupting lives and destroying communities.
So in the midst of civil war, Lincoln embarked on a series of policies that not only laid the groundwork for a fully integrated national economy but extended the ladders of opportunity downward to reach more and more people.
During America’s first 150 years, as capital became more concentrated in trusts and limited liability corporations, workers were prevented by law and by violence from forming unions that would increase their own leverage. Workers had almost no protections from unsafe or inhumane working conditions, whether in sweatshops or meatpacking plants. Nor did American culture have much sympathy for workers left impoverished by capitalism’s periodic gales of “creative destruction” — the recipe for individual success was greater toil, not pampering from the state. What safety net did exist came from the uneven and meager resources of private charity.
But FDR also understood that capitalism in a democracy required the consent of the people, and that by giving workers a larger share of the economic pie, his reforms would undercut the potential appeal of government-managed, command-and-control systems — whether fascist, socialist, or communist — that were gaining support all across Europe. As he would explain in 1944, “People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
There were those on the right who complained of creeping socialism, and those on the left who believed FDR had not gone far enough. But the enormous growth of America’s mass production economy, and the enormous gap in productive capacity between the US and the war-torn economies of Europe and Asia, muted most ideological battles. Without any serious rivals, US companies could routinely pass on higher labor and regulatory costs to their customers. Full employment allowed unionized factory workers to move into the middle class, support a family on a single income, and enjoy the stability of health and retirement security. And in such an environment of steady corporate profits and rising wages, policy makers found only modest political resistance to higher taxes and more regulation to tackle pressing social problems — hence the creation of the Great Society programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare, under Johnson.
With less ability to pass on higher costs or shoddy products to consumers, corporate profits and market share shrank, and corporate shareholders began demanding more value. Some corporations found ways to improve productivity through innovation and automation. Others relied primarily on brutal layoffs, resistance to unionization, and a further shift of production overseas. Those corporate managers who didn’t adapt were vulnerable to corporate raiders and leveraged buyout artists, who would make the changes for them, without any regard for the employees whose lives might be upended or the communities that might be torn apart. One way or another, American companies became leaner and meaner — with old-line manufacturing workers and towns like Galesburg bearing the brunt of this transformation.
Still, the conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan’s central insight — that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie — contained a good deal of truth. Just as too many corporate managers, shielded from competition, had stopped delivering value, too many government bureaucracies had stopped asking whether their shareholders (the American taxpayer) and their consumers (the users of government services) were getting their money’s worth.
Neither strategy will work anymore. America can’t compete with China and India simply by cutting costs and shrinking government — unless we’re willing to tolerate a drastic decline in American living standards, with smog-choked cities and beggars lining the streets. Nor can America compete simply by erecting trade barriers and raising the minimum wage — unless we’re willing to confiscate all the world’s computers.
And we can be guided throughout by Lincoln’s simple maxim: that we will do collectively, through our government, only those things that we cannot do as well or at all individually and privately.
“These Kids Syndrome” — the willingness of society to find a million excuses for why “these kids” can’t learn; how “these kids come from tough backgrounds” or “these kids are too far behind.”
“When I hear that term, it drives me nuts,” the teacher told me. “They’re not ‘these kids.’ They’re our kids.”
Having more stem cell lines would definitely be useful, but the real problem we’re seeing is significant cutbacks in federal grants.
China is graduating 8 times as many engineers as the US every year.
In other words, we can afford to do what needs to be done. What’s missing is not money, but a national sense of urgency.
Education. Science and technology. Energy.
Viewed in isolation, the agreement posed little threat to American workers — the combined economies of the Central American countries involved were roughly the same as that of New Haven, Connecticut.
When I met with representatives from organized labor, though, they were having none of it. As far as they were concerned, NAFTA had been a disaster for US workers, and CAFTA just promised more of the same. What was needed, they said, was not just free trade but fair trade: stronger labor protections in countries that trade with the US, including rights to unionize and bans on child labor; improved environmental standards in these same countries; an end to unfair government subsidies to foreign exporters and nontariff barriers on US exports; stronger protection of US IP; and — in the case of China in particular — an end to artificially devalued currency that put US companies at a perpetual disadvantage.
