If you're only tool is a hammer, you tend to look at all problems as nails.
Mark Twain
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Dear Friends,
You remember Paul Begala, James Carville's sidekick in the 1992 kick-ass campaign that (narrowly) sent Bill Clinton to the White House with 43% of the popular vote -- thanks mostly to the calculus of Ross Perot's spoiler campaign and George H. W. Bush's somnambulant enterprise.
Well, Paul was up bright and early yesterday morning with some advice for his friends who are congregating in Denver to nominate Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And he posted his suggestions on the eminently suitable platform of the Huff-and-Puffington Post, making it all too wonderful for words.
Here's what he had to say in “Please, Democrats, Attack:”
“But I have a seven-point plan for uniting the Obama and Clinton wings of the party:
“Attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, attack.
“Attack.”
Such helpful thinking. Such originality. Such tripe.
Of course, Begala's prescription is a bit more nuanced than that:
“. . . each speaker has one job at the Democratic convention: make the case for change. That case begins with a resounding, ringing indictment of the failed Bush-McCain policies.
“In other words: attack.”
And he's got more than a few victories under his black belt to support his perspective.
But if he and his many like-minded friends and associates in politics haven't heard, this election is about the future and not the past. And for millions and millions of Americans “attack-attack-attack-attack-attack-attack-attack” is the politics of the past.
Attack politics has consistently and continuously undermined and eroded the fragile framework of a relatively effective democracy.
Mind you, no one is proposing that Obama and Biden ought to ignore the disorder and disarray that has been wrought by the Bush administration -- not for a second. Nor is anyone suggesting that now is the time to make a wholesale exchange of “kick-ass” for “kumbayah.”
Politics is a blood sport, and some noses and arms -- and the occasional leg -- are going to get broken along the way between Labor Day and Election Day.
But the last thing this electorate wants to be subjected to during those sixty-five days is two sets of candidates screaming at each other Crossfire-style. As the saying goes, “Been there, done that.”
A large quotient of the theme of “change” to which Barack Obama has addressed himself for the last year-and-a-half is that we must begin to change the way we think about -- and conduct -- our politics.
So the operative notion isn't simply change; it's that we have reached a place where we must begin the process of changing.
So when Begala says, “ . . . make the case for change. That case begins with a resounding, ringing indictment of the failed Bush-McCain policies."
Yes.
But when his strategy is to, “Attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, attack.”
No.
And it's the space in between “making the case for change” and “attack-attack-attack” where our political rhetoric needs retooling so that it resembles a conversation among adults and not road rage.
It's a matter of degree. The change will come incrementally, unevenly, and, in all likelihood, inequitably.
We've already seen the literature and the language from the right.
“The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality" -- by that distinguished scholar, Jerome R. Corsi, co-author of "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry" -- is published by Threshold Editions, Mary Matalin's imprint at Simon & Schuster.
Matalin, you'll recall, is the wife of firebrand James Carville, and a black beret in the politics of attack-attack-attack-attack-attack-attack-attack, having served in Lee Atwater's Revolutionary Guard Unit and the headquarters staff of Vice President Dick Cheney.
To paraphrase Twain, these are people who were born with hammers in their hands, and for whom the landscape of American politics is a succession of nails, all waiting to beaten into the ground.
It was worked for them. It has not worked for us.
It may have worked on us, but it is making the business of governing harder and harder and harder just when the issues we confront are getting tougher and tougher and tougher.
So someone needed to blow a whistle, to attempt an intervention.
Barack Obama did it. It worked.
Not by a landslide, to be sure. And had Hillary Clinton's campaign been more effective, he might not have succeeded. But hers wasn't and his was, and that has made all the difference.
I haven't the slightest notion that the Begala-Carville-Matalin-Morris-Penn-Rove cadre of American political consultants will find this missive the least bit persuasive; and, in fact, I can hear them laughing themselves sick right now.
But if this makes any sense to you, send it along to someone who might be open to the message, because if we're going to begin leaching some of the “attackattackattackattackattackattackattack” out of the system, it will take more than a village.
And more than one election cycle.
P.S. Although it's unlikely that John McCain has an interest in TMR's thoughts about his selection of a vice presidential running mate, our counsel would be to take a cue from Barack Obama and draw from the top of the deck, not the bottom. That will send an early and important message to the base that they can't have everything they want.
McCain's strongest choice? Former Pennsylvania Governor and Homeland Security Secretary, Tom Ridge.
Comments