[Ebooks] Barack Obama: The Audacity Of Hope (Part 1)

IT’S BEEN ALMOST ten years since I first ran for political office. I was thirty-five at
the time, four years out of law school, recently married, and generally impatient with
life. A seat in the Illinois legislature had opened up, and several friends suggested that I
run, thinking that my work as a civil rights lawyer, and contacts from my days as a
community organizer, would make me a viable candidate. After discussing it with my
wife, I entered the race and proceeded to do what every first-time candidate does: I
talked to anyone who would listen. I went to block club meetings and church socials,
beauty shops and barbershops. If two guys were standing on a corner, I would cross the
street to hand them campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I’d get some version of
the same two questions.

“Where’d you get that funny name?”

And then: “You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want to go into something
dirty and nasty like politics?”

I was familiar with the question, a variant on the questions asked of me years earlier,
when I’d first arrived in Chicago to work in low-income neighborhoods. It signaled a
cynicism not simply with politics but with the very notion of a public life, a cynicism
that—at least in the South Side neighborhoods I sought to represent—had been
nourished by a generation of broken promises. In response, I would usually smile and
nod and say that I understood the skepticism, but that there was—and always had
been—another tradition to politics, a tradition that stretched from the days of the
country’s founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a tradition based on the
simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is
greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that
proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get
something meaningful done.

It was a pretty convincing speech, I thought. And although I’m not sure that the people
who heard me deliver it were similarly impressed, enough of them appreciated my
earnestness and youthful swagger that I made it to the Illinois legislature.



SIX YEARS LATER, when I decided to run for the United States Senate, I wasn’t so
sure of myself.

By all appearances, my choice of careers seemed to have worked out. After two terms
during which I labored in the minority, Democrats had gained control of the state
senate, and I had subsequently passed a slew of bills, from reforms of the Illinois death
penalty system to an expansion of the state’s health program for kids. I had continued to
teach at the University of Chicago Law School, a job I enjoyed, and was frequently
invited to speak around town. I had preserved my independence, my good name, and


my marriage, all of which, statistically speaking, had been placed at risk the moment I
set foot in the state capital.

But the years had also taken their toll. Some of it was just a function of my getting
older, I suppose, for if you are paying attention, each successive year will make you
more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws—the blind spots, the recurring habits
of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly
worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip. In me,
one of those flaws had proven to be a chronic restlessness; an inability to appreciate, no
matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in front of me.
It’s a flaw that is endemic to modern life, I think—endemic, too, in the American
character—and one that is nowhere more evident than in the field of politics. Whether
politics actually encourages the trait or simply attracts those who possess it is unclear.
Someone once said that every man is trying to either live up to his father’s expectations
or make up for his father’s mistakes, and I suppose that may explain my particular
malady as well as anything else.

In any event, it was as a consequence of that restlessness that I decided to challenge a
sitting Democratic incumbent for his congressional seat in the 2000 election cycle. It
was an ill-considered race, and I lost badly—the sort of drubbing that awakens you to
the fact that life is not obliged to work out as you’d planned. A year and a half later, the
scars of that loss sufficiently healed, I had lunch with a media consultant who had been
encouraging me for some time to run for statewide office. As it happened, the lunch was
scheduled for late September 2001.

“You realize, don’t you, that the political dynamics have changed,” he said as he picked
at his salad.

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing full well what he meant. We both looked down
at the newspaper beside him. There, on the front page, was Osama bin Laden.

“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he said, shaking his head. “Really bad luck. You can’t change
your name, of course. Voters are suspicious of that kind of thing. Maybe if you were at
the start of your career, you know, you could use a nickname or something. But now…”
His voice trailed off and he shrugged apologetically before signaling the waiter to bring
us the check.

I suspected he was right, and that realization ate away at me. For the first time in my
career, I began to experience the envy of seeing younger politicians succeed where I had
failed, moving into higher offices, getting more things done. The pleasures of politics—
the adrenaline of debate, the animal warmth of shaking hands and plunging into a
crowd—began to pale against the meaner tasks of the job: the begging for money, the
long drives home after the banquet had run two hours longer than scheduled, the bad
food and stale air and clipped phone conversations with a wife who had stuck by me so
far but was pretty fed up with raising our children alone and was beginning to question
my priorities. Even the legislative work, the policy making that had gotten me to run in
the first place, began to feel too incremental, too removed from the larger battles—over
taxes, security, health care, and jobs—that were being waged on a national stage. I
began to harbor doubts about the path I had chosen; I began feeling the way I imagine
an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream,


after years of waiting tables between auditions or scratching out hits in the minor
leagues, he realizes that he’s gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him.
The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a
grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up
bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.



DENIAL, ANGER, bargaining, despair—I’m not sure I went through all the stages
prescribed by the experts. At some point, though, I arrived at acceptance—of my limits,
and, in a way, my mortality. I refocused on my work in the state senate and took
satisfaction from the reforms and initiatives that my position afforded. I spent more time
at home, and watched my daughters grow, and properly cherished my wife, and thought
about my long-term financial obligations. I exercised, and read novels, and came to
appreciate how the earth rotated around the sun and the seasons came and went without
any particular exertions on my part.

And it was this acceptance, I think, that allowed me to come up with the thoroughly
cockeyed idea of running for the United States Senate. An up-or-out strategy was how I
described it to my wife, one last shot to test out my ideas before I settled into a calmer,
more stable, and better-paying existence. And she—perhaps more out of pity than
conviction—agreed to this one last race, though she also suggested that given the
orderly life she preferred for our family, I shouldn’t necessarily count on her vote.

I let her take comfort in the long odds against me. The Republican incumbent, Peter
Fitzgerald, had spent $19 million of his personal wealth to unseat the previous senator,
Carol Moseley Braun. He wasn’t widely popular; in fact he didn’t really seem to enjoy
politics all that much. But he still had unlimited money in his family, as well as a
genuine integrity that had earned him grudging respect from the voters.

For a time Carol Moseley Braun reappeared, back from an ambassadorship in New
Zealand and with thoughts of trying to reclaim her old seat; her possible candidacy put
my own plans on hold. When she decided to run for the presidency instead, everyone
else started looking at the Senate race. By the time Fitzgerald announced he would not
seek reelection, I was staring at six primary opponents, including the sitting state
comptroller; a businessman worth hundreds of millions of dollars; Chicago Mayor
Richard Daley’s former chief of staff; and a black, female health-care professional who
the smart money assumed would split the black vote and doom whatever slim chances
I’d had in the first place.

I didn’t care. Freed from worry by low expectations, my credibility bolstered by several
helpful endorsements, I threw myself into the race with an energy and joy that I’d
thought I had lost. I hired four staffers, all of them smart, in their twenties or early
thirties, and suitably cheap. We found a small office, printed letterhead, installed phone
lines and several computers. Four or five hours a day, I called major Democratic donors
and tried to get my calls returned. I held press conferences to which nobody came. We
signed up for the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade and were assigned the parade’s very
last slot, so my ten volunteers and I found ourselves marching just a few paces ahead of
the city’s sanitation trucks, waving to the few stragglers who remained on the route
while workers swept up garbage and peeled green shamrock stickers off the lampposts.


Mostly, though, I just traveled, often driving alone, first from ward to ward in Chicago,
then from county to county and town to town, eventually up and down the state, past
miles and miles of cornfields and beanfields and train tracks and silos. It wasn’t an
efficient process. Without the machinery of the state’s Democratic Party organization,
without any real mailing list or Internet operation, I had to rely on friends or
acquaintances to open their houses to whoever might come, or to arrange for my visit to
their church, union hall, bridge group, or Rotary Club. Sometimes, after several hours of
driving, I would find just two or three people waiting for me around a kitchen table. I
would have to assure the hosts that the turnout was fine and compliment them on the
refreshments they’d prepared. Sometimes I would sit through a church service and the
pastor would forget to recognize me, or the head of the union local would let me speak
to his members just before announcing that the union had decided to endorse someone
else.

But whether I was meeting with two people or fifty, whether I was in one of the well-
shaded, stately homes of the North Shore, a walk-up apartment on the West Side, or a
farmhouse outside Bloomington, whether people were friendly, indifferent, or
occasionally hostile, I tried my best to keep my mouth shut and hear what they had to
say. I listened to people talk about their jobs, their businesses, the local school; their
anger at Bush and their anger at Democrats; their dogs, their back pain, their war
service, and the things they remembered from childhood. Some had well-developed
theories to explain the loss of manufacturing jobs or the high cost of health care. Some
recited what they had heard on Rush Limbaugh or NPR. But most of them were too
busy with work or their kids to pay much attention to politics, and they spoke instead of
what they saw before them: a plant closed, a promotion, a high heating bill, a parent in a
nursing home, a child’s first step.

No blinding insights emerged from these months of conversation. If anything, what
struck me was just how modest people’s hopes were, and how much of what they
believed seemed to hold constant across race, region, religion, and class. Most of them
thought that anybody willing to work should be able to find a job that paid a living
wage. They figured that people shouldn’t have to file for bankruptcy because they got
sick. They believed that every child should have a genuinely good education—that it
shouldn’t just be a bunch of talk—and that those same children should be able to go to
college even if their parents weren’t rich. They wanted to be safe, from criminals and
from terrorists; they wanted clean air, clean water, and time with their kids. And when
they got old, they wanted to be able to retire with some dignity and respect.