But they won’t eliminate the enormous gap in huge wages between US workers and workers in Honduras, Indonesia, Mozambique, or Bangladesh, countries where work in a dirty factory or overheated sweatshop is often considered a step up on the the economic ladder.
In fact, the basic debate surrounding free trade has hardly changed since the early 1980s, with labor and its allies generally losing the fight. The conventional wisdom among policy makers, the press, and the business community these days is that free trade makes everyone better off. At any given time, so the argument goes, some US jobs may be lost to trade and cause localized pain and hardship — but for everyone thousand manufacturing jobs lost due to a plant closure, the same or an even greater number of jobs will be created in the new and expanding service sectors of the economy.
In other words, free trade may well grow the worldwide economic pie — but there’s no law that says workers in the US will continue to get a bigger and bigger slice.
That’s a complicated question. Most economists will tell you that there’s no inherent limit to the number of good new jobs that the US economy can generate, because there’s no limit to human ingenuity. People invent new industries, new needs and wants. I think the economists are probably right. Historically, it’s been the case. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the pattern holds this time. With the pace of technological change, the size of the countries we’re competing against, and the cost differentials with those countries, we may see a different dynamic emerge. So I suppose it’s possible that even if we do everything right, we could still face some challenges.
I said it’s possible, not probable. I tend to be cautiously optimistic that if we get our fiscal house in order and improve our educational system, their children will do just fine. Anyway, there’s one thing that I would tell the people in Galesburg is certain. Any efforts at protectionism will be counterproductive — and it will make their children worse off in the bargain.
The resistance to CAFTA had less to do with the specifics of the agreement and more to do with the growing insecurities of the American worker. Unless we found strategies to allay those fears, and sent a strong signal to American workers that the federal government was on their side, protectionist sentiment would only grow.
For the average American worker, that security rested on 3 pillars: the ability to find a job that paid enough to support a family and save for emergencies; a package of health and retirement benefits from his employer; and a government safety net that could cushion the fall of those who suffered setbacks in their lives.
Sasha is fine now, as healthy and happy as a 5-year-old should be. But I still shudder when I think of those 3 days; how my world narrowed to a single point, and how I was not interested in anything or anybody outside the four walls of that hospital room — not my work, not my schedule, not my future.
That debt now stands at $9T — $30K for every man, woman, and child in the country.
So far we’ve been able to get away with this mountain of debt because foreign central banks — particularly China’s — want us to keep buying their exports. But this easy credit won’t continue forever. At some point, foreigners will stop lending us money, interest rates will go up, and we will spend most of our nation’s output paying them back.
If there’s class warfare going on in America, then my class is winning.
The free market is the best mechanism ever devised to put resources to their most efficient and productive use. The government isn’t particularly good at that. But the market isn’t so good at making sure that the wealth that’s produced is being distributed fairly or wisely. Some of that wealth has to be plowed back into education, so that the next generation has a fair chance, and to maintain our infrastructure, and provide some sort of safety net for those who lose out in a market economy. And it just makes sense that those of us who’ve benefited most from the market should pay a bigger share.
He was especially exercised over Bush’s proposed elimination of the estate tax, a step he believed would encourage an aristocracy of wealth rather than merit.
“When you get rid of the estate tax, you’re basically handing over command of the country’s resources to people who didn’t earn it. It’s like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the children of all the winners at the 2000 Games.”
Meanwhile, I’ve had corporate CEOs explain to me that it’s easy for Buffett to favor an estate tax — even if his estate is taxed at 90%, he could still have a few billions to pass on to his kids — but that the tax is grossly unfair to those with estates worth “only” $10M or $15M.
It was the right thing to do, but I won’t lie; the first time I was scheduled for a four-city swing in 2 days flying commercial, I felt some pangs of regret. The traffic to O’Hare was terrible. When I got there, the flight to Memphis had been delayed. A kid spilled orange juice on my shoe.
