I’ve been reading the late Ted Kennedy’s memoir True Compass, which I got for Christmas. I’m only up to the Watergate years at the moment, but it’s already been a fascinating read. Reading this reminded me of what I think was Kennedy’s only appearance on “The Daily Show” back in April 2006, where he was promoting another book.
In that interview, Kennedy contrasted what he called the Bush Administration’s “politics of fear” with the American narrative up to that point: emphasis on hope for the future. Watching that clip again, after reading Kennedy’s perception of what his older brothers represented in American politics, it’s evident what he saw in Barack Obama’s early candidacy. No, it’s not just the ability to give a stirring speech, as many of Obama’s detractors have dismissed him. I imagine that, in Obama, Kennedy saw a return to leaders who challenged Americans to act out our founding ideals in our policies, instead of just cynically appealing to the lowest common denominator.
In the last year, we’ve seen Obama the president – a leader who’s more deliberative and slow-moving than Obama the candidate appeared to some. Candidate Obama was lampooned as a naïve hope-monger. But anyone who paid attention to his stated positions during the campaign, on everything from taxes to health care to resolving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, can’t be surprised by anything he’s done in office. (One glaring exception is LGBT civil rights, where the Obama Administration has worked in total opposition to campaign pledges.) That Obama is not the radical leftist his opponents painted him to be is why those opponents are reduced to questioning his birth certificate and calling him a Communist. (Really? What is this, 1953?)
Which brings me to this… In the last year, we’ve also seen the opposition party capitulate to un-elected radio personalities and the Facebook page of an unemployed ex-VP candidate. I would never suggest that a minority party just silently go along with the majority at the expense of its own principles, but that’s not what we’re seeing here. Olympia Snowe questioning why the Senate must vote on a health care reform bill before Christmas is productive opposition; Virginia Foxx calling reform more dangerous than Osama bin Laden is something else entirely. In other words, we can, and should, debate policy without resorting to inflammatory scare tactics.
Returning to the Kennedy book – one of the most striking things about Kennedy’s memoir are the cordial relationships he recounts between members of different political parties. It’s easy to say that those relationships are a relic of an age where governing was conducted out of the view of 24-hour news/commentary networks… but that isn’t really accurate. Bipartisan work does still happen in Congress. For instance, a mental-health parity bill going into effect in 2010 was co-sponsored by Democrat Patrick Kennedy and Republican Jim Ramstad in the House, and Sen. Kennedy and Republican Pete Domenici in the Senate, and was signed into law by President Bush. But that’s not as sexy as Michele Bachman’s latest screed, so our media doesn’t talk about it.
My hope for the upcoming year is that principled people on both sides of the aisle will continue to do the thankless work of hammering out laws that benefit Americans, even if it means they forgo sound bites on Fox News or MSNBC. I don’t think that this is a naïve hope; even in an election year, most of our elected representatives understand that Fox & Friends or Huffington Post don’t return them to office – voters in their districts do. And those voters, at the end of the day, really only care about results.
So, here’s believing that our national conversation can rise above “death panels” and “Republicans want you to die quickly,” and that we can push ourselves to make the hard decisions that will ultimately improve our quality of life.
No comments:
Post a Comment