The Audacity of Hope (24 page)

government waste and fraud, even as the number of pork barrel projects increased by an astonishing 64 percent.

The result of this collective denial is the most precarious budget situation that we’ve seen in years. We now have an annual budget deficit of almost $300 billion, not counting more than $180 billion we borrow every year from the Social Security Trust Fund, all of which adds directly to our national debt. That debt now stands at $9 trillion—approximately $30,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country.

It’s not the debt itself that’s most troubling. Some debt might have been justified if we had spent the money investing in those things that would make us more competitive— overhauling our schools, or increasing the reach of our broadband system, or installing E85 pumps in gas stations across the country. We might have used the surplus to shore up Social Security or restructure our health-care system. Instead, the bulk of the debt is a direct result of the President’s tax cuts, 47.4 percent of which went to the top 5 percent of the income bracket, 36.7 percent of which went to the top 1 percent, and 15 percent of which went to the top one-tenth of 1 percent, typically people making $1.6 million a year or more.

In other words, we ran up the national credit card so that the biggest beneficiaries of the global economy could keep an even bigger share of the take.

So far we’ve been able to get away with this mountain of debt because foreign central banks—particularly China’s—want us to keep buying their exports. But this easy credit won’t continue forever. At some point, foreigners will stop lending us money, interest rates will go up, and we will spend most of our nation’s output paying them back.

If we’re serious about avoiding such a future, then we’ll have to start digging ourselves out of this hole. On paper, at least, we know what to do. We can cut and consolidate nonessential programs. We can rein in spending on health-care costs. We can eliminate tax credits that have outlived their usefulness and close loopholes that let corporations get away without paying taxes. And we can restore a law that was in place during the Clinton presidency—called Paygo—that prohibits money from leaving the federal treasury, either in the form of new spending or tax cuts, without some way of compensating for the lost revenue.

If we take all of these steps, emerging from this fiscal situation will still be difficult. We will probably have to postpone some investments that we know are needed to improve our competitive position in the world, and we will have to prioritize the help that we give to struggling American families.

But even as we make these difficult choices, we should ponder the lesson of the past six years and ask ourselves whether our budgets and our tax policy really reflect the values that we profess to hold.

“IF THERE’S CLASS warfare going on in America, then my class is winning.”

I was sitting in the office of Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and the second richest man in the world. I had heard about the famous simplicity of Buffett’s tastes—how he still lived in the same modest home that he’d bought in 1967, and how he had sent all his children to the Omaha public schools.

Still, I had been a little surprised when I walked into a nondescript office building in Omaha and entered what looked like an insurance agent’s office, with mock wood paneling, a few decorative pictures on the wall, and no one in sight. “Come on back,” a woman’s voice had called out, and I’d turned the corner to find the Oracle of Omaha himself, chuckling about something with his daughter, Susie, and his assistant, Debbie, his suit a bit rumpled, his bushy eyebrows sticking out high over his glasses.

Buffett had invited me to Omaha to discuss tax policy. More specifically, he wanted to know why Washington continued to cut taxes for people in his income bracket when the country was broke.

“I did a calculation the other day,” he said as we sat down in his office. “Though I’ve never used tax shelters or had a tax planner, after including the payroll taxes we each pay, I’ll pay a lower effective tax rate this year than my receptionist. In fact, I’m pretty sure I pay a lower rate than the average American. And if the President has his way, I’ll be paying even less.”

Buffett’s low rates were a consequence of the fact that, like most wealthy Americans, almost all his income came from dividends and capital gains, investment income that since 2003 has been taxed at only 15 percent. The receptionist’s salary, on the other hand, was taxed at almost twice that rate once FICA was included. From Buffett’s perspective, the discrepancy was unconscionable.