Within the bubble of Democratic Party politics, this was standard boilerplate, designed to fire up the base. The notion of engaging the other side on the issue was pointless, the argument went; any ambiguity on the issue implied weakness, and faced with the single-minded, give-no-quarter approach of antiabortion forces, we simply could not afford weakness.
It is a truism that we Americans are a religious people. 95% of Americans believe in God.
What is more remarkable is the ability of evangelical Christianity not only to survive bu to thrive in modern, high-tech America.
A complete inability to discipline his appetites, and a broad tolerance of other people’s weaknesses — that precluded him from getting too serious about anything.
She remembered the respectable church ladies who were always so quick to shun those unable to meet their standards of propriety, even as they desperately concealed their own dirty little secrets; the church fathers who uttered racial epithets and chiseled their workers out of any nickel that they could.
For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb or piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.
Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.
In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist that she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a suitable detachment as well.
Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for live and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional.
She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer strangeness of life.
My fierce ambitions might have been fueled by my father — by my knowledge of his achievements and failures, by my unspoken desire to somehow earn his love, and by my resentments and anger toward him.
But they sensed that a part of me remained removed, detached, an observer among them. I came to realize that without a vessel for my beliefs, without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the same ways she was ultimately alone.
In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world. In the day-to-day work of the men and women I met in church each day, in their ability to “make a way out of no way” and maintain hope and dignity in the direst of circumstances, I could see the Word made manifest.
There was no doubt that the man could talk. At the drop of a hat Mr. Keyes could deliver a grammatically flawless disquisition on virtually any topic. On the stump, he could wind himself up into a fiery intensity, his body rocking, his brow running with sweat, his fingers jabbing the air, his high-pitched voice trembling with emotions as he called the faithful to do battle against the forces of evil.
Unfortunately for him, neither his intellect nor his eloquence could overcome certain defects as a candidate. Unlike most politicians, for example, Mr. Keyes made no effort to conceal what he clearly considered to be his moral and intellectual superiority.
Moreover, that self-assuredness disabled him in the instincts for self-censorship that allow most people to navigate the world without getting into constant fistfights. Mr. Keyes said whatever popped into his mind, and with dogged logic would follow over a cliff just about any idea that came to him.
In other words, Alan Keyes was an ideal opponent; all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and start planning my swearing-in ceremony. And yet, as the campaign progressed, I found him getting under my skin in a way that few people ever have. When our paths crossed during the campaign, I often had to suppress the rather uncharitable urge to either taunt him or wring his neck.
But religion is rarely practiced in isolation; organized religion, at least, is a very public affair. The faithful may feel compelled by their religion to actively evangelize wherever they can. They may feel that a secular state promotes values that directly offend their beliefs. They may want the larger society to validate and reinforce their views.
And when the religiously motivated assert themselves politically to achieve these aims, liberals get nervous. Those of us in public office my try to avoid the conversation about religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that — regardless of our personal beliefs — constitutional principles tie our hands on issues like abortion and school prayer.
But over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people, and so avoid joining a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.
Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting “preachy” may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in addressing some of our most urgent social problems.
After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of perfect ten-point plan. They are also rooted in societal indifference and individual callousness — the desire among those at the top of the social ladder to maintain their wealth and status whatever the cost, as well as the despair and self-destructiveness among those at the bottom of the social ladder.
This brings us to a different point — the manner in which religious views should inform public debate and guide elected officials. Surely, secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square. The majority of great reformers in American history not only were motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue their causes. To say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public-policy debates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposal must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teaching of my church or invoke God’s will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.
Almost by definition, faith and reason operate in different domains and involve different paths to discerning truth. Reason — and science — involves the accumulation of knowledge based on realities that we can all apprehend. Religion, by contrast, is based on truths that are not provable through ordinary human understanding — the “belief in things not seen.” When science teachers insist on keeping creationism or intelligent design our of their classrooms, they are not asserting that scientific knowledge is superior to religious insight. They are simply insisting that each path to knowledge involves different rules and that those rules are not interchangeable.