That was about it. It wasn’t much. And although they understood that how they did in
life depended mostly on their own efforts—although they didn’t expect government to
solve all their problems, and certainly didn’t like seeing their tax dollars wasted—they
figured that government should help.

I told them that they were right: government couldn’t solve all their problems. But with
a slight change in priorities we could make sure every child had a decent shot at life and
meet the challenges we faced as a nation. More often than not, folks would nod in
agreement and ask how they could get involved. And by the time I was back on the
road, with a map on the passenger’s seat, on my way to my next stop, I knew once again
just why I’d gone into politics.


I felt like working harder than I’d ever worked in my life.







THIS BOOK GROWS directly out of those conversations on the campaign trail. Not
only did my encounters with voters confirm the fundamental decency of the American
people, they also reminded me that at the core of the American experience are a set of
ideals that continue to stir our collective conscience; a common set of values that bind
us together despite our differences; a running thread of hope that makes our improbable
experiment in democracy work. These values and ideals find expression not just in the
marble slabs of monuments or in the recitation of history books. They remain alive in
the hearts and minds of most Americans—and can inspire us to pride, duty, and
sacrifice.

I recognize the risks of talking this way. In an era of globalization and dizzying
technological change, cutthroat politics and unremitting culture wars, we don’t even
seem to possess a shared language with which to discuss our ideals, much less the tools
to arrive at some rough consensus about how, as a nation, we might work together to
bring those ideals about. Most of us are wise to the ways of admen, pollsters,
speechwriters, and pundits. We know how high-flying words can be deployed in the
service of cynical aims, and how the noblest sentiments can be subverted in the name of
power, expedience, greed, or intolerance. Even the standard high school history
textbook notes the degree to which, from its very inception, the reality of American life
has strayed from its myths. In such a climate, any assertion of shared ideals or common
values might seem hopelessly naïve, if not downright dangerous—an attempt to gloss
over serious differences in policy and performance or, worse, a means of muffling the
complaints of those who feel ill served by our current institutional arrangements.

My argument, however, is that we have no choice. You don’t need a poll to know that
the vast majority of Americans—Republican, Democrat, and independent—are weary
of the dead zone that politics has become, in which narrow interests vie for advantage
and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth. Whether
we’re from red states or blue states, we feel in our gut the lack of honesty, rigor, and
common sense in our policy debates, and dislike what appears to be a continuous menu
of false or cramped choices. Religious or secular, black, white, or brown, we sense—
correctly—that the nation’s most significant challenges are being ignored, and that if we
don’t change course soon, we may be the first generation in a very long time that leaves
behind a weaker and more fractured America than the one we inherited. Perhaps more
than any other time in our recent history, we need a new kind of politics, one that can
excavate and build upon those shared understandings that pull us together as Americans.

That’s the topic of this book: how we might begin the process of changing our politics
and our civic life. This isn’t to say that I know exactly how to do it. I don’t. Although I
discuss in each chapter a number of our most pressing policy challenges, and suggest in
broad strokes the path I believe we should follow, my treatment of the issues is often
partial and incomplete. I offer no unifying theory of American government, nor do these


pages provide a manifesto for action, complete with charts and graphs, timetables and
ten-point plans.

Instead what I offer is something more modest: personal reflections on those values and
ideals that have led me to public life, some thoughts on the ways that our current
political discourse unnecessarily divides us, and my own best assessment—based on my
experience as a senator and lawyer, husband and father, Christian and skeptic—of the
ways we can ground our politics in the notion of a common good.

Let me be more specific about how the book is organized. Chapter One takes stock of
our recent political history and tries to explain some of the sources for today’s bitter
partisanship. In Chapter Two, I discuss those common values that might serve as the
foundation for a new political consensus. Chapter Three explores the Constitution not
just as a source of individual rights, but also as a means of organizing a democratic
conversation around our collective future. In Chapter Four, I try to convey some of the
institutional forces—money, media, interest groups, and the legislative process—that
stifle even the best-intentioned politician. And in the remaining five chapters, I suggest
how we might move beyond our divisions to effectively tackle concrete problems: the
growing economic insecurity of many American families, the racial and religious
tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats—from terrorism to
pandemic—that gather beyond our shores.

I suspect that some readers may find my presentation of these issues to be insufficiently
balanced. To this accusation, I stand guilty as charged. I am a Democrat, after all; my
views on most topics correspond more closely to the editorial pages of the New York
Times than those of the Wall Street Journal. I am angry about policies that consistently
favor the wealthy and powerful over average Americans, and insist that government has
an important role in opening up opportunity to all. I believe in evolution, scientific
inquiry, and global warming; I believe in free speech, whether politically correct or
politically incorrect, and I am suspicious of using government to impose anybody’s
religious beliefs—including my own—on nonbelievers. Furthermore, I am a prisoner of
my own biography: I can’t help but view the American experience through the lens of a
black man of mixed heritage, forever mindful of how generations of people who looked
like me were subjugated and stigmatized, and the subtle and not so subtle ways that race
and class continue to shape our lives.

But that is not all that I am. I also think my party can be smug, detached, and dogmatic
at times. I believe in the free market, competition, and entrepreneurship, and think no
small number of government programs don’t work as advertised. I wish the country had
fewer lawyers and more engineers. I think America has more often been a force for
good than for ill in the world; I carry few illusions about our enemies, and revere the
courage and competence of our military. I reject a politics that is based solely on racial
identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or victimhood generally. I think much of
what ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture that will not be cured by money
alone, and that our values and spiritual life matter at least as much as our GDP.

Undoubtedly, some of these views will get me in trouble. I am new enough on the
national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different
political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not
all, of them. Which perhaps indicates a second, more intimate theme to this book—


namely, how I, or anybody in public office, can avoid the pitfalls of fame, the hunger to
please, the fear of loss, and thereby retain that kernel of truth, that singular voice within
each of us that reminds us of our deepest commitments.

Recently, one of the reporters covering Capitol Hill stopped me on the way to my office
and mentioned that she had enjoyed reading my first book. “I wonder,” she said, “if you
can be that interesting in the next one you write.” By which she meant, I wonder if you
can be honest now that you are a U.S. senator.

I wonder, too, sometimes. I hope writing this book helps me answer the question.


Chapter One

Republicans and Democrats

ON MOST DAYS, I enter the Capitol through the basement. A small subway train
carries me from the Hart Building, where my office is located, through an underground
tunnel lined with the flags and seals of the fifty states. The train creaks to a halt and I
make my way, past bustling staffers, maintenance crews, and the occasional tour group,
to the bank of old elevators that takes me to the second floor. Stepping off, I weave
around the swarm of press that normally gathers there, say hello to the Capitol Police,
and enter, through a stately set of double doors, onto the floor of the U.S. Senate.

The Senate chamber is not the most beautiful space in the Capitol, but it is imposing
nonetheless. The dun-colored walls are set off by panels of blue damask and columns of
finely veined marble. Overhead, the ceiling forms a creamy white oval, with an
American eagle etched in its center. Above the visitors’ gallery, the busts of the nation’s
first twenty vice presidents sit in solemn repose.

And in gentle steps, one hundred mahogany desks rise from the well of the Senate in
four horseshoe-shaped rows. Some of these desks date back to 1819, and atop each desk
is a tidy receptacle for inkwells and quills. Open the drawer of any desk, and you will
find within the names of the senators who once used it—Taft and Long, Stennis and
Kennedy—scratched or penned in the senator’s own hand. Sometimes, standing there in
the chamber, I can imagine Paul Douglas or Hubert Humphrey at one of these desks,
urging yet again the adoption of civil rights legislation; or Joe McCarthy, a few desks
over, thumbing through lists, preparing to name names; or LBJ prowling the aisles,
grabbing lapels and gathering votes. Sometimes I will wander over to the desk where
Daniel Webster once sat and imagine him rising before the packed gallery and his
colleagues, his eyes blazing as he thunderously defends the Union against the forces of
secession.

But these moments fade quickly. Except for the few minutes that it takes to vote, my
colleagues and I don’t spend much time on the Senate floor. Most of the decisions—
about what bills to call and when to call them, about how amendments will be handled
and how uncooperative senators will be made to cooperate—have been worked out well
in advance by the majority leader, the relevant committee chairman, their staffs, and
(depending on the degree of controversy involved and the magnanimity of the
Republican handling the bill) their Democratic counterparts. By the time we reach the
floor and the clerk starts calling the roll, each of the senators will have determined—in
consultation with his or her staff, caucus leader, preferred lobbyists, interest groups,
constituent mail, and ideological leanings—just how to position himself on the issue.

It makes for an efficient process, which is much appreciated by the members, who are
juggling twelve- or thirteen-hour schedules and want to get back to their offices to meet
constituents or return phone calls, to a nearby hotel to cultivate donors, or to the
television studio for a live interview. If you stick around, though, you may see one lone
senator standing at his desk after the others have left, seeking recognition to deliver a
statement on the floor. It may be an explanation of a bill he’s introducing, or it may be a
broader commentary on some unmet national challenge. The speaker’s voice may flare


with passion; his arguments—about cuts to programs for the poor, or obstructionism on
judicial appointments, or the need for energy independence—may be soundly
constructed. But the speaker will be addressing a near-empty chamber: just the
presiding officer, a few staffers, the Senate reporter, and C-SPAN’s unblinking eye. The
speaker will finish. A blue-uniformed page will silently gather the statement for the
official record. Another senator may enter as the first one departs, and she will stand at
her desk, seek recognition, and deliver her statement, repeating the ritual.

