Sunday, August 24, 2008
Is a new kind of politics even possible?
Dan Radmacher
Recent columns
- Kaine saw much progress in his four years
- Virginia voted for gridlock on Tuesday
- Project Vote Smart tries to educate Virginia voters
- America should listen to this Cassandra
From the RoundTable blog
In "The Audacity of Hope," Barack Obama defines a serious American ailment, a debilitating disease wracking the body politic. As he put it, there is a "gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics -- the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and the trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem."
In that book, written shortly after he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama called for a new kind of politics, one that could remind Democrats and Republicans that we are all Americans with "common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break."
In a very brief interview following his speech in Lynchburg Wednesday night, I asked Obama how he felt that effort was going, given the harsher tone the campaign has taken in recent weeks.
Obama expressed disappointment in the attacks on his character he said the McCain campaign has engaged in, but he was also determined to respond without resorting to the same tactics. He said he would go after McCain's record "in a very clear way."
"I don't think there's a contradiction between running a tough campaign and expressing a desire to reach across partisan lines," he said. "The issues facing this nation are not Democratic issues or Republican issues, they are American issues. We can't solve them by sticking to partisan dogma."
Obama said his issue was with the type of politics McCain was resorting to, not his character.
I asked, though, if it didn't say something about McCain's character that he had chosen to ally himself with the very people who had ended his 2000 presidential run through a vicious smear campaign not unlike the one now undertaken in his name.
McCain was victimized in 2000, Obama said. "It was nasty stuff, false stuff," Obama said, referring to the push poll that asked South Carolina voters whether their opinion of McCain would change if they knew he had a black child out of wedlock. (He did not.)
Obama said that McCain, who was incredibly angered by that experience, could have reacted by declaring, "That's not how politics should be."
Instead, McCain appears to have decided that, when it comes to such abuse, it's better to give than to receive.
He has approved frivolous ads against Obama that, in a clever bit of political jujitsu, attempt to turn the large, enthusiastic crowds Obama generates into a negative. The ads paint Obama as a vapid celebrity, à la Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, and the massive throngs chanting "O-BAM-A" as a mindless mob fooled by Obama's oratorical skills.
McCain is running ads warning that Obama will "raise your taxes," though that's only true if you are among the 2 percent of Americans making more than $250,000 a year. If that's the case, you'll go back to paying what you were prior to President Bush's tax cuts -- the tax cuts McCain once opposed as irresponsible but now embraces.
"But it's not my job to whine," Obama told me. "I'm trying to keep Americans focused on what's at stake. There is a clear choice between our policies."
Asked how he could get that message out to all Americans in such a politically polarized age, he admitted that in the day-to-day news cycle, "it's hard to break through." Americans have been conditioned to be cynical about politicians and to believe the worst.
He hoped that the upcoming Democratic National Convention and the debates with McCain would give him an opportunity to communicate directly with voters.
In his book, Obama says he believes there are Americans out there who are waiting for "a politics with the maturity to balance idealism and realism, to distinguish between what can and cannot be compromised, to admit the possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point."
For these Americans, the red-blue divide that seems so deep to those of us who immerse ourselves in politics is trivial and meaningless -- especially when compared to the challenges facing the nation.
They are right. But overcoming the trivialization of politics won't be easy when so many politicians seem convinced that trivializing politics and slandering opponents is the only path to victory.
Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