Politics is hardly a science, and it too infrequently depends on reason. But in a pluralistic democracy, the same distinctions apply. Politics, like science, depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. Moreover, politics (unlike science) involves compromise, the art of the possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on the impossible. If God has spoken, the followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.
Abraham has passed God’s test of devotion. He become a model of fidelity to God, and his great faith is rewarded through future generations. And yet it is fair to say that if any of us saw a 21st-century Abraham raising the knife we would call the police; we would wrestle him down; even if we saw him lower the knife at the last minute. We would do so because God doesn’t reveal Himself and His angles to all of us in a single moment. We do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that are possible for all of us to know, understanding that a part of what we know to be true — as individuals or communities of faith — will be true for us alone.
This is not entirely foreign to religious doctrine; even those who claim the Bible’s inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, based on a sense that some passages — the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ’s divinity — are central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life. The American people intuitively understand this, which is why the majority of Catholics practice birth control and some of those opposed to gay marriage nevertheless are opposed to a constitutional amendment banning int.
And we need to recognize that sometimes our argument is less about what is right than about who makes the final determination — whether we need the coercive arm of the state to enforce our values, or whether the subject is one best left to individual conscience and evolving norms.
I don’t believe such doubts make me a bad Christian. I believe that they make me human, limited in y understanding of God’s purpose and therefore prone to sin. When I read the Bible, I do so with the belief that it is not a static text but the Living Word and that I must be continually open to new revelations — whether they come from a lesbian friend or a doctor opposed to abortion.
Friends and strangers alike would have assured them that their daughters had not died in vain — that they had awakened the conscience of a nation and helped liberate a people; that the bomb had burst a dam to let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. And yet would even that knowledge enough to console your grief, to keep you from madness and eternal rage — unless you also knew that you child had gone on to a better place?
Moreover, while my own upbringing hardly typifies the African American experience — and although, largely through luck and circumstance, I now occupy a position that insulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the average black man must endure — I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that during my 45 years have been directed my way. I know what it’s like to have people tell me I can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of swallowed-back anger.
To think clearly about race, then, requires us to see the world on a split screen — to maintain in our sights the kind of America that we want while looking squarely at America as it is, to acknowledge the sins of our past and the challenges of the present without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair.
In general, members of every minority group continue to be measured largely by the degree of our assimilation — how closely speech patterns, dress, and demeanor conform to the dominant white culture — and the more that a minority strays from these external markers, the more he or she is subject to negative assumptions.
The feeling that as a group we have no store of goodwill in America’s accounts, that as individuals we must prove ourselves anew each day, that we will rarely get the benefit of the doubt and will have little margin for error.
And it is also a testament to that generation of African American mothers and fathers whose heroism was less dramatic but no less important: parents who worked all their lives in jobs that were too small for them, without complaint, scrimping and saving to buy a small home; parents who did without so that their children could take dance classes or the school-sponsored field trip; parents who coached Little League games and baked birthday cakes and badgered teachers to make sure that their children weren’t tracked into the less challenging programs; parents who dragged their children to church every Sunday.
Too much television, too much consumption of poisons (blacks smoke more and eat more fast food), and a lack of emphasis on educational achievement.
But mainly it’s a matter of simple self-interest. Most white Americans figure that they haven’t engaged in discrimination themselves and have plenty of their own problems to worry about. They also know that with a national debt approaching $9T and annual deficit of almost $300B, they country has precious few resources to help them with those problems.
As a result, proposals that solely benefit minorities and dissect Americans into “us” and “them” may generate a few short-term concession when the costs to whites aren’t too high, but they can’t serve as the basis for the kinds of sustained, broad-based political coalitions needed to transform America.
Rather than evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of fear and outright contempt. But mostly it’s bred indifference. Black men filling our prisons, black children unable to read or caught in a gangland shooting, the black homeless sleeping on grates and in the parks of our nation’s capital — we take these things for granted, as part of the natural order, a tragic situation, perhaps, but not one for which we are culpable, and certainly not something subject to change.
