As outlined in yesterday’s “3 Delusions” post, we desperately
need bold solutions to our problems. And we need leaders who boldly speak
the truth. Sadly, that doesn’t exist on today’s political spectrum.
Christopher Hitchens said in Letters to a
Young Contrarian:
“If you care about agreement and civility, then you
had better be equipped with points of argument and combativity, because if you
are not, then the ‘center’ will be occupied and defined without your having
helped to decide it, or determine what and where it is.”
That
describes neatly the tactical failure
of Mr. Obama’s 1st term. He tried a bipartisan solution; he
tried to be about civility and agreement. But, for an orator, his points of argument and his
leadership once in office were weaker than what the moment required.
Bipartisanship is a grand and useful concept. It should be the focus of the senior leaders
of both parties. The lesson to take out of Mr.
Obama’s 1st term was that Republicans chose a course of obstruction when their inaction risked collapsing the
global economy.
That was their game plan. It
lacked vision, it was risky but, it may work to defeat Mr. Obama.
It’s what
should really scare people who are paying attention. We’ll know next Tuesday.
A brief story about President Lincoln: He was trying to move his agenda to hold the Union
together.
His great
foe in that regard was the abolitionist, US Representative Thaddeus Stevens, who
called Lincoln, “the capitulating
compromiser, the dawdler.”
Stevens was a man who only
followed principle. Lincoln was someone who worked the political middle to get things
done.
Doris Kerns Goodwin says in her book about Lincoln, Team
of Rivals, that Lincoln came out against slavery in a speech in 1854,
but in that same speech he declared that denouncing slaveholders wouldn’t
convert them:
Though the cause be “naked truth itself, transformed to
the heaviest lance, harder than steel” [Lincoln said], the sanctimonious
reformer could no more pierce the heart of the drinker or the slave owner than “penetrate
the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be
understood by those who would lead him.” In order to “win a man to your cause,”
Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his
reason.”
Lincoln demonstrates
Hitchens’ point perfectly. He was a leader, he cared about agreement, he knew his arguments
and he was civil. Oh, and he carried the day.
Today, as in 1865, issues and ideology divide us. So, can we find a leader to create the workable
majority for the big ideas we need?
Let’s not
just rule out big ideas, they can happen in a divided America:
· In 1932, we elected Franklin
Delano Roosevelt and he pulled us out of the Great Depression
· 1960 brought us John Kennedy and
ultimately, Lyndon Johnson and with that, the promise of equality for black
America
· In 1980, Ronald Regan helped
usher in a wave of economic growth, prosperity and the collapse of the Soviet
Union
All of these presidents faced opposition from true
believers. All of them worked the middle
of both parties as well as the political edges of their own party.
In his remarks in New Hampshire in June,
President Obama said this:
There are too many people out there who are struggling,
too many folks out of work, too many homes that are still under water.
Of course, we need to do better. The debate is not
whether, it is how. How do we grow the economy faster? How do we create we
create more jobs? How do we pay down our debt? How do we reclaim that central
American promise that no matter who you are, you can make it here if you try?
When we
go to the polls next week, we face a stark choice: to go forward or roll
dangerously backward; whether we continue
to accept the 3 Delusions about the economy as true; whether we will
continue to expand the American dream or whether we will see it collapse in on itself.
You know what to do, and you know how to do it.
Please, vote.