“The free market’s the best mechanism ever devised to put resources to their most efficient and productive use,” he told me. “The government isn’t particularly good at that. But the market isn’t so good at making sure that the wealth that’s produced is being distributed fairly or wisely. Some of that wealth has to be plowed back into education, so that the next generation has a fair chance, and to maintain our infrastructure, and provide some sort of safety net for those who lose out in a market economy. And it just makes sense that those of us who’ve benefited most from the market should pay a bigger share.”

We spent the next hour talking about globalization, executive compensation, the worsening trade deficit, and the national debt. He was especially exercised over Bush’s proposed elimination of the estate tax, a step he believed would encourage an aristocracy of wealth rather than merit.

“When you get rid of the estate tax,” he said, “you’re basically handing over command of the country’s resources to people who didn’t earn it. It’s like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the children of all the winners at the 2000 Games.”

Before I left, I asked Buffett how many of his fellow billionaires shared his views. He laughed.

“I’ll tell you, not very many,” he said. “They have this idea that it’s ‘their money’ and they deserve to keep every penny of it. What they don’t factor in is all the public investment that lets us live the way we do. Take me as an example. I happen to have a talent for allocating capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent of mine would be pretty worthless. I can’t run very fast. I’m not particularly strong. I’d probably end up as some wild animal’s dinner.

“But I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the financial system to let me do what I love doing—and make a lot of money doing it. The least I can do is help pay for all that.”

It may be surprising to some to hear the world’s foremost capitalist talk in this way, but Buffett’s views aren’t necessarily a sign of a soft heart. Rather, they reflect an understanding that how well we respond to globalization won’t be just a matter of identifying the right policies. It will also have to do with a change in spirit, a willingness to put our common interests and the interests of future generations ahead of short-term expediency.

More particularly, we will have to stop pretending that all cuts in spending are equivalent, or that all tax increases are the same. Ending corporate subsidies that serve no discernible economic purpose is one thing; reducing health-care benefits to poor children is something else entirely. At a time when ordinary families are feeling hit from all sides, the impulse to keep their taxes as low as possible is honorable and right. What’s less honorable has been the willingness of the rich and the powerful to ride this antitax sentiment for their own purposes, or the way the President, Congress, lobbyists, and conservative commentators have been able to successfully conflate in the mind of voters the very real tax burdens of the middle class and the very manageable tax burdens of the wealthy.

Nowhere has this confusion been more evident than in the debate surrounding the proposed repeal of the estate tax. As currently structured, a husband and wife can pass on $4 million without paying any estate tax; in 2009, under current law, that figure goes up to $7 million. For this reason, the tax currently affects only the wealthiest one-half of 1 percent of the population, and will affect only one-third of 1 percent in 2009. And since completely repealing the estate tax would cost the U.S. Treasury around $1 trillion, it would be hard to find a tax cut that was less responsive to the needs of ordinary Americans or the long-term interests of the country.

Nevertheless, after some shrewd marketing by the President and his allies, 70 percent of the country now opposes the “death tax.” Farm groups come to visit my office, insisting that the estate tax will mean the end of the family farm, despite the Farm Bureau’s inability to point to a single farm in the country lost as a result of the “death tax.” Meanwhile, I’ve had corporate CEOs explain to me that it’s easy for Warren Buffett to favor an estate tax—even if his estate is taxed at 90 percent, he could still have a few billion to pass on to his kids—but that the tax is grossly unfair to those with estates worth “only” $10 or $15 million.

So let’s be clear. The rich in America have little to complain about. Between 1971 and 2001, while the median wage and salary income of the average worker showed literally no gain, the income of the top hundredth of a percent went up almost 500 percent. The distribution of wealth is even more skewed, and levels of inequality are now higher than at any time since the Gilded Age. These trends were already at work throughout the nineties. Clinton’s tax policies simply slowed them down a bit. Bush’s tax cuts made them worse.

I point out these facts not—as Republican talking points would have it—to stir up class envy. I admire many Americans of great wealth and don’t begrudge their success in the least. I know that many if not most have earned it through hard work, building businesses and creating jobs and providing value to their customers. I simply believe that those of us who have benefited most from this new economy can best afford to shoulder the obligation of ensuring every American child has a chance for that same success. And perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffett seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that’s hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American’s yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.