At the bottom or even the middle ranks of the industry, drug dealing is a minimum-wage affair. For many inner-city men, what prevents gainful employment is not simply the absence of motivation to get off the streets but the absence of a job history or any marketable skills — and, increasingly, the stigma of a prison record. ***
As beneficiaries of a nation more tolerant and more worldly than the one immigrants faced generations ago, a nation that has come to revere its immigrant myth, they are more confident in their place here, more assertive of their rights.
According to them, my remarks always follow a 3-part structure: “I am your friend,” “[Fill in the home country] has been a cradle of civilization,” and “You embody the American dream.”
They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during WW2, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.
Everywhere, it seemed, Mexican and Central American workers came to dominate low-wage work that had once cone to blacks and made inroads in the construction trades that had long excluded black labor. Blacks began to grumble and feel threatened; they wondered if once again they were about to be passed over by those who’d just arrived.
When pressed, many blacks will express a grudging admiration for Latino immigrants — for their strong work ethic and commitment to family, their willingness to start at the bottom and make the most of what little they have.
Still, there’s no denying that many blacks share the same anxieties as many whites about the wave of illegal immigration flooding our Southern border — a sense that what’s happening now is fundamentally different from what has gone on before. Not all these fears are irrational.
Other fears of native-born Americans are disturbingly familiar, echoing the xenophobia once directed at Italian, Irish, and Slavs fresh off the boat — fears that Latinos are inherently too different, in culture and in temperament, to assimilate fully into the American way of life; fears that, with the demographic changes now taking place, Latinos will wrest control away from those accustomed to wielding political power.
- My small business guys are still going to hire immigrants. All your amendment does is make them pay more for their help.
- But why would they hire immigrants over US workers if they cost the same?
- Cause let’s face it, Barrack. These Mexicans are just willing to work harder than Americans do.
When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.
And perhaps more than that, I understood, even at a young age, that my family’s status was determined not only by our wealth but buy our ties to the West. My mother might scowl at the attitudes she heard from other Americans in Jakarta, their condescension toward Indonesians, their unwillingness to learn anything about the country that was hosting them — but given the exchange rate, she was glad to be getting paid in dollars rather than the rupiahs her Indonesian colleagues at the embassy were paid.
All this, I knew, was part of my heritage and set me apart, for my mother and I were citizens of the US, beneficiaries of its power, safe and secure under the blanket of its protection.
For 25 years, in fits and starts, Indonesia’s economy continued to grow. Jakarta became a metropolis of almost 9M souls, with skyscrapers, slums, smog, and nightmare traffic. Men and women left the countryside to join the ranks of wage labor in manufacturing plants built by foreign investment, making sneakers for Nike and shirts for Gap. Bali became the resort of choice for surfers and rockstars. By the early 90s, Indonesia was considered an “Asian tiger,” the next great success story of a globalizing world.
The average Indonesian’s sense of deprivation is amplified by the Internet and satellite TV, which beam in images of the unattainable riches of London, NY, HK, and Paris in exquisite detail. And anti-American sentiment, almost nonexistent during the Suharto years, is now widespread, thanks in part to perception that NY speculators and the IMF purposely triggered the Asian financial crisis.
Indonesia also provides a handy record of US foreign policy over the past 50 years. In broad outline at least, it’s all there: our role in liberating former colonies and creating international institutions to help manage the post-WW2 order; our tendency to view nations and conflicts through the prism of the Cold War; our tireless promotion of American-style capitalism and MNCs; the tolerance and occasional encouragement of tyranny, corruption, and environmental degradation when it served our interests; our optimism once the Cold War ended that Big Macs and the Internet would lead to the end of historical conflicts; the growing economic power o fAsia and the growing resentment of the US as the world’s sole superpower; the realization that in the short term, at least, democratization might lay bare, rather than alleviate, ethnic hatreds and religious divisions — and that the wonders of globalization might also facilitate economic volatility, the spread of pandemics and terrorism.
The same John Quincy Adams who warned against US adventurism abroad became a tireless advocate of continental expansion and served as the chief architect of the Monroe Doctrine.