In the world’s greatest deliberative body, no one is listening.



I REMEMBER January 4, 2005—the day that I and a third of the Senate were sworn in
as members of the 109th Congress—as a beautiful blur. The sun was bright, the air
unseasonably warm. From Illinois, Hawaii, London, and Kenya, my family and friends
crowded into the Senate visitors’ gallery to cheer as my new colleagues and I stood
beside the marble dais and raised our right hands to take the oath of office. In the Old
Senate Chamber, I joined my wife, Michelle, and our two daughters for a reenactment
of the ceremony and picture-taking with Vice President Cheney (true to form, then six-
year-old Malia demurely shook the vice president’s hand, while then three-year-old
Sasha decided instead to slap palms with the man before twirling around to wave for the
cameras). Afterward, I watched the girls skip down the east Capitol steps, their pink and
red dresses lifting gently in the air, the Supreme Court’s white columns a majestic
backdrop for their games. Michelle and I took their hands, and together the four of us
walked to the Library of Congress, where we met a few hundred well-wishers who had
traveled in for the day, and spent the next several hours in a steady stream of
handshakes, hugs, photographs, and autographs.

A day of smiles and thanks, of decorum and pageantry—that’s how it must have seemed
to the Capitol’s visitors. But if all of Washington was on its best behavior that day,
collectively pausing to affirm the continuity of our democracy, there remained a certain
static in the air, an awareness that the mood would not last. After the family and friends
went home, after the receptions ended and the sun slid behind winter’s gray shroud,
what would linger over the city was the certainty of a single, seemingly inalterable fact:
The country was divided, and so Washington was divided, more divided politically than
at any time since before World War II.

Both the presidential election and various statistical measures appeared to bear out the
conventional wisdom. Across the spectrum of issues, Americans disagreed: on Iraq,
taxes, abortion, guns, the Ten Commandments, gay marriage, immigration, trade,
education policy, environmental regulation, the size of government, and the role of the
courts. Not only did we disagree, but we disagreed vehemently, with partisans on each
side of the divide unrestrained in the vitriol they hurled at opponents. We disagreed on
the scope of our disagreements, the nature of our disagreements, and the reasons for our
disagreements. Everything was contestable, whether it was the cause of climate change
or the fact of climate change, the size of the deficit or the culprits to blame for the
deficit.

For me, none of this was entirely surprising. From a distance, I had followed the
escalating ferocity of Washington’s political battles: Iran-Contra and Ollie North, the


Bork nomination and Willie Horton, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, the Clinton
election and the Gingrich Revolution, Whitewater and the Starr investigation, the
government shutdown and impeachment, dangling chads and Bush v. Gore. With the
rest of the public, I had watched campaign culture metastasize throughout the body
politic, as an entire industry of insult—both perpetual and somehow profitable—
emerged to dominate cable television, talk radio, and the New York Times best-seller
list.

And for eight years in the Illinois legislature, I had gotten some taste of how the game
had come to be played. By the time I arrived in Springfield in 1997, the Illinois Senate’s
Republican majority had adopted the same rules that Speaker Gingrich was then using
to maintain absolute control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Without the capacity
to get even the most modest amendment debated, much less passed, Democrats would
shout and holler and fulminate, and then stand by helplessly as Republicans passed
large corporate tax breaks, stuck it to labor, or slashed social services. Over time, an
implacable anger spread through the Democratic Caucus, and my colleagues would
carefully record every slight and abuse meted out by the GOP. Six years later,
Democrats took control, and Republicans fared no better. Some of the older veterans
would wistfully recall the days when Republicans and Democrats met at night for
dinner, hashing out a compromise over steaks and cigars. But even among these old
bulls, such fond memories rapidly dimmed the first time the other side’s political
operatives selected them as targets, flooding their districts with mail accusing them of
malfeasance, corruption, incompetence, and moral turpitude.

I don’t claim to have been a passive bystander in all this. I understood politics as a full-
contact sport, and minded neither the sharp elbows nor the occasional blind-side hit. But
occupying as I did an ironclad Democratic district, I was spared the worst of Republican
invective. Occasionally, I would partner up with even my most conservative colleagues
to work on a piece of legislation, and over a poker game or a beer we might conclude
that we had more in common than we publicly cared to admit. Which perhaps explains
why, throughout my years in Springfield, I had clung to the notion that politics could be
different, and that the voters wanted something different; that they were tired of
distortion, name-calling, and sound-bite solutions to complicated problems; that if I
could reach those voters directly, frame the issues as I felt them, explain the choices in
as truthful a fashion as I knew how, then the people’s instincts for fair play and common
sense would bring them around. If enough of us took that risk, I thought, not only the
country’s politics but the country’s policies would change for the better.

It was with that mind-set that I had entered the 2004 U.S. Senate race. For the duration
of the campaign I did my best to say what I thought, keep it clean, and focus on
substance. When I won the Democratic primary and then the general election, both by
sizable margins, it was tempting to believe that I had proven my point.

There was just one problem: My campaign had gone so well that it looked like a fluke.
Political observers would note that in a field of seven Democratic primary candidates,
not one of us ran a negative TV ad. The wealthiest candidate of all—a former trader
worth at least $300 million—spent $28 million, mostly on a barrage of positive ads,
only to flame out in the final weeks due to an unflattering divorce file that the press got
unsealed. My Republican opponent, a handsome and wealthy former Goldman Sachs
partner turned inner-city teacher, started attacking my record almost from the start, but


before his campaign could get off the ground, he was felled by a divorce scandal of his
own. For the better part of a month, I traveled Illinois without drawing fire, before being
selected to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention—
seventeen minutes of unfiltered, uninterrupted airtime on national television. And
finally the Illinois Republican Party inexplicably chose as my opponent former
presidential candidate Alan Keyes, a man who had never lived in Illinois and who
proved so fierce and unyielding in his positions that even conservative Republicans
were scared of him.

Later, some reporters would declare me the luckiest politician in the entire fifty states.
Privately, some of my staff bristled at this assessment, feeling that it discounted our
hard work and the appeal of our message. Still, there was no point in denying my almost
spooky good fortune. I was an outlier, a freak; to political insiders, my victory proved
nothing.

No wonder then that upon my arrival in Washington that January, I felt like the rookie
who shows up after the game, his uniform spotless, eager to play, even as his mud-
splattered teammates tend to their wounds. While I had been busy with interviews and
photo shoots, full of high-minded ideas about the need for less partisanship and
acrimony, Democrats had been beaten across the board—the presidency, Senate seats,
House seats. My new Democratic colleagues could not have been more welcoming
toward me; one of our few bright spots, they would call my victory. In the corridors,
though, or during a lull in the action on the floor, they’d pull me aside and remind me of
what typical Senate campaigns had come to look like.

They told me about their fallen leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who had seen
millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads rain down on his head—full-page newspaper
ads and television spots informing his neighbors day after day that he supported baby-
killing and men in wedding gowns, a few even suggesting that he’d treated his first wife
badly, despite the fact that she had traveled to South Dakota to help him get reelected.
They recalled Max Cleland, the former Georgia incumbent, a triple-amputee war
veteran who had lost his seat in the previous cycle after being accused of insufficient
patriotism, of aiding and abetting Osama bin Laden.

And then there was the small matter of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: the shocking
efficiency with which a few well-placed ads and the chants of conservative media could
transform a decorated Vietnam war hero into a weak-kneed appeaser.

No doubt there were Republicans who felt similarly abused. And perhaps the newspaper
editorials that appeared that first week of session were right; perhaps it was time to put
the election behind us, for both parties to store away their animosities and ammunition
and, for a year or two at least, get down to governing the country. Maybe that would
have been possible had the elections not been so close, or had the war in Iraq not been
still raging, or had the advocacy groups, pundits, and all manner of media not stood to
gain by stirring the pot. Maybe peace would have broken out with a different kind of
White House, one less committed to waging a perpetual campaign—a White House that
would see a 51–48 victory as a call to humility and compromise rather than an
irrefutable mandate.


But whatever conditions might have been required for such a détente, they did not exist
in 2005. There would be no concessions, no gestures of goodwill. Two days after the
election, President Bush appeared before cameras and declared that he had political
capital to spare and he intended to use it. That same day, conservative activist Grover
Norquist, unconstrained by the decorum of public office, observed, in connection with
the Democrats’ situation, that “any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around
and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate.” Two
days after my swearing in, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, out of Cleveland,
stood up in the House of Representatives to challenge the certification of Ohio electors,
citing the litany of voting irregularities that had taken place in the state on Election Day.
Rank-and-file Republicans scowled (“Sore losers,” I could hear a few mutter), but
Speaker Hastert and Majority Leader DeLay gazed stone-faced from the heights of the
dais, placid in the knowledge that they had both the votes and the gavel. Senator
Barbara Boxer of California agreed to sign the challenge, and when we returned to the
Senate chamber, I found myself casting my first vote, along with seventy-three of the
seventy-four others voting that day, to install George W. Bush for a second term as
president of the United States.

