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December 09, 2008

The Audacity of Hope - 1

I've recently purchased and begun reading Barack Obama's book "The Audacity of Hope" looking for insights into not just how he intends to lead but into his philosophical premises.

A popular lay-definition of "insanity" is: trying the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Seems to me that what we've been doing for a long while now simply isn't working. Furthermore, it seems to me that a heck of a lot of my fellow Americans have reached similar conclussions and that this directly contributed to our having voted for Obama.

With those premises in mind, I will periodically be posting excerpts from Obama's book that struck me as I read it. Hopefully we can all discuss and perhaps learn from it. Perhaps not, but nothing ventured/nothing gained.

"Whatever the explanation, after Reagan the lines between Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, would be drawn in more sharply ideological terms. This was true, of course, for the hot-button issues of affirmative action, crime, welfare, abortion, and school prayer, all of which were extensions of earlier battles. But it was also now true for every other issue, large or small, domestic or foreign, all of which were reduced to a menu of either-or, for-or-against, sout-bite-ready choices. 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.

Sometimes I suspect that even the Republican leaders who immediately followed Reagan weren't entirely comfortable with the direction politics had taken. In the mouths of men like George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole, thepolarizing rhetoric and the politics of resentment always seemed forced, a way of peeling off voters from the Democratic base and not necessarily a recipe for governing.

But for a younger generation of conservative operatives who would soon rise to power, for Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, the fiery rhetoric was more than a matter of campaign strategy. They were true believers who meant what they said, whether it was "No new taxes" or "we are a Christian nation." In fact, with their rigid doctrines, slash-and-burn style, and exaggerated sense of having been aggrieved, this new conservative leadership was eerily reminiscent of some of the New Left's leaders during the sixties. As with their left-wing counterparts, this new vanguard of the right viewed politics as a contest not just between competing policy vision, but between good and evil. Activists in both parties began developing litmus tests, checklists of orthodoxy, leaving a Democrat who questioned abortion increasingly lonely, and Republican who championed gun control effectively marooned. 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. - Chapter 1: Republicans and Democrats, pages 40-42 (emphasis supplied)

Posted by Kevin at December 9, 2008 12:15 PM