America would never pursue the systematic colonization practiced by European nations, but it shed all inhibitions about meddling in the affairs of countries it deemed strategically important. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, added a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, declaring that the US would intervene in any Latin American or Caribbean country whose government it deemed not to America’s liking. “The US has not the option as to whether it will or it will not play a great part in the world. It must play a great part. All that it can decide is whether it will play that part well or badly.”
When the war was over, America had emerged as the world’s dominant power — but a power whose prosperity Wilson now understood to be linked to peace and prosperity in faraway lands.
Wilson’s proposals were initially greeted with enthusiasm in the US and around the world. The US Senate, however, was less impressed. Republican Senate Leader Henry Cabot Lodge considered the League of Nations — and the very concept of international law — as an encroachment on American sovereignty, a foolish constraint on America’s ability to impose its will around the world.
But even the power of the US was finite — and because the battle against communism was also a battle of ideas, a test of what system might best serve the hopes and dreams of billions of people around the world, military might alone could not ensure America’s long-term prosperity or security.
What America needed, then, were stable allies — allies that shared the ideals of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, and that saw themselves as having a stake in a market-based economic system. Such alliances, both military and economic, entered into freely and maintained by mutual consent, would be more lasting — and stir less resentment — than any collection of vassal states American imperialism might secure. Likewise, it was in America’s interest to work with other countries to build up international institutions and promote international norms. Not because of a naive assumption that international laws and treaties alone would end conflicts among nations or eliminate the need for American military action, but because the more international norms were reinforced and the more America signaled a willingness to show restraint in the exercise of its power, the fewer the number of conflicts that would arise — and the more legitimate our actions would appear in the eyes of the world when we did not have to move militarily.
Most important, the postwar system over time suffered from too much politics and not enough deliberation and domestic consensus building. Politicians discovered that they could get votes by being tougher on communism than their opponents. Democrats were assailed for “losing China.” McCarthyism destroyed careers and crushed dissent. Kennedy would blame Republicans for a “missile gap” that didn’t exist on his way to beating Nixon.
As a consequence of a more aggressive press corps and the images of body bags flooding into living rooms, Americans began to realize that the best and the brightest in Washington didn’t always know what they were doing - -and didn’t always tell the truth.
In their view, President Johnson, General Westmoreland, the CIA, the “military-industrial complex,” and international institutions were all manifestations of American arrogance, jingoism, racism, capitalism, and imperialism.
By the time Bill Clinton came into office, conventional wisdom suggested that America’s post-Cold War foreign policy would be more a matter of trade than tanks, protecting American copyrights rather than American lives. Clinton himself understood that globalization involved not only new economic challenges but also new security challenges. But in the eyes of the public, at least, foreign policy in the 90s lacked any overarching theme or grand imperatives. US military action in particular seemed entirely a matter of choice, not necessity.
For most Americans, such routines represented a victory of order over chaos, the concrete expression of our belief that so long as we exercised, wore seat belts, had a job with benefits, and avoided certain neighborhoods, our safety was ensured, our families protected.
Now chaos had come to our doorstep. As a consequence, we would have to act differently, understand the world differently.
With improved capabilities, they were arresting more and more insurgent leaders each day, but like street gangs back in Chicago, for every insurgent they arrested, there seemed to be two ready to take his place. Economics, and not just politics, seemed to be feeding the insurgency — the central government had been neglecting Anbar, and male unemployment hovered around 70%.
Still, it’s not too early to draw some conclusions from our actions in Iraq. For our difficulties there don’t just arise as a result of bad execution. They reflect a failure of conception. The fact is, close to 5 years after 9/11 and 15 years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the US still lacks a coherent national security policy. Instead of guiding principles, we have what appear to be a series of ad hoc decisions, with dubious results.
But our allies — and for that matter our enemies — certainly don’t know what those answers are. More important, neither do American people. Without a well-articulated strategy that the public supports and the world understands, America will lack the legitimacy — and ultimately the power — it needs to make the world safer than it is today. We need a revised foreign policy framework that matches the boldness and scope of Truman’s post-WW2 policies — one that addresses both the challenges and the opportunities of a new millennium, one that guides our use of force and express our deepest ideals and commitments.