I would get my first big batch of phone calls and negative mail after this vote. I called
back some of my disgruntled Democratic supporters, assuring them that yes, I was
familiar with the problems in Ohio, and yes, I thought an investigation was in order, but
yes, I still believed George Bush had won the election, and no, as far as I could tell I
didn’t think I had either sold out or been co-opted after a mere two days on the job. That
same week, I happened to run into retiring Senator Zell Miller, the lean, sharp-eyed
Georgia Democrat and NRA board member who had gone sour on the Democratic
Party, endorsed George Bush, and delivered the blistering keynote address at the
Republican National Convention—a no-holds-barred rant against the perfidy of John
Kerry and his supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange, filled
with unspoken irony—the elderly Southerner on his way out, the young black
Northerner on his way in, the contrast that the press had noted in our respective
convention speeches. Senator Miller was very gracious and wished me luck with my
new job. Later, I would happen upon an excerpt from his book, A Deficit of Decency, in
which he called my speech at the convention one of the best he’d ever heard, before
noting—with what I imagined to be a sly smile—that it may not have been the most
effective speech in terms of helping to win an election.

In other words: My guy had lost. Zell Miller’s guy had won. That was the hard, cold
political reality. Everything else was just sentiment.



MY WIFE WILL tell you that by nature I’m not somebody who gets real worked up
about things. When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television
screen, I find it hard to take them seriously; I assume that they must be saying what they
do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their
precious evenings with such sourpusses. When Democrats rush up to me at events and
insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its
grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under
FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching
under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all


take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in
the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal
attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a
Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad
deal.

Still, I am not immune to distress. And like most Americans, I find it hard to shake the
feeling these days that our democracy has gone seriously awry.

It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the reality
we witness every day. In one form or another, that gap has existed since America’s
birth. Wars have been fought, laws passed, systems reformed, unions organized, and
protests staged to bring promise and practice into closer alignment.

No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the
smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial,
our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working
consensus to tackle any big problem.

We know that global competition—not to mention any genuine commitment to the
values of equal opportunity and upward mobility—requires us to revamp our
educational system from top to bottom, replenish our teaching corps, buckle down on
math and science instruction, and rescue inner-city kids from illiteracy. And yet our
debate on education seems stuck between those who want to dismantle the public school
system and those who would defend an indefensible status quo, between those who say
money makes no difference in education and those who want more money without any
demonstration that it will be put to good use.

We know that our health-care system is broken: wildly expensive, terribly inefficient,
and poorly adapted to an economy no longer built on lifetime employment, a system
that exposes hardworking Americans to chronic insecurity and possible destitution. But
year after year, ideology and political gamesmanship result in inaction, except for 2003,
when we got a prescription drug bill that somehow managed to combine the worst
aspects of the public and private sectors—price gouging and bureaucratic confusion,
gaps in coverage and an eye-popping bill for taxpayers.

We know that the battle against international terrorism is at once an armed struggle and
a contest of ideas, that our long-term security depends on both a judicious projection of
military power and increased cooperation with other nations, and that addressing the
problems of global poverty and failed states is vital to our nation’s interests rather than
just a matter of charity. But follow most of our foreign policy debates, and you might
believe that we have only two choices—belligerence or isolationism.

We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of
faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial,
religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape. And instead of resolving these
tensions or mediating these conflicts, our politics fans them, exploits them, and drives
us further apart.


Privately, those of us in government will acknowledge this gap between the politics we
have and the politics we need. Certainly Democrats aren’t happy with the current
situation, since for the moment at least they are on the losing side, dominated by
Republicans who, thanks to winner-take-all elections, control every branch of
government and feel no need to compromise. Thoughtful Republicans shouldn’t be too
sanguine, though, for if the Democrats have had trouble winning, it appears that the
Republicans—having won elections on the basis of pledges that often defy reality (tax
cuts without service cuts, privatization of Social Security with no change in benefits,
war without sacrifice)—cannot govern.

And yet publicly it’s difficult to find much soul-searching or introspection on either side
of the divide, or even the slightest admission of responsibility for the gridlock. What we
hear instead, not only in campaigns but on editorial pages, on bookstands, or in the
ever-expanding blog universe, are deflections of criticism and assignments of blame.
Depending on your tastes, our condition is the natural result of radical conservatism or
perverse liberalism, Tom DeLay or Nancy Pelosi, big oil or greedy trial lawyers,
religious zealots or gay activists, Fox News or the New York Times. How well these
stories are told, the subtlety of the arguments and the quality of the evidence, will vary
by author, and I won’t deny my preference for the story the Democrats tell, nor my
belief that the arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact. In
distilled form, though, the explanations of both the right and the left have become
mirror images of each other. They are stories of conspiracy, of America being hijacked
by an evil cabal. Like all good conspiracy theories, both tales contain just enough truth
to satisfy those predisposed to believe in them, without admitting any contradictions
that might shake up those assumptions. Their purpose is not to persuade the other side
but to keep their bases agitated and assured of the rightness of their respective causes—
and lure just enough new adherents to beat the other side into submission.

Of course, there is another story to be told, by the millions of Americans who are going
about their business every day. They are on the job or looking for work, starting
businesses, helping their kids with their homework, and struggling with high gas bills,
insufficient health insurance, and a pension that some bankruptcy court somewhere has
rendered unenforceable. They are by turns hopeful and frightened about the future.
Their lives are full of contradictions and ambiguities. And because politics seems to
speak so little to what they are going through—because they understand that politics
today is a business and not a mission, and what passes for debate is little more than
spectacle—they turn inward, away from the noise and rage and endless chatter.

A government that truly represents these Americans—that truly serves these
Americans—will require a different kind of politics. That politics will need to reflect
our lives as they are actually lived. It won’t be prepackaged, ready to pull off the shelf.
It will have to be constructed from the best of our traditions and will have to account for
the darker aspects of our past. We will need to understand just how we got to this place,
this land of warring factions and tribal hatreds. And we will need to remind ourselves,
despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a
bond that will not break.




ONE OF THE first things I noticed upon my arrival in Washington was the relative
cordiality among the Senate’s older members: the unfailing courtesy that governed
every interaction between John Warner and Robert Byrd, or the genuine bond of
friendship between Republican Ted Stevens and Democrat Daniel Inouye. It is
commonly said that these men represent the last of a dying breed, men who not only
love the Senate but who embody a less sharply partisan brand of politics. And in fact it
is one of the few things that conservative and liberal commentators agree on, this idea of
a time before the fall, a golden age in Washington when, regardless of which party was
in power, civility reigned and government worked.

At a reception one evening, I started a conversation with an old Washington hand who
had served in and around the Capitol for close to fifty years. I asked him what he
thought accounted for the difference in atmosphere between then and now.

“It’s generational,” he told me without hesitation. “Back then, almost everybody with
any power in Washington had served in World War II. We might’ve fought like cats and
dogs on issues. A lot of us came from different backgrounds, different neighborhoods,
different political philosophies. But with the war, we all had something in common.
That shared experience developed a certain trust and respect. It helped to work through
our differences and get things done.”

As I listened to the old man reminisce, about Dwight Eisenhower and Sam Rayburn,
Dean Acheson and Everett Dirksen, it was hard not to get swept up in the hazy portrait
he painted, of a time before twenty-four-hour news cycles and nonstop fund-raising, a
time of serious men doing serious work. I had to remind myself that his fondness for
this bygone era involved a certain selective memory: He had airbrushed out of the
picture the images of the Southern Caucus denouncing proposed civil rights legislation
from the floor of the Senate; the insidious power of McCarthyism; the numbing poverty
that Bobby Kennedy would help highlight before his death; the absence of women and
minorities in the halls of power.

I realized, too, that a set of unique circumstances had underwritten the stability of the
governing consensus of which he had been a part: not just the shared experiences of the
war, but also the near unanimity forged by the Cold War and the Soviet threat, and
perhaps more important, the unrivaled dominance of the American economy during the
fifties and sixties, as Europe and Japan dug themselves out of the postwar rubble.

Still, there’s no denying that American politics in the post–World War II years was far
less ideological—and the meaning of party affiliation far more amorphous—than it is
today. The Democratic coalition that controlled Congress through most of those years
was an amalgam of Northern liberals like Hubert Humphrey, conservative Southern
Democrats like James Eastland, and whatever loyalists the big-city machines cared to
elevate. What held this coalition together was the economic populism of the New
Deal—a vision of fair wages and benefits, patronage and public works, and an ever-
rising standard of living. Beyond that, the party cultivated a certain live-and-let-live
philosophy: a philosophy anchored in acquiescence toward or active promotion of racial
oppression in the South; a philosophy that depended on a broader culture in which
social norms—the nature of sexuality, say, or the role of women—were largely
unquestioned; a culture that did not yet possess the vocabulary to force discomfort,
much less political dispute, around such issues.


Throughout the fifties and early sixties, the GOP, too, tolerated all sorts of philosophical
fissures—between the Western libertarianism of Barry Goldwater and the Eastern
paternalism of Nelson Rockefeller; between those who recalled the Republicanism of
Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, with its embrace of federal activism, and those
who followed the conservatism of Edmund Burke, with its preference of tradition to
social experimentation. Accommodating these regional and temperamental differences,
on civil rights, federal regulation, or even taxes, was neither neat nor tidy. But as with
the Democrats, it was mainly economic interests that bound the GOP together, a
philosophy of free markets and fiscal restraint that could appeal to all its constituent
parts, from the Main Street storekeeper to the country-club corporate manager.
(Republicans may have also embraced a more fervid brand of anticommunism in the
fifties, but as John F. Kennedy helped to prove, Democrats were more than willing to
call and raise the GOP on that score whenever an election rolled around.)

