Don’t Make Solving Super Partisanship Central to Obama’s Vision: It Isn’t

Now that the tsunami of punditry on the President’s inaugural address has washed over us, the main conclusion of both his fans and detractors is left standing. He was aggressive in laying out his vision and did not so much as tip his hat to finding common ground with Republicans.

The Kansas Methodist, Rev. Adam Hamilton, chosen to preach at the National Cathedral Inaugural service, lauded the president for “a gift unlike any other President we have ever had” to cast a vision. However, Hamilton’s real message to Obama seemed to be when he told PBS news hour audiences that working across the partisan aisle should be Obama’s vision. Find issues, he counseled him, where you can work together and then build on that step by step to overcome the bitter partisan divide.

What does Hamilton’s vision mean in practice? All say Republicans and Democrats may be able to come together on an immigration policy. But then, why would anyone think they could move on to cure America’s partisan divide, or even reach agreement on any other issue. Is immigration reform the vision we are looking for? Do we just drop climate change, investing in education, gun control, equal opportunity economy, among other elements of Obama’s vision?

Finding common ground with Republicans should not be the centerpiece of Obama’s vision. As Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein told us a year ago in “It’s Even Worse Than it Looks,” America’s problem isn’t political polarization, it is the takeover of one party, the Republicans, by extremists. Those who are pushing to find consensus at all costs are elevating partisan rancor to the vision level and dignifying and validating extremism. To comment on the President’s Inaugural address, as Speaker Boehner did, that the President’s goal is to “annihilate” Republicans was a completely commonplace Republican statement―but extreme nonetheless.

Obama should not see his goal as finding common ground with extremists. Obama’s aggressive promotion of his vision is just that. If Republicans want to take it as aggression against them, they are wrong. He cares about his vision―not about annihilating Republicans. Republicans hate big government; they must hate politicians whose profession is mastering the art of governing. They are the last to say Obama should care more about placating partisan enemies than he does about succeeding in implementing his vision. He is prepared to leave all calls for nonpartisanship aside and go talk to the American people and get their direct support for his vision. What could be more American, more democratic?

Obama’s vision, in its whole and in its parts, should be what we are all talking about and not debating whether he has crossed some red line of the Republicans, who are so leaderless they don’t even have anyone to draw the red lines.

We must clearly separate America’s political dysfunction from a vision for America. Political dysfunction will get cured when the debate is on the vision. Honest disagreements on elements in a vision are welcomed. However, we should reject those who tell us that the President is aggressive and partisan and that his vision should placate the most extremely disaffected among us. That is not a recipe for success. Moving only where there is common ground is a recipe for disaster.
– Elizabeth Spiro Clark

 

The Election: Press wants a “Tossup”, but it isn’t

The Sunday before the elections, readers of the New York Times and the Washington Post got the strong message that the election was a “tossup”.   This was explicit in the case of the Post, which listed Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, Wisconsin, Virginia, Florida and Ohio as tossup states.  Meanwhile in the New York Times, Nate Silver and his FiveThirtyEight blog was absent from the Sunday edition, which led with an “equally tight” theme for the Presidential race (“competitive states that right to the end are producing equal shares of hope and fear among conflicting signals about the outcome.”)

If you go online to FiveThirtyEight, the most detailed and authoritative analysis of election polling, you would have to ask what equal “shares of hope and fear” are they talking about? Of the argument the election is “too close to call,” Silver says:  “It isn’t. If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can’t acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.”

Of the Post’s seven “tossup” states, Silver lists only one – Florida – as a “tossup”.  In addition, Silver has Iowa, Ohio, New Hampshire, Wisconsin as not just “leaning” Obama, but  as “likely” Obama (i.e. 80-90%).  Silver gives Obama an 85.1% of winning the Electoral vote.

The Post rather gives away its game with a chart where Obama needs from the “tossup” column only Ohio plus either Wisconsin or Colorado (or Ohio plus “likelies” Iowa and NH). The Post ignored its own giveaway sentence – buried in the text on ‘tossup” Ohio – that “virtually every public poll in the last 10 days shows Obama with an advantage.” But then, the Post needs its “tossup” states to make its story “entertainment”.

Is there a reason why the Post and the Times took this “dead heat” approach? Suspense  sells, but is it also that an entrenched “balanced reporting” imperative  trumps any objective analysis, just when objective reporting counts the most? (Note: to see what objective analysis means go to http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/nov-2-for-romney-to-win-state-polls-must-be-statistically-biased/#more-37099).

 

The CEO Style: Good for Running the University of Virginia; Good for running the Country?

