The Audacity of Hope (16 page)

A few months later, Time magazine asked if I would be interested in writing an essay for a special issue on Lincoln. I didn’t have time to write something new, so I asked the magazine’s editors if my speech would be acceptable. They said it was, but asked if I could personalize it a bit more—say something about Lincoln’s impact on my life. In between meetings I dashed off a few changes. One of those changes was to the passage quoted above, which now read, “In Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat—in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles.”

No sooner had the essay appeared than Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, weighed in. Under the title “Conceit of Government,” she wrote: “This week comes the previously careful Sen. Barack Obama, flapping his wings in Time Magazine and explaining that he’s a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better.” She went on to say, “There is nothing wrong with Barack Obama’s resume, but it is a log-cabin-free zone. So far it is also a greatness-free zone. If he keeps talking about himself like this it always will be.”

Ouch!

It’s hard to tell, of course, whether Ms. Noonan seriously thought I was comparing myself to Lincoln, or whether she just took pleasure in filleting me so elegantly. As potshots from the press go, it was very mild—and not entirely undeserved.

Still, I was reminded of what my veteran colleagues already knew—that every statement I made would be subject to scrutiny, dissected by every manner of pundit, interpreted in ways over which I had no control, and combed through for a potential error, misstatement, omission, or contradiction that might be filed away by the opposition party and appear in an unpleasant TV ad somewhere down the road. In an environment in which a single ill-considered remark can generate more bad publicity than years of ill-considered policies, it should have come as no surprise to me that on Capitol Hill jokes got screened, irony became suspect, spontaneity was frowned upon, and passion was considered downright dangerous. I started to wonder how long it took for a politician to internalize all this; how long before the committee of scribes and editors and censors took residence in your head; how long before even the “candid” moments became scripted, so that you choked up or expressed outrage only on cue.

How long before you started sounding like a politician?

There was another lesson to be learned: As soon as Ms. Noonan’s column hit, it went racing across the Internet, appearing on every right-wing website as proof of what an arrogant, shallow boob I was (just the quote Ms. Noonan selected, and not the essay itself, generally made an appearance on these sites). In that sense, the episode hinted at a more subtle and corrosive aspect of modern media—how a particular narrative, repeated over and over again and hurled through cyberspace at the speed of light, eventually becomes a hard particle of reality; how political caricatures and nuggets of conventional wisdom lodge themselves in our brain without us ever taking the time to examine them.

For example, it’s hard to find any mention of Democrats these days that doesn’t suggest we are “weak” and “don’t stand for anything.” Republicans, on the other hand, are “strong” (if a little mean), and Bush is “decisive” no matter how often he changes his mind. A vote or speech by Hillary Clinton that runs against type is immediately labeled calculating; the same move by John McCain burnishes his maverick credentials. “By law,” according to one caustic observer, my name in any article must be preceded by the words “rising star”—although Noonan’s piece lays the groundwork for a different if equally familiar story line: the cautionary tale of a young man who comes to Washington, loses his head with all the publicity, and ultimately becomes either calculating or partisan (unless he can somehow manage to move decisively into the maverick camp).

Of course, the PR machinery of politicians and their parties helps feed these narratives, and over the last few election cycles, at least, Republicans have been far better at such “messaging” than the Democrats have been (a cliché that, unfortunately for us Democrats, really is true). The spin works, though, precisely because the media itself are hospitable to spin. Every reporter in Washington is working under pressures imposed by editors and producers, who in turn are answering to publishers or network executives, who in turn are poring over last week’s ratings or last year’s circulation figures and trying to survive the growing preference for PlayStation and reality TV. To make the deadline, to maintain market share and feed the cable news beast, reporters start to move in packs, working off the same news releases, the same set pieces, the same stock figures. Meanwhile, for busy and therefore casual news consumers, a well- worn narrative is not entirely unwelcome. It makes few demands on our thought or time; it’s quick and easy to digest. Accepting spin is easier on everybody.

This element of convenience also helps explain why, even among the most scrupulous reporters, objectivity often means publishing the talking points of different sides of a debate without any perspective on which side might actually be right. A typical story might begin: “The White House today reported that despite the latest round of tax cuts, the deficit is projected to be cut in half by the year 2010.” This lead will then be followed by a quote from a liberal analyst attacking the White House numbers and a conservative analyst defending the White House numbers. Is one analyst more credible than the other? Is there an independent analyst somewhere who might walk us through the numbers? Who knows? Rarely does the reporter have time for such details; the story is not really about the merits of the tax cut or the dangers of the deficit but rather about the dispute between the parties. After a few paragraphs, the reader can conclude that Republicans and Democrats are just bickering again and turn to the sports page, where the story line is less predictable and the box score tells you who won.

Indeed, part of what makes the juxtaposition of competing press releases so alluring to reporters is that it feeds that old journalistic standby—personal conflict. It’s hard to deny that political civility has declined in the past decade, and that the parties differ sharply on major policy issues. But at least some of the decline in civility arises from the fact that, from the press’s perspective, civility is boring. Your quote doesn’t run if you say, “I see the other guy’s point of view” or “The issue’s really complicated.” Go on the attack, though, and you can barely fight off the cameras. Often, reporters will go out of their way to stir up the pot, asking questions in such a way as to provoke an inflammatory response. One TV reporter I know back in Chicago was so notorious for feeding you the quote he wanted that his interviews felt like a Laurel and Hardy routine.