It was the sixties that upended these political alignments, for reasons and in ways that
have been well chronicled. First the civil rights movement arrived, a movement that
even in its early, halcyon days fundamentally challenged the existing social structure
and forced Americans to choose sides. Ultimately Lyndon Johnson chose the right side
of this battle, but as a son of the South, he understood better than most the cost involved
with that choice: upon signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he would tell aide Bill
Moyers that with the stroke of a pen he had just delivered the South to the GOP for the
foreseeable future.

Then came the student protests against the Vietnam War and the suggestion that
America was not always right, our actions not always justified—that a new generation
would not pay any price or bear any burden that its elders might dictate.

And then, with the walls of the status quo breached, every form of “outsider” came
streaming through the gates: feminists, Latinos, hippies, Panthers, welfare moms, gays,
all asserting their rights, all insisting on recognition, all demanding a seat at the table
and a piece of the pie.

It would take several years for the logic of these movements to play itself out. Nixon’s
Southern strategy, his challenge to court-ordered busing and appeal to the silent
majority, paid immediate electoral dividends. But his governing philosophy never
congealed into a firm ideology—it was Nixon, after all, who initiated the first federal
affirmative action programs and signed the creation of the Environmental Protection
Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration into law. Jimmy Carter
would prove it possible to combine support for civil rights with a more traditionally
conservative Democratic message; and despite defections from their ranks, most
Southern Democratic congressmen who chose to stay in the party would retain their
seats on the strength of incumbency, helping Democrats maintain control of at least the
House of Representatives.

But the country’s tectonic plates had shifted. Politics was no longer simply a
pocketbook issue but a moral issue as well, subject to moral imperatives and moral
absolutes. And politics was decidedly personal, insinuating itself into every
interaction—whether between black and white, men and women—and implicating itself
in every assertion or rejection of authority.


Accordingly, liberalism and conservatism were now defined in the popular imagination
less by class than by attitude—the position you took toward the traditional culture and
counterculture. What mattered was not just how you felt about the right to strike or
corporate taxation, but also how you felt about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, the Latin
Mass or the Western canon. For white ethnic voters in the North, and whites generally
in the South, this new liberalism made little sense. The violence in the streets and the
excuses for such violence in intellectual circles, blacks moving next door and white kids
bused across town, the burning of flags and spitting on vets, all of it seemed to insult
and diminish, if not assault, those things—family, faith, flag, neighborhood, and, for
some at least, white privilege—that they held most dear. And when, in the midst of this
topsy-turvy time, in the wake of assassinations and cities burning and Vietnam’s bitter
defeat, economic expansion gave way to gas lines and inflation and plant closings, and
the best Jimmy Carter could suggest was turning down the thermostat, even as a bunch
of Iranian radicals added insult to OPEC’s injury—a big chunk of the New Deal
coalition began looking for another political home.



I’VE ALWAYS FELT a curious relationship to the sixties. In a sense, I’m a pure
product of that era: As the child of a mixed marriage, my life would have been
impossible, my opportunities entirely foreclosed, without the social upheavals that were
then taking place. But I was too young at the time to fully grasp the nature of those
changes, too removed—living as I did in Hawaii and Indonesia—to see the fallout on
America’s psyche. Much of what I absorbed from the sixties was filtered through my
mother, who to the end of her life would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed
liberal. The civil rights movement, in particular, inspired her reverence; whenever the
opportunity presented itself, she would drill into me the values that she saw there:
tolerance, equality, standing up for the disadvantaged.

In many ways, though, my mother’s understanding of the sixties was limited, both by
distance (she had left the mainland of the United States in 1960) and by her incorrigible,
sweet-natured romanticism. Intellectually she might have tried to understand Black
Power or SDS or those women friends of hers who had stopped shaving their legs, but
the anger, the oppositional spirit, just wasn’t in her. Emotionally her liberalism would
always remain of a decidedly pre-1967 vintage, her heart a time capsule filled with
images of the space program, the Peace Corps and Freedom Rides, Mahalia Jackson and
Joan Baez.

It was only as I got older, then, during the seventies, that I came to appreciate the degree
to which—for those who had experienced more directly some of the sixties’ seminal
events—things must have seemed to be spinning out of control. Partly I understood this
through the grumblings of my maternal grandparents, longtime Democrats who would
admit that they’d voted for Nixon in 1968, an act of betrayal that my mother never let
them live down. Mainly my understanding of the sixties came as a result of my own
investigations, as my adolescent rebellion sought justification in the political and
cultural changes that by then had already begun to ebb. In my teens, I became fascinated
with the Dionysian, up-for-grabs quality of the era, and through books, film, and music,
I soaked in a vision of the sixties very different from the one my mother talked about:
images of Huey Newton, the ’68 Democratic National Convention, the Saigon airlift,
and the Stones at Altamont. If I had no immediate reasons to pursue revolution, I


decided nevertheless that in style and attitude I, too, could be a rebel, unconstrained by
the received wisdom of the over-thirty crowd.

Eventually, my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-
destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I’d begun to see how any
challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its
own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my
mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I
believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my
college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into cant: the point at which the
denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom
from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully
understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily
embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming
moral superiority over those not so victimized.

All of which may explain why, as disturbed as I might have been by Ronald Reagan’s
election in 1980, as unconvinced as I might have been by his John Wayne, Father
Knows Best pose, his policy by anecdote, and his gratuitous assaults on the poor, I
understood his appeal. It was the same appeal that the military bases back in Hawaii had
always held for me as a young boy, with their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, the
crisp uniforms and crisper salutes. It was related to the pleasure I still get from watching
a well-played baseball game, or my wife gets from watching reruns of The Dick Van
Dyke Show. Reagan spoke to America’s longing for order, our need to believe that we
are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can shape our individual
and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work,
patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism, and faith.

That Reagan’s message found such a receptive audience spoke not only to his skills as a
communicator; it also spoke to the failures of liberal government, during a period of
economic stagnation, to give middle-class voters any sense that it was fighting for them.
For the fact was that government at every level had become too cavalier about spending
taxpayer money. Too often, bureaucracies were oblivious to the cost of their mandates.
A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and
responsibilities. Reagan may have exaggerated the sins of the welfare state, and
certainly liberals were right to complain that his domestic policies tilted heavily toward
economic elites, with corporate raiders making tidy profits throughout the eighties while
unions were busted and the income for the average working stiff flatlined.

Nevertheless, by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, cared
for their families, and loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of a
common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster. And the more his critics
carped, the more those critics played into the role he’d written for them—a band of out-
of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first, politically correct elites.



WHAT I FIND remarkable is not that the political formula developed by Reagan
worked at the time, but just how durable the narrative that he helped promote has
proven to be. Despite a forty-year remove, the tumult of the sixties and the subsequent


backlash continues to drive our political discourse. Partly it underscores how deeply felt
the conflicts of the sixties must have been for the men and women who came of age at
that time, and the degree to which the arguments of the era were understood not simply
as political disputes but as individual choices that defined personal identity and moral
standing.

I suppose it also highlights the fact that the flash-point issues of the sixties were never
fully resolved. The fury of the counterculture may have dissipated into consumerism,
lifestyle choices, and musical preferences rather than political commitments, but the
problems of race, war, poverty, and relations between the sexes did not go away.

And maybe it just has to do with the sheer size of the Baby Boom generation, a
demographic force that exerts the same gravitational pull in politics that it exerts on
everything else, from the market for Viagra to the number of cup holders automakers
put in their cars.

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, sound-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, the polarizing 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
visions, but between good and evil. Activists in both parties began developing litmus
tests, checklists of orthodoxy, leaving a Democrat who questioned abortion increasingly
lonely, any 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.


It was Bill Clinton’s singular contribution that he tried to transcend this ideological
deadlock, recognizing not only that what had come to be meant by the labels of
“conservative” and “liberal” played to Republican advantage, but that the categories
were inadequate to address the problems we faced. At times during his first campaign,
his gestures toward disaffected Reagan Democrats could seem clumsy and transparent
(what ever happened to Sister Souljah?) or frighteningly coldhearted (allowing the
execution of a mentally retarded death row inmate to go forward on the eve of an
important primary). In the first two years of his presidency, he would be forced to
abandon some core elements of his platform—universal health care, aggressive
investment in education and training—that might have more decisively reversed the
long-term trends that were undermining the position of working families in the new
economy.

Still, he instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being presented to the
American people. He saw that government spending and regulation could, if properly
designed, serve as vital ingredients and not inhibitors to economic growth, and how
markets and fiscal discipline could help promote social justice. He recognized that not
only societal responsibility but personal responsibility was needed to combat poverty. In
his platform—if not always in his day-to-day politics—Clinton’s Third Way went
beyond splitting the difference. It tapped into the pragmatic, nonideological attitude of
the majority of Americans.

Indeed, by the end of his presidency, Clinton’s policies—recognizably progressive if
modest in their goals—enjoyed broad public support. Politically, he had wrung out of
the Democratic Party some of the excesses that had kept it from winning elections. That
he failed, despite a booming economy, to translate popular policies into anything
resembling a governing coalition said something about the demographic difficulties
Democrats were facing (in particular, the shift in population growth to an increasingly
solid Republican South) and the structural advantages the Republicans enjoyed in the
Senate, where the votes of two Republican senators from Wyoming, population
493,782, equaled the votes of two Democratic senators from California, population
33,871,648.

But that failure also testified to the skill with which Gingrich, Rove, Norquist, and the
like were able to consolidate and institutionalize the conservative movement. They
tapped the unlimited resources of corporate sponsors and wealthy donors to create a
network of think tanks and media outlets. They brought state-of-the-art technology to
the task of mobilizing their base, and centralized power in the House of Representatives
in order to enhance party discipline.