Helen Dragas, Chair of the Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia, came to her position from a career as CEO of Dragas Companies, a real estate and construction firm. She brought to her position a reputation for resolve and decisiveness, which she demonstrated when she fired University President Teresa Sullivan with, initially at least, the support of 15 members of the 16 member Board. The Board was comprised almost entirely of individuals who, like Dragas, are heads of businesses or have business backgrounds. No reasons were given for Sullivan’s firing; the consensus opinion was that Dragas and some major donors wanted better cooperation from the President in bringing the University closer to a business model in its operations.

Dragas was appointed by a Democrat and has given money to Democratic politicians, so her action cannot be ascribed to a Republican Party agenda. However, it is hard not to see in this university leadership crisis the same downsides of a business background and culture at play that would be at play if Mitt Romney, touting his business credentials for the job, became President. It is hard to translate the goal of making money off of building and selling houses to nurturing the values of a great institution of higher learning. It is hard to translate buying up distressed companies, making money, often, off of their destruction rather than their improved operations, to guiding a nation to greater security and well-being for its citizens.

Autocratic decision-making style is not appropriate in either case. The Sullivan firing followed a secretive and abbreviated process that might be termed “model” CEO decision making. The firing immediately led to the resignation of one of UVA’s star academics, who clearly did not see his role as a division chief in a construction firm following orders. Romney has been noted for his secretive style as governor of Massachusetts.

Accountability for the Dragas decision and the swift reinstatement of President Sullivan came partly as a result of outraged student demonstrations in support of Sullivan. The chief mechanism for keeping a President of the United States democratically accountable are elections. If Romney is elected and doesn’t do well, then he can be “fired” at the next election. However, that scenario assumes that after four years of a Romney presidency, the lines of accountability will remain clear after outsourcing of government functions to corporate supporters and unlimited political money channeled from the top 1 percent to political campaigns. The chorus of students, professors, and graduates cannot turn around a national election. The answer is clear: we must work to re-elect President Obama.

 

On the Debt Ceiling Stalemate: A Sermon for the Republican Right

I have been many times to see La Boheme, sometimes railing against Puccini’s universal plot structure, where the women always die and the men walk away. The last time I went – at a music festival deep in the Virginia countryside – I saw another theme. In the opera’s last scene, Puccini aims straight and true for the heart, when as Mimi is dying she and Rodolfo reprise the first moments of their love in Rodolfo’s darkened apartment, where each is pretending to look for Mimi’s key in order to stay together longer. Puccini is brief, as Mimi’s life is brief, but his music opens up their feelings to us, feelings that become infinite because shared through empathy.

The scholar Lynn Hunt has written on the origins of human rights (Inventing Human Rights, Norton, 2007). She identifies the invention of the novel as an important trigger for a new sensibility, especially the extension of the feeling of empathy across class lines coming from identification with the interior lives of ordinary persons. She discusses in particular the widely popular episolatory novels, Clarissa and Pamela by Samuel Richardson and Julie by Rousseau. “Human rights could only flourish when people learned to think of others as their equals, as like them in some fundamental fashion. They learned this equality at least in part by experiencing identification with ordinary characters who seemed dramatically present and familiar even if ultimately fictional.” A century and a half later Puccini draws us into a poor young woman’s life as Richardson and Rousseau had with a different artistic form, but creating the same powerful empathy.

The real Mimis lived – and live – lives that seem no more than a gnats bite, quickly brushed away. Mimi didn’t have health care; research had not come up with a cure for TB; there were no minimum labor protections. A poor seamstress was virtually forced into prostitution in a world of people who mattered and people who didn’t matter. It seemed that we had moved to an understanding that we all matter as human beings and are bound together in a community. Government is one vehicle that creates actions and institutions to better lives, following up on that feeling of empathy. Instead of the evanescence of a gnat’s bite, Mimi’s spirit is a big as the universe the minute we say no one should die of destitution.

Many on the conservative right today appear to live in a world where human beings do not have a right to be recognized in some moral sense as equally valuable and that sense of equality is essential if we are to feel duties and obligations to others. Republican politicians have denounced using government to better lives as evil socialism. For many on the religious right, charity is the way to deal with need and is a matter of an individual choice the government should not interfere with. The fact that charity’s reach will be random and inadequate is not seen as a deficit.

Empathy builds in us an enlarged moral vision. Without it we are free to see government, for one thing, solely as it impinges on our defined-down selves. Who can forget Republican Senator Rand Paul’s rant that the government should get out of his decisions on what toilet to buy (water usage!). Defining ourselves down, as we have seen in the debate over deficit reduction and raising the debt ceiling, leads inevitably to a small minded vision of our country and what we, together, are capable of accomplishing. We become, as President Obama said, addressing the nation on the debt ceiling stalemate, “disjointed individuals, but not a society.”