More than anything, it is that sense—that despite great differences in wealth, we rise and fall together—that we can’t afford to lose. As the pace of change accelerates, with some rising and many falling, that sense of common kinship becomes harder to maintain. Jefferson was not entirely wrong to fear Hamilton’s vision for the country, for we have always been in a constant balancing act between self-interest and community, markets and democracy, the concentration of wealth and power and the opening up of opportunity. We’ve lost that balance in Washington, I think. With all of us scrambling to raise money for campaigns, with unions weakened and the press distracted and lobbyists for the powerful pressing their full advantage, there are few countervailing voices to remind us of who we are and where we’ve come from, and to affirm our bonds with one another.

That was the subtext of a debate in early 2006, when a bribery scandal triggered new efforts to curb the influence of lobbyists in Washington. One of the proposals would have ended the practice of letting senators fly on private jets at the cheaper first-class commercial rate. The provision had little chance of passage. Still, my staff suggested that as the designated Democratic spokesperson on ethics reform, I should initiate a self-imposed ban on the practice.

It was the right thing to do, but I won’t lie; the first time I was scheduled for a four-city swing in two days flying commercial, I felt some pangs of regret. The traffic to O’Hare was terrible. When I got there, the flight to Memphis had been delayed. A kid spilled orange juice on my shoe.

Then, while waiting in line, a man came up to me, maybe in his mid-thirties, dressed in chinos and a golf shirt, and told me that he hoped Congress would do something about stem cell research this year. I have early-stage Parkinson’s disease, he said, and a son who’s three years old. I probably won’t ever get to play catch with him. I know it may

be too late for me, but there’s no reason somebody else has to go through what I’m going through.

These are the stories you miss, I thought to myself, when you fly on a private jet.

The Audacity of Hope

Chapter Six

Faith

TWO DAYS AFTER I won the Democratic nomination in my U.S. Senate race, I received an email from a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical School.

“Congratulations on your overwhelming and inspiring primary win,” the doctor wrote. “I was happy to vote for you, and I will tell you that I am seriously considering voting for you in the general election. I write to express my concerns that may, in the end, prevent me from supporting you.”

The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to be comprehensive and “totalizing.” His faith led him to strongly oppose abortion and gay marriage, but he said his faith also led him to question the idolatry of the free market and the quick resort to militarism that seemed to characterize much of President Bush’s foreign policy.

The reason the doctor was considering voting for my opponent was not my position on abortion as such. Rather, he had read an entry that my campaign had posted on my website, suggesting that I would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.” He went on to write:

I sense that you have a strong sense of justice and of the precarious position of justice in any polity, and I know that you have championed the plight of the voiceless. I also sense that you are a fair-minded person with a high regard for reason…. Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion are all ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women, then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded…. You know that weenter times that are fraught with possibilities for good and for harm, times when we are struggling to make sense of a common polity in the context of plurality, when we are unsure of what grounds we have for making any claims that involve others…. I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.

I checked my website and found the offending words. They were not my own; my staff had posted them to summarize my prochoice position during the Democratic primary, at a time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to protect Roe v. Wade. Within the bubble of Democratic Party politics, this was standard boilerplate, designed to fire up the base. The notion of engaging the other side on the issue was pointless, the argument went; any ambiguity on the issue implied weakness, and faced with the single-minded, give-no-quarter approach of antiabortion forces, we simply could not afford weakness.

Rereading the doctor’s letter, though, I felt a pang of shame. Yes, I thought, there were those in the antiabortion movement for whom I had no sympathy, those who jostled or

blocked women who were entering clinics, shoving photographs of mangled fetuses in the women’s faces and screaming at the top of their lungs; those who bullied and intimidated and occasionally resorted to violence.