And they understood the threat Clinton posed to their vision of a long-term conservative
majority, which helps explain the vehemence with which they went after him. It also
explains why they invested so much time attacking Clinton’s morality, for if Clinton’s
policies were hardly radical, his biography (the draft letter saga, the marijuana puffing,
the Ivy League intellectualism, the professional wife who didn’t bake cookies, and most
of all the sex) proved perfect grist for the conservative base. With enough repetition, a
looseness with the facts, and the ultimately undeniable evidence of the President’s own
personal lapses, Clinton could be made to embody the very traits of sixties liberalism
that had helped spur the conservative movement in the first place. Clinton may have
fought that movement to a draw, but the movement would come out stronger for it—and


in George W. Bush’s first term, that movement would take over the United States
government.



THIS TELLING OF the story is too neat, I know. It ignores critical strands in the
historical narrative—how the decline of manufacturing and Reagan’s firing of the air
traffic controllers critically wounded America’s labor movement; the way that the
creation of majority-minority congressional districts in the South simultaneously
ensured more black representatives and reduced Democratic seats in that region; the
lack of cooperation that Clinton received from congressional Democrats, who had
grown fat and complacent and didn’t realize the fight they were in. It also doesn’t
capture the degree to which advances in political gerrymandering polarized the
Congress, or how efficiently money and negative television ads have poisoned the
atmosphere.

Still, when I think about what that old Washington hand told me that night, when I
ponder the work of a George Kennan or a George Marshall, when I read the speeches of
a Bobby Kennedy or an Everett Dirksen, I can’t help feeling that the politics of today
suffers from a case of arrested development. For these men, the issues America faced
were never abstract and hence never simple. War might be hell and still the right thing
to do. Economies could collapse despite the best-laid plans. People could work hard all
their lives and still lose everything.

For the generation of leaders who followed, raised in relative comfort, different
experiences yielded a different attitude toward politics. In the back-and-forth between
Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I
were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation—a tale rooted in old
grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago—played
out on the national stage. The victories that the sixties generation brought about—the
admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of individual
liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority—have made America a far
better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost in the process, and has yet to be
replaced, are those shared assumptions—that quality of trust and fellow feeling—that
bring us together as Americans.

So where does that leave us? Theoretically the Republican Party might have produced
its own Clinton, a center-right leader who built on Clinton’s fiscal conservatism while
moving more aggressively to revamp a creaky federal bureaucracy and experiment with
market- or faith-based solutions to social policy. And in fact such a leader may still
emerge. Not all Republican elected officials subscribe to the tenets of today’s
movement conservatives. In both the House and the Senate, and in state capitals across
the country, there are those who cling to more traditional conservative virtues of
temperance and restraint—men and women who recognize that piling up debt to finance
tax cuts for the wealthy is irresponsible, that deficit reduction can’t take place on the
backs of the poor, that the separation of church and state protects the church as well as
the state, that conservation and conservatism don’t have to conflict, and that foreign
policy should be based on facts and not wishful thinking.


But these Republicans are not the ones who have driven the debate over the past six
years. Instead of the “compassionate conservatism” that George Bush promised in his
2000 campaign, what has characterized the ideological core of today’s GOP is
absolutism, not conservatism. There is the absolutism of the free market, an ideology of
no taxes, no regulation, no safety net—indeed, no government beyond what’s required
to protect private property and provide for the national defense.

There’s the religious absolutism of the Christian right, a movement that gained traction
on the undeniably difficult issue of abortion, but which soon flowered into something
much broader; a movement that insists not only that Christianity is America’s dominant
faith, but that a particular, fundamentalist brand of that faith should drive public policy,
overriding any alternative source of understanding, whether the writings of liberal
theologians, the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, or the words of Thomas
Jefferson.

And there is the absolute belief in the authority of majority will, or at least those who
claim power in the name of the majority—a disdain for those institutional checks (the
courts, the Constitution, the press, the Geneva Conventions, the rules of the Senate, or
the traditions governing redistricting) that might slow our inexorable march toward the
New Jerusalem.

Of course, there are those within the Democratic Party who tend toward similar
zealotry. But those who do have never come close to possessing the power of a Rove or
a DeLay, the power to take over the party, fill it with loyalists, and enshrine some of
their more radical ideas into law. The prevalence of regional, ethnic, and economic
differences within the party, the electoral map and the structure of the Senate, the need
to raise money from economic elites to finance elections—all these things tend to
prevent those Democrats in office from straying too far from the center. In fact, I know
very few elected Democrats who neatly fit the liberal caricature; the last I checked, John
Kerry believes in maintaining the superiority of the U.S. military, Hillary Clinton
believes in the virtues of capitalism, and just about every member of the Congressional
Black Caucus believes Jesus Christ died for his or her sins.

Instead, we Democrats are just, well, confused. There are those who still champion the
old-time religion, defending every New Deal and Great Society program from
Republican encroachment, achieving ratings of 100 percent from the liberal interest
groups. But these efforts seem exhausted, a constant game of defense, bereft of the
energy and new ideas needed to address the changing circumstances of globalization or
a stubbornly isolated inner city. Others pursue a more “centrist” approach, figuring that
so long as they split the difference with the conservative leadership, they must be acting
reasonably—and failing to notice that with each passing year they are giving up more
and more ground. Individually, Democratic legislators and candidates propose a host of
sensible if incremental ideas, on energy and education, health care and homeland
security, hoping that it all adds up to something resembling a governing philosophy.

Mainly, though, the Democratic Party has become the party of reaction. In reaction to a
war that is ill conceived, we appear suspicious of all military action. In reaction to those
who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we resist efforts to use market principles to
tackle pressing problems. In reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with
secularism, and forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a


larger meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We
lose the courts and wait for a White House scandal.

And increasingly we feel the need to match the Republican right in stridency and
hardball tactics. The accepted wisdom that drives many advocacy groups and
Democratic activists these days goes something like this: The Republican Party has
been able to consistently win elections not by expanding its base but by vilifying
Democrats, driving wedges into the electorate, energizing its right wing, and
disciplining those who stray from the party line. If the Democrats ever want to get back
into power, then they will have to take up the same approach.

I understand the frustration of these activists. The ability of Republicans to repeatedly
win on the basis of polarizing campaigns is indeed impressive. I recognize the dangers
of subtlety and nuance in the face of the conservative movement’s passionate intensity.
And in my mind, at least, there are a host of Bush Administration policies that justify
righteous indignation.

Ultimately, though, I believe any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply
partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we’re in. I am convinced
that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose.
Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it’s precisely the pursuit of
ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current
political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as
a country. It’s what keeps us locked in “either/or” thinking: the notion that we can have
only big government or no government; the assumption that we must either tolerate
forty-six million without health insurance or embrace “socialized medicine.”

It is such doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship that have turned Americans off of
politics. This is not a problem for the right; a polarized electorate—or one that easily
dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate—works
perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government. After all,
a cynical electorate is a self-centered electorate.

But for those of us who believe that government has a role to play in promoting
opportunity and prosperity for all Americans, a polarized electorate isn’t good enough.
Eking out a bare Democratic majority isn’t good enough. What’s needed is a broad
majority of Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and independents of goodwill—who
are reengaged in the project of national renewal, and who see their own self-interest as
inextricably linked to the interests of others.

I’m under no illusion that the task of building such a working majority will be easy. But
it’s what we must do, precisely because the task of solving America’s problems will be
hard. It will require tough choices, and it will require sacrifice. Unless political leaders
are open to new ideas and not just new packaging, we won’t change enough hearts and
minds to initiate a serious energy policy or tame the deficit. We won’t have the popular
support to craft a foreign policy that meets the challenges of globalization or terrorism
without resorting to isolationism or eroding civil liberties. We won’t have a mandate to
overhaul America’s broken health-care system. And we won’t have the broad political
support or the effective strategies needed to lift large numbers of our fellow citizens out
of poverty.


I made this same argument in a letter I sent to the left-leaning blog Daily Kos in
September 2005, after a number of advocacy groups and activists had attacked some of
my Democratic colleagues for voting to confirm Chief Justice John Roberts. My staff
was a little nervous about the idea; since I had voted against Roberts’s confirmation,
they saw no reason for me to agitate such a vocal part of the Democratic base. But I had
come to appreciate the give-and-take that the blogs afforded, and in the days following
the posting of my letter, in true democratic fashion, more than six hundred people
posted their comments. Some agreed with me. Others thought that I was being too
idealistic—that the kind of politics I was suggesting could not work in the face of the
Republican PR machine. A sizable contingent thought that I had been “sent” by
Washington elites to quell dissent in the ranks, and/or had been in Washington too long
and was losing touch with the American people, and/or was—as one blogger later put
it—simply an “idiot.”

Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there’s no escaping our great political divide, an
endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Or
maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people
see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators
and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces red
or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to
beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters.

But I don’t think so. They are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary citizens who
have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural battles, but who have found a
way—in their own lives, at least—to make peace with their neighbors, and themselves.
I imagine the white Southerner who growing up heard his dad talk about niggers this
and niggers that but who has struck up a friendship with the black guys at the office and
is trying to teach his own son different, who thinks discrimination is wrong but doesn’t
see why the son of a black doctor should get admitted into law school ahead of his own
son. Or the former Black Panther who decided to go into real estate, bought a few
buildings in the neighborhood, and is just as tired of the drug dealers in front of those
buildings as he is of the bankers who won’t give him a loan to expand his business.
There’s the middle-aged feminist who still mourns her abortion, and the Christian
woman who paid for her teenager’s abortion, and the millions of waitresses and temp
secretaries and nurse’s assistants and Wal-Mart associates who hold their breath every
single month in the hope that they’ll have enough money to support the children that
they did bring into the world.