“Do you feel betrayed by the Governor’s decision yesterday?” he would ask me.

“No. I’ve talked to the Governor, and I’m sure we can work out our differences before the end of session.”

“Sure…but do you feel betrayed by the Governor?”

“I wouldn’t use that word. His view is that…”

“But isn’t this really a betrayal on the Governor’s part?”

The spin, the amplification of conflict, the indiscriminate search for scandal and miscues—the cumulative impact of all this is to erode any agreed-upon standards for judging the truth. There’s a wonderful, perhaps apocryphal story that people tell about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the brilliant, prickly, and iconoclastic late senator from New York. Apparently, Moynihan was in a heated argument with one of his colleagues over an issue, and the other senator, sensing he was on the losing side of the argument, blurted out: “Well, you may disagree with me, Pat, but I’m entitled to my own opinion.” To which Moynihan frostily replied, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”

Moynihan’s assertion no longer holds. We have no authoritative figure, no Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation. Depending on your

viewing preferences, global climate change is or is not dangerously accelerating; the budget deficit is going down or going up.

Nor is the phenomenon restricted to reporting on complicated issues. In early 2005, Newsweek published allegations that U.S. guards and interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention center had goaded and abused prisoners by, among other things, flushing a Koran down the toilet. The White House insisted there was absolutely no truth to the story. Without hard documentation and in the wake of violent protests in Pakistan regarding the article, Newsweek was forced to publish a self-immolating retraction. Several months later, the Pentagon released a report indicating that some U.S. personnel at Guantanamo had in fact engaged in multiple instances of inappropriate activity— including instances in which U.S. female personnel pretended to smear menstrual blood on detainees during questioning, and at least one instance of a guard splashing a Koran and a prisoner with urine. The Fox News crawl that afternoon: “Pentagon finds no evidence of Koran being flushed down the toilet.”

I understand that facts alone can’t always settle our political disputes. Our views on abortion aren’t determined by the science of fetal development, and our judgment on whether and when to pull troops out of Iraq must necessarily be based on probabilities. But sometimes there are more accurate and less accurate answers; sometimes there are facts that cannot be spun, just as an argument about whether it’s raining can usually be settled by stepping outside. The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those—like the White House press office—who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.

Today’s politician understands this. He may not lie, but he understands that there is no great reward in store for those who speak the truth, particularly when the truth may be complicated. The truth may cause consternation; the truth will be attacked; the media won’t have the patience to sort out all the facts and so the public may not know the difference between truth and falsehood. What comes to matter then is positioning—the statement on an issue that will avoid controversy or generate needed publicity, the stance that will fit both the image his press folks have constructed for him and one of the narrative boxes the media has created for politics in general. The politician may still, as a matter of personal integrity, insist on telling the truth as he sees it. But he does so knowing that whether he believes in his positions matters less than whether he looks like he believes; that straight talk counts less than whether it sounds straight on TV.

From what I’ve observed, there are countless politicians who have crossed these hurdles and kept their integrity intact, men and women who raise campaign contributions without being corrupted, garner support without being held captive by special interests, and manage the media without losing their sense of self. But there is one final hurdle that, once you’ve settled in Washington, you cannot entirely avoid, one that is certain to make at least a sizable portion of your constituency think ill of you—and that is the thoroughly unsatisfactory nature of the legislative process.

I don’t know a single legislator who doesn’t anguish on a regular basis over the votes he or she has to take. There are times when one feels a piece of legislation to be so obviously right that it merits little internal debate (John McCain’s amendment

prohibiting torture by the U.S. government comes to mind). At other times, a bill appears on the floor that’s so blatantly one-sided or poorly designed that one wonders how the sponsor can maintain a straight face during debate.

But most of the time, legislation is a murky brew, the product of one hundred compromises large and small, a blend of legitimate policy aims, political grandstanding, jerry-rigged regulatory schemes, and old-fashioned pork barrels. Often, as I read through the bills coming to the floor my first few months in the Senate, I was confronted with the fact that the principled thing was less clear than I had originally thought; that either an aye vote or a nay vote would leave me with some trace of remorse. Should I vote for an energy bill that includes my provision to boost alternative fuel production and improves the status quo, but that’s wholly inadequate to the task of lessening America’s dependence on foreign oil? Should I vote against a change in the Clean Air Act that will weaken regulations in some areas but strengthen regulation in others, and create a more predictable system for corporate compliance? What if the bill increases pollution but funds clean coal technology that may bring jobs to an impoverished part of Illinois?

Again and again I find myself poring over the evidence, pro and con, as best I can in the limited time available. My staff will inform me that the mail and phone calls are evenly divided and that interest groups on both sides are keeping score. As the hour approaches to cast my vote, I am frequently reminded of something John F. Kennedy wrote fifty years ago in his book Profiles in Courage:

Few, if any, face the same dread finality of decision that confronts a Senator facing an important call of the roll. He may want more time for his decision—he may believe there is something to be said for both sides—he may feel that a slight amendment could remove all difficulties—but when that roll is called he cannot hide, he cannot equivocate, he cannot delay—and he senses that his constituency, like the Raven in Poe’s poem, is perched there on his Senate desk, croaking “Nevermore” as he casts the vote that stakes his political future.