But those antiabortion protesters weren’t the ones who occasionally appeared at my campaign rallies. The ones I encountered usually showed up in the smaller, downstate communities that we visited, their expressions weary but determined as they stood in silent vigil outside whatever building in which the rally was taking place, their handmade signs or banners held before them like shields. They didn’t yell or try to disrupt our events, although they still made my staff jumpy. The first time a group of protesters showed up, my advance team went on red alert; five minutes before my arrival at the meeting hall, they called the car I was in and suggested that I slip in through the rear entrance to avoid a confrontation.

“I don’t want to go through the back,” I told the staffer driving me. “Tell them we’re coming through the front.”

We turned into the library parking lot and saw seven or eight protesters gathered along a fence: several older women and what looked to be a family—a man and woman with two young children. I got out of the car, walked up to the group, and introduced myself. The man shook my hand hesitantly and told me his name. He looked to be about my age, in jeans, a plaid shirt, and a St. Louis Cardinals cap. His wife shook my hand as well, but the older women kept their distance. The children, maybe nine or ten years old, stared at me with undisguised curiosity.

“You folks want to come inside?” I asked.

“No, thank you,” the man said. He handed me a pamphlet. “Mr. Obama, I want you to know that I agree with a lot of what you have to say.”

“I appreciate that.”

“And I know you’re a Christian, with a family of your own.”

“That’s true.”

“So how can you support murdering babies?”

I told him I understood his position but had to disagree with it. I explained my belief that few women made the decision to terminate a pregnancy casually; that any pregnant woman felt the full force of the moral issues involved and wrestled with her conscience when making that heart-wrenching decision; that I feared a ban on abortion would force women to seek unsafe abortions, as they had once done in this country and as they continued to do in countries that prosecute abortion doctors and the women who seek their services. I suggested that perhaps we could agree on ways to reduce the number of women who felt the need to have abortions in the first place.

The man listened politely and then pointed to statistics on the pamphlet listing the number of unborn children that, according to him, were sacrificed every year. After a few minutes, I said I had to go inside to greet my supporters and asked again if the

group wanted to come in. Again the man declined. As I turned to go, his wife called out to me.

“I will pray for you,” she said. “I pray that you have a change of heart.”

Neither my mind nor my heart changed that day, nor did they in the days to come. But I did have that family in mind as I wrote back to the doctor and thanked him for his email. The next day, I circulated the email to my staff and had the language on my website changed to state in clear but simple terms my prochoice position. And that night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer of my own—that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me.

IT IS A truism that we Americans are a religious people. According to the most recent surveys, 95 percent of Americans believe in God, more than two-thirds belong to a church, 37 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people believe in angels than believe in evolution. Nor is religion confined to places of worship. Books proclaiming the end of days sell millions of copies, Christian music fills the Billboard charts, and new megachurches seem to spring up daily on the outskirts of every major metropolis, providing everything from day care to singles mixers to yoga and Pilates classes. Our President routinely remarks on how Christ changed his heart, and football players point to the heavens after every touchdown, as if God were calling plays from the celestial sidelines.

Of course, such religiosity is hardly new. The Pilgrims came to our shores to escape religious persecution and practice without impediment to their brand of strict Calvinism. Evangelical revivalism has repeatedly swept across the nation, and waves of successive immigrants have used their faith to anchor their lives in a strange new world. Religious sentiment and religious activism have sparked some of our most powerful political movements, from abolition to civil rights to the prairie populism of William Jennings Bryan.

Still, if fifty years ago you had asked the most prominent cultural commentators of the time just what the future of religion in America might be, they undoubtedly would have told you it was on the decline. The old-time religion was withering away, it was argued, a victim of science, higher levels of education in the general population, and the marvels of technology. Respectable folks might still attend church every Sunday; Bible- thumpers and faith healers might still work the Southern revival circuit; the fear of “godless communism” might help feed McCarthyism and the Red Scare. But for the most part, traditional religious practice—and certainly religious fundamentalism—was considered incompatible with modernity, at most a refuge of the poor and uneducated from the hardships of life. Even Billy Graham’s monumental crusades were treated as a curious anachronism by pundits and academics, vestiges of an earlier time that had little to do with the serious work of managing a modern economy or shaping foreign policy.