I imagine they are waiting for a politics with the maturity to balance idealism and
realism, to distinguish between what can and cannot be compromised, to admit the
possibility that the other side might sometimes have a point. They don’t always
understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal, but they
recognize the difference between dogma and common sense, responsibility and
irresponsibility, between those things that last and those that are fleeting.

They are out there, waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.


Chapter Two

Values

THE FIRST TIME I saw the White House was in 1984. I had just graduated from
college and was working as a community organizer out of the Harlem campus of the
City College of New York. President Reagan was proposing a round of student aid cuts
at the time, and so I worked with a group of student leaders—most of them black,
Puerto Rican, or of Eastern European descent, almost all of them the first in their
families to attend college—to round up petitions opposing the cuts and then deliver
them to the New York congressional delegation.

It was a brief trip, spent mostly navigating the endless corridors of the Rayburn
Building, getting polite but cursory audiences with Hill staffers not much older than I
was. But at the end of the day, the students and I took the time to walk down to the Mall
and the Washington Monument, and then spent a few minutes gazing at the White
House. Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few feet away from the Marine guard
station at the main entrance, with pedestrians weaving along the sidewalk and traffic
whizzing behind us, I marveled not at the White House’s elegant sweep, but rather at
the fact that it was so exposed to the hustle and bustle of the city; that we were allowed
to stand so close to the gate, and could later circle to the other side of the building to
peer at the Rose Garden and the residence beyond. The openness of the White House
said something about our confidence as a democracy, I thought. It embodied the notion
that our leaders were not so different from us; that they remained subject to laws and
our collective consent.

Twenty years later, getting close to the White House wasn’t so simple. Checkpoints,
armed guards, vans, mirrors, dogs, and retractable barricades now sealed off a two-
block perimeter around the White House. Unauthorized cars no longer traveled
Pennsylvania Avenue. On a cold January afternoon, the day before my swearing in to
the Senate, Lafayette Park was mostly empty, and as my car was waved through the
White House gates and up the driveway, I felt a glancing sadness at what had been lost.

The inside of the White House doesn’t have the luminous quality that you might expect
from TV or film; it seems well kept but worn, a big old house that one imagines might
be a bit drafty on cold winter nights. Still, as I stood in the foyer and let my eyes wander
down the corridors, it was impossible to forget the history that had been made there—
John and Bobby Kennedy huddling over the Cuban missile crisis; FDR making last-
minute changes to a radio address; Lincoln alone, pacing the halls and shouldering the
weight of a nation. (It wasn’t until several months later that I would get to see the
Lincoln Bedroom, a modest space with antique furniture, a four-poster bed, an original
copy of the Gettysburg Address discreetly displayed under glass—and a big flat-screen
TV set atop one of the desks. Who, I wondered, flipped on SportsCenter while spending
the night in the Lincoln Bedroom?)

I was greeted immediately by a member of the White House’s legislative staff and led
into the Gold Room, where most of the incoming House and Senate members had
already gathered. At sixteen hundred hours on the dot, President Bush was announced
and walked to the podium, looking vigorous and fit, with that jaunty, determined walk


that suggests he’s on a schedule and wants to keep detours to a minimum. For ten or so
minutes he spoke to the room, making a few jokes, calling for the country to come
together, before inviting us to the other end of the White House for refreshments and a
picture with him and the First Lady.

I happened to be starving at that moment, so while most of the other legislators started
lining up for their photographs, I headed for the buffet. As I munched on hors d’oeuvres
and engaged in small talk with a handful of House members, I recalled my previous two
encounters with the President, the first a brief congratulatory call after the election, the
second a small White House breakfast with me and the other incoming senators. Both
times I had found the President to be a likable man, shrewd and disciplined but with the
same straightforward manner that had helped him win two elections; you could easily
imagine him owning the local car dealership down the street, coaching Little League,
and grilling in his backyard—the kind of guy who would make for good company so
long as the conversation revolved around sports and the kids.

There had been a moment during the breakfast meeting, though, after the backslapping
and the small talk and when all of us were seated, with Vice President Cheney eating his
eggs Benedict impassively and Karl Rove at the far end of the table discreetly checking
his BlackBerry, that I witnessed a different side of the man. The President had begun to
discuss his second-term agenda, mostly a reiteration of his campaign talking points—
the importance of staying the course in Iraq and renewing the Patriot Act, the need to
reform Social Security and overhaul the tax system, his determination to get an up-or-
down vote on his judicial appointees—when suddenly it felt as if somebody in a back
room had flipped a switch. The President’s eyes became fixed; his voice took on the
agitated, rapid tone of someone neither accustomed to nor welcoming interruption; his
easy affability was replaced by an almost messianic certainty. As I watched my mostly
Republican Senate colleagues hang on his every word, I was reminded of the dangerous
isolation that power can bring, and appreciated the Founders’ wisdom in designing a
system to keep power in check.

“Senator?”

I looked up, shaken out of my memory, and saw one of the older black men who made
up most of the White House waitstaff standing next to me.

“Want me to take that plate for you?”

I nodded, trying to swallow a mouthful of chicken something-or-others, and noticed that
the line to greet the President had evaporated. Wanting to thank my hosts, I headed
toward the Blue Room. A young Marine at the door politely indicated that the
photograph session was over and that the President needed to get to his next
appointment. But before I could turn around to go, the President himself appeared in the
doorway and waved me in.

“Obama!” the President said, shaking my hand. “Come here and meet Laura. Laura, you
remember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family. And that
wife of yours—that’s one impressive lady.”


“We both got better than we deserve, Mr. President,” I said, shaking the First Lady’s
hand and hoping that I’d wiped any crumbs off my face. The President turned to an aide
nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the President’s hand.

“Want some?” the President asked. “Good stuff. Keeps you from getting colds.”

Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.

“Come over here for a second,” he said, leading me off to one side of the room. “You
know,” he said quietly, “I hope you don’t mind me giving you a piece of advice.”

“Not at all, Mr. President.”

He nodded. “You’ve got a bright future,” he said. “Very bright. But I’ve been in this
town awhile and, let me tell you, it can be tough. When you get a lot of attention like
you’ve been getting, people start gunnin’ for ya. And it won’t necessarily just be
coming from my side, you understand. From yours, too. Everybody’ll be waiting for
you to slip, know what I mean? So watch yourself.”

“Thanks for the advice, Mr. President.”

“All right. I gotta get going. You know, me and you got something in common.”

“What’s that?”

“We both had to debate Alan Keyes. That guy’s a piece of work, isn’t he?”

I laughed, and as we walked to the door I told him a few stories from the campaign. It
wasn’t until he had left the room that I realized I had briefly put my arm over his
shoulder as we talked—an unconscious habit of mine, but one that I suspected might
have made many of my friends, not to mention the Secret Service agents in the room,
more than a little uneasy.



SINCE MY ARRIVAL in the Senate, I’ve been a steady and occasionally fierce critic
of Bush Administration policies. I consider the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to be both
fiscally irresponsible and morally troubling. I have criticized the Administration for
lacking a meaningful health-care agenda, a serious energy policy, or a strategy for
making America more competitive. Back in 2002, just before announcing my Senate
campaign, I made a speech at one of the first antiwar rallies in Chicago in which I
questioned the Administration’s evidence of weapons of mass destruction and suggested
that an invasion of Iraq would prove to be a costly error. Nothing in the recent news
coming out of Baghdad or the rest of the Middle East has dispelled these views.

So Democratic audiences are often surprised when I tell them that I don’t consider
George Bush a bad man, and that I assume he and members of his Administration are
trying to do what they think is best for the country.


I say this not because I am seduced by the proximity to power. I see my invitations to
the White House for what they are—exercises in common political courtesy—and am
mindful of how quickly the long knives can come out when the Administration’s agenda
is threatened in any serious way. Moreover, whenever I write a letter to a family who
has lost a loved one in Iraq, or read an email from a constituent who has dropped out of
college because her student aid has been cut, I’m reminded that the actions of those in
power have enormous consequences—a price that they themselves almost never have to
pay.

It is to say that after all the trappings of office—the titles, the staff, the security
details—are stripped away, I find the President and those who surround him to be pretty
much like everybody else, possessed of the same mix of virtues and vices, insecurities
and long-buried injuries, as the rest of us. No matter how wrongheaded I might consider
their policies to be—and no matter how much I might insist that they be held
accountable for the results of such policies—I still find it possible, in talking to these
men and women, to understand their motives, and to recognize in them values I share.

This is not an easy posture to maintain in Washington. The stakes involved in
Washington policy debates are often so high—whether we send our young men and
women to war; whether we allow stem cell research to go forward—that even small
differences in perspective are magnified. The demands of party loyalty, the imperative
of campaigns, and the amplification of conflict by the media all contribute to an
atmosphere of suspicion. Moreover, most people who serve in Washington have been
trained either as lawyers or as political operatives—professions that tend to place a
premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems. I can see how, after a
certain amount of time in the capital, it becomes tempting to assume that those who
disagree with you have fundamentally different values—indeed, that they are motivated
by bad faith, and perhaps are bad people.

