Think of this as Volume 14, Number 5 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.
If you poke a Republican and ask them whose Presidency they would most like to have back, the honest answer is going to be Roosevelt.
The differences among Republicans are only over which Roosevelt they seek to repeal -- Franklin or Theodore.
Poke a Democrat and you will usually get the answer Nixon. It's not so much what Nixon did -- in many ways he was our most liberal President ever. It was how he did it, what I call the Nixon Thesis of Conflict.
The Nixon Thesis is deeply embedded in our political culture now. We assume that politics is war, that every battle is binary, that the other party is an "enemy" that must be destroyed, not a collection of fellow Americans with which we do political battle, then join for a beer. Political reporting is dispatches from the front.
It is this Thesis that Barack Obama is most determined to overthrow. The goal of his politics is to simply repeal Nixon.
This was much in evidence at last night's State of the Union speech. Given recent setbacks in Congress and in Massachusetts, my natural instinct is to fight back. They kick you in the balls, you kick them back, harder.
Kicking them in the balls is what the Netroots were built to do. Howard Dean, Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas, what they have been building online is the liberal equivalent to the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. They believe in something, something completely contrary to what conservatives believe in, and they're determined to fight for it as conservatives do.
I agree with them. I would much rather give my money and time to Moveon.org than to a Democratic National Committee that supports weak sisters like Ben Nelson.
But what's most clear is that's not really what this President is about. Changing the tone is more than a slogan with Barack Obama. It's his passion.
Before we can have consensus, we must have an end to politics as war. It's this peace Barack Obama seeks, and he is using "this moment" to press for it above all.
So while any other Democratic politician would press to have the Senate push through the health bill under reconciliation, and use a fading Democratic majority there as it's used in the (more popular) House, the President once more urged compromise. For the lions of the GOP House, who hate him with a passion Confederates reserved for Lincoln, Obama said he would come to their meetings, implying that what worked for Henry Louis Gates and the Boston cop can work on Capitol Hill.
An e-mail blast sent in the wake of his speech used his kindest words toward partisan ends.
We have just finished a difficult year. We have come through a difficult decade. But a new year has come. A new decade stretches before us. We don't quit. I don't quit. Let's seize this moment -- to start anew, to carry the dream forward, and to strengthen our union once more.
It's hard to figure this President. Many Democrats wanted another Roosevelt. We wanted a Lincoln who would fight for us. Even a Nixon, feeding us rhetoric and telling us to charge the enemy's battlements, that we would understand.
I'm certain that to the pundits, this rhetoric makes our President seem weak, vacillating, easy to push around. An echo and not a choice. But Americans still wear the scars of our own internal wars -- McCarthyism and racist, religious populism still rule many hearts. We don't see our fellow Americans as Americans -- we see them as categories.
Lots of Republicans pretend to yearn for some bygone era, when the air was cleaner, when kids did their homework, where people knew their place and America was Number One. That place never really existed. But it can exist, in any heart that can hold out a hand, take the hand of another, and not use the off-hand to pop the other guy in the kisser.
Ultimately the message of Barack Obama is there are too few of us to afford a them. We have to come to some consensus because the problems before us are too great for us to afford this incessant conflict. Democracy must provide a result -- policy -- which people can accept, even if grudgingly. If it can't then everything we were taught about our nation and our values and our history is a pack of lies.
Who better to sell this message than Barack Obama? The son of a Kenyan father who was torn apart by his own demons, raised by white members of the Greatest Generation. Half-black and half-white, with relatives on every continent and of every color. A synthesis greater than the sum of the parts. In a word, America. The America we pretend exists within us, standing before us, urging us forward, toward the better angels of our nature.
It's a challenge aimed at my heart, and at yours. It is the real battle of our time. The Civil War is still being fought and it can still be lost. Or we can bind up this nation's wounds and seek a new birth of freedom.
Your choice, America.
Recent Comments