It was partly because of the experience in Somalia that candidate Bush vowed in the 2000 election never again to expend American military resources on “nation building.”
Since the outset of the Cold War, our ability to deter nation-to-nation aggression has to a large extent underwritten security for every country that commits itself to international rules and norms. With the only blue-water navy that patrols the entire globe, it is our ships that keep the sea lanes clear. And it is our nuclear umbrella that prevented Europe and Japan from entering the arms race during the Cold War, and that — until recently, at least — has led most countries to conclude that nukes aren’t worth the trouble.
Bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat or even incapacitate the US in a conventional war. What he and his allies can do is inflict enough pain to provoke a reaction of the sort we’ve seen in Iraq — a botched and ill-advised US military incursion into a Muslim country, which in turn spurs on insurgencies based on religious sentiment and nationalist pride, which in turn necessitates a lengthy and difficult US occupation, which in turn leads to an escalating death toll on the part of US troops and the local civilian population. All this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims, increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits, and prompts the American public to question not only the war but also those policies that project us into the Islamic world in the first place.
Why conduct ourselves in this way? Because nobody benefits more than we do from the observance of international “rules of the road.” We can’t win converts to those rules if we act as if they apply to everyone but us. When the world’s sole superpower willingly restraints its power and abides by internationally agreed-upon standards of conduct, it sends a message that these are rules worth following, and robs terrorists and dictators of the argument that these rules are simply tools of American imperialism.
If we hope to win the broader battle of ideas, then world opinion must enter into this calculus. And while it may be frustrating at times to hear anti-American posturing from European allies that enjoy the blanket of our protection, or hear speeches in the UN General Assembly designed to obfuscate, distract, or excuse inaction, it’s just possible that beneath all the rhetoric are perspectives that can illuminate the situation and help us make better strategic decisions.
Finally, by engaging our allies, we give them joint ownership over the difficult, methodical, vital, and necessarily collaborative work of limiting the terrorists’ capacity to inflict harm.
But in fact countries like India, Nigeria, and China have developed 2 legal systems — one for foreigners and elites, and one for ordinary people trying to get ahead.
As for countries like Somalia, Sierra Leone, or the Congo, well, they have barely any law whatsoever.
FDR was certainly right when he said, “As a nation we may take pride in the fact that we are softhearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed.”
No country has a bigger stake than we do in strengthening international institutions — which is why we pushed for their creation in the first place, and why we need to take the lead in improving them.
Tired and stressed, we had little time for conversation, much less romance. When I launched my ill-fated congressional run, Michelle put up no pretense of being happy with the decision. My failure to clean up the kitchen suddenly became less endearing. Leaning down to kiss Michelle goodbye in the morning, all I would get was a peck on the cheek. By the time Sasha was born, my wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained. “You only think about yourself. I never thought I’d have to raise a family alone.”
I may tell myself that in some larger sense I am in politics for Malia and Sasha, that the work I do will make the world a better place for them. But such rationalizations seem feeble and painfully abstract when I’m missing one of the girls’ school potlucks because of a vote, or calling Michelle to tell her that session’s been extended and we need to postpone our vacation. Indeed, my recent success in politics does little to assuage the guilt; as Michelle told me once, only half joking, seeing your dad’s picture in the paper may be the kind of neat the first time it happens, but when it happens all the time it’s probably kind of embarrassing.
It’s not that compromise is inherently wrong, I just didn’t find it satisfying. And the one thing I’ve discovered as I get older is that you have to do what is satisfying to you. In fact that’s one of the advantages of old age, I suppose, that you’ve finally learned what matters to you. It’s hard to know that at 26. And the problem is that nobody else can answer that question for you. You can only figure it out on your own.
Sometimes, working in Washington, I feel I am meeting that goal. At other times, it seems as if the goal recedes from me, and all the activity I engage in — the hearings and speeches and press conferences and position papers — are an exercise in vanity, useful to no one.