By the time the sixties rolled around, many mainstream Protestant and Catholic leaders had concluded that if America’s religious institutions were to survive, they would have to make themselves “relevant” to changing times—by accommodating church doctrine

to science, and by articulating a social gospel that addressed the material issues of economic inequality, racism, sexism, and American militarism.

What happened? In part, the cooling of religious enthusiasm among Americans was always exaggerated. On this score, at least, the conservative critique of “liberal elitism” has a strong measure of truth: Ensconced in universities and large urban centers, academics, journalists, and purveyors of popular culture simply failed to appreciate the continuing role that all manner of religious expression played in communities across the country. Indeed, the failure of the country’s dominant cultural institutions to acknowledge America’s religious impulse helped foster a degree of religious entrepreneurship unmatched elsewhere in the industrialized world. Pushed out of sight but still throbbing with vitality throughout the heartland and the Bible Belt, a parallel universe emerged, a world not only of revivals and thriving ministries but also of Christian television, radio, universities, publishers, and entertainment, all of which allowed the devout to ignore the popular culture as surely as they were being ignored.

The reluctance on the part of many evangelicals to be drawn into politics—their inward focus on individual salvation and willingness to render unto Caesar what is his—might have endured indefinitely had it not been for the social upheavals of the sixties. In the minds of Southern Christians, the decision of a distant federal court to dismantle segregation seemed of a piece with its decisions to eliminate prayer in schools—a multipronged assault on the pillars of traditional Southern life. Across America, the women’s movement, the sexual revolution, the increasing assertiveness of gays and lesbians, and most powerfully the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade seemed a direct challenge to the church’s teachings about marriage, sexuality, and the proper roles of men and women. Feeling mocked and under attack, conservative Christians found it no longer possible to insulate themselves from the country’s broader political and cultural trends. And although it was Jimmy Carter who would first introduce the language of evangelical Christianity into modern national politics, it was the Republican Party, with its increasing emphasis on tradition, order, and “family values,” that was best positioned to harvest this crop of politically awakened evangelicals and mobilize them against the liberal orthodoxy.

The story of how Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, and finally Karl Rove and George W. Bush mobilized this army of Christian foot soldiers need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that today white evangelical Christians (along with conservative Catholics) are the heart and soul of the Republican Party’s grassroots base—a core following continually mobilized by a network of pulpits and media outlets that technology has only amplified. It is their issues—abortion, gay marriage, prayer in schools, intelligent design, Terri Schiavo, the posting of the Ten Commandments in the courthouse, home schooling, voucher plans, and the makeup of the Supreme Court— that often dominate the headlines and serve as one of the major fault lines in American politics. The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans is not between men and women, or between those who reside in so-called red states and those who reside in blue states, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don’t. Democrats, meanwhile, are scrambling to “get religion,” even as a core segment of our constituency remains stubbornly secular in orientation, and fears—rightly, no doubt—that the agenda of an assertively Christian nation may not make room for them or their life choices.

But the growing political influence of the Christian right tells only part of the story. The Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition may have tapped into the discontent of many evangelical Christians, but what is more remarkable is the ability of evangelical Christianity not only to survive but to thrive in modern, high-tech America. At a time when mainline Protestant churches are all losing membership at a rapid clip, nondenominational evangelical churches are growing by leaps and bounds, eliciting levels of commitment and participation from their membership that no other American institution can match. Their fervor has gone mainstream.

There are various explanations for this success, from the skill of evangelicals in marketing religion to the charisma of their leaders. But their success also points to a hunger for the product they are selling, a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause. Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds— dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets—and coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness are not enough. They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless toll of daily life. They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them—that they are not just destined to travel down a long highway toward nothingness.