Outside of Washington, though, America feels less deeply divided. Illinois, for
example, is no longer considered a bellwether state. For more than a decade now, it’s
become more and more Democratic, partly because of increased urbanization, partly
because the social conservatism of today’s GOP doesn’t wear well in the Land of
Lincoln. But Illinois remains a microcosm of the country, a rough stew of North and
South, East and West, urban and rural, black, white, and everything in between.
Chicago may possess all the big-city sophistication of L.A. or New York, but
geographically and culturally, the southern end of Illinois is closer to Little Rock or
Louisville, and large swaths of the state are considered, in modern political parlance, a
deep shade of red.

I first traveled through southern Illinois in 1997. It was the summer after my first term
in the Illinois legislature, and Michelle and I were not yet parents. With session
adjourned, no law school classes to teach, and Michelle busy with work of her own, I
convinced my legislative aide, Dan Shomon, to toss a map and some golf clubs in the
car and tool around the state for a week. Dan had been both a UPI reporter and a field
coordinator for several downstate campaigns, so he knew the territory pretty well. But
as the date of our departure approached, it became apparent that he wasn’t quite sure
how I would be received in the counties we were planning to visit. Four times he
reminded me how to pack—just khakis and polo shirts, he said; no fancy linen trousers
or silk shirts. I assured him that I didn’t own any linens or silks. On the drive down, we


stopped at a TGI Friday’s and I ordered a cheeseburger. When the waitress brought the
food I asked her if she had any Dijon mustard. Dan shook his head.

“He doesn’t want Dijon,” he insisted, waving the waitress off. “Here”—he shoved a
yellow bottle of French’s mustard in my direction—“here’s some mustard right here.”

The waitress looked confused. “We got Dijon if you want it,” she said to me.

I smiled. “That would be great, thanks.” As the waitress walked away, I leaned over to
Dan and whispered that I didn’t think there were any photographers around.

And so we traveled, stopping once a day to play a round of golf in the sweltering heat,
driving past miles of cornfields and thick forests of ash trees and oak trees and
shimmering lakes lined with stumps and reeds, through big towns like Carbondale and
Mount Vernon, replete with strip malls and Wal-Marts, and tiny towns like Sparta and
Pinckneyville, many of them with brick courthouses at the center of town, their main
streets barely hanging on with every other store closed, the occasional roadside vendors
selling fresh peaches or corn, or in the case of one couple I saw, “Good Deals on Guns
and Swords.”

We stopped in a coffee shop to eat pie and swap jokes with the mayor of Chester. We
posed in front of the fifteen-foot-tall statue of Superman at the center of Metropolis. We
heard about all the young people who were moving to the big cities because
manufacturing and coal-mining jobs were disappearing. We learned about the local high
school football teams’ prospects for the coming season, and the vast distances veterans
had to drive in order to reach the closest VA facility. We met women who had been
missionaries in Kenya and greeted me in Swahili, and farmers who tracked the financial
pages of the Wall Street Journal before setting out on their tractors. Several times a day,
I pointed out to Dan the number of men we met sporting white linen slacks or silk
Hawaiian shirts. In the small dining room of a Democratic party official in Du Quoin, I
asked the local state’s attorney about crime trends in his largely rural, almost uniformly
white county, expecting him to mention joy-riding sprees or folks hunting out of season.

“The Gangster Disciples,” he said, munching on a carrot. “We’ve got an all-white
branch down here—kids without jobs, selling dope and speed.”

By the end of the week, I was sorry to leave. Not simply because I had made so many
new friends, but because in the faces of all the men and women I’d met I had recognized
pieces of myself. In them I saw my grandfather’s openness, my grandmother’s matter-
of-factness, my mother’s kindness. The fried chicken, the potato salad, the grape halves
in the Jell-O mold—all of it felt familiar.

It’s that sense of familiarity that strikes me wherever I travel across Illinois. I feel it
when I’m sitting down at a diner on Chicago’s West Side. I feel it as I watch Latino
men play soccer while their families cheer them on in a park in Pilsen. I feel it when I’m
attending an Indian wedding in one of Chicago’s northern suburbs.

Not so far beneath the surface, I think, we are becoming more, not less, alike.


I don’t mean to exaggerate here, to suggest that the pollsters are wrong and that our
differences—racial, religious, regional, or economic—are somehow trivial. In Illinois,
as is true everywhere, abortion vexes. In certain parts of the state, the mention of gun
control constitutes sacrilege. Attitudes about everything from the income tax to sex on
TV diverge wildly from place to place.

It is to insist that across Illinois, and across America, a constant cross-pollination is
occurring, a not entirely orderly but generally peaceful collision among people and
cultures. Identities are scrambling, and then cohering in new ways. Beliefs keep slipping
through the noose of predictability. Facile expectations and simple explanations are
being constantly upended. Spend time actually talking to Americans, and you discover
that most evangelicals are more tolerant than the media would have us believe, most
secularists more spiritual. Most rich people want the poor to succeed, and most of the
poor are both more self-critical and hold higher aspirations than the popular culture
allows. Most Republican strongholds are 40 percent Democrat, and vice versa. The
political labels of liberal and conservative rarely track people’s personal attributes.

All of which raises the question: What are the core values that we, as Americans, hold
in common? That’s not how we usually frame the issue, of course; our political culture
fixates on where our values clash. In the immediate aftermath of the 2004 election, for
example, a major national exit poll was published in which voters ranked “moral
values” as having determined how they cast their ballot. Commentators fastened on the
data to argue that the most controversial social issues in the election—particularly gay
marriage—had swung a number of states. Conservatives heralded the numbers,
convinced that they proved the Christian right’s growing power.

When these polls were later analyzed, it turned out that the pundits and prognosticators
had overstated their case a bit. In fact, voters had considered national security as the
election’s most important issue, and although large numbers of voters did consider
“moral values” an important factor in the way they voted, the meaning of the term was
so vague as to include everything from abortion to corporate malfeasance. Immediately,
some Democrats could be heard breathing a sigh of relief, as if a diminution in the
“values factor” served the liberal cause; as if a discussion of values was a dangerous,
unnecessary distraction from those material concerns that characterized the Democratic
Party platform.

I think Democrats are wrong to run away from a debate about values, as wrong as those
conservatives who see values only as a wedge to pry loose working-class voters from
the Democratic base. It is the language of values that people use to map their world. It is
what can inspire them to take action, and move them beyond their isolation. The
postelection polls may have been poorly composed, but the broader question of shared
values—the standards and principles that the majority of Americans deem important in
their lives, and in the life of the country—should be the heart of our politics, the
cornerstone of any meaningful debate about budgets and projects, regulations and
policies.




“WE HOLD THESE truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those simple words are our starting point as Americans; they describe not only the
foundation of our government but the substance of our common creed. Not every
American may be able to recite them; few, if asked, could trace the genesis of the
Declaration of Independence to its roots in eighteenth-century liberal and republican
thought. But the essential idea behind the Declaration—that we are born into this world
free, all of us; that each of us arrives with a bundle of rights that can’t be taken away by
any person or any state without just cause; that through our own agency we can, and
must, make of our lives what we will—is one that every American understands. It
orients us, sets our course, each and every day.

Indeed, the value of individual freedom is so deeply ingrained in us that we tend to take
it for granted. It is easy to forget that at the time of our nation’s founding this idea was
entirely radical in its implications, as radical as Martin Luther’s posting on the church
door. It is an idea that some portion of the world still rejects—and for which an even
larger portion of humanity finds scant evidence in their daily lives.

In fact, much of my appreciation of our Bill of Rights comes from having spent part of
my childhood in Indonesia and from still having family in Kenya, countries where
individual rights are almost entirely subject to the self-restraint of army generals or the
whims of corrupt bureaucrats. I remember the first time I took Michelle to Kenya,
shortly before we were married. As an African American, Michelle was bursting with
excitement about the idea of visiting the continent of her ancestors, and we had a
wonderful time, visiting my grandmother up-country, wandering through the streets of
Nairobi, camping in the Serengeti, fishing off the island of Lamu.

But during our travels Michelle also heard—as I had heard during my first trip to
Africa—the terrible sense on the part of most Kenyans that their fates were not their
own. My cousins told her how difficult it was to find a job or start their own businesses
without paying bribes. Activists told us about being jailed for expressing their
opposition to government policies. Even within my own family, Michelle saw how
suffocating the demands of family ties and tribal loyalties could be, with distant cousins
constantly asking for favors, uncles and aunts showing up unannounced. On the flight
back to Chicago, Michelle admitted she was looking forward to getting home. “I never
realized just how American I was,” she said. She hadn’t realized just how free she
was—or how much she cherished that freedom.

At its most elemental level, we understand our liberty in a negative sense. As a general
rule we believe in the right to be left alone, and are suspicious of those—whether Big
Brother or nosy neighbors—who want to meddle in our business. But we understand
our liberty in a more positive sense as well, in the idea of opportunity and the subsidiary
values that help realize opportunity—all those homespun virtues that Benjamin Franklin
first popularized in Poor Richard’s Almanack and that have continued to inspire our
allegiance through successive generations. The values of self-reliance and self-
improvement and risk-taking. The values of drive, discipline, temperance, and hard
work. The values of thrift and personal responsibility.


These values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will—a
confidence that through pluck and sweat and smarts, each of us can rise above the
circumstances of our birth. But these values also express a broader confidence that so
long as individual men and women are free to pursue their own interests, society as a
whole will prosper. Our system of self-government and our free-market economy
depend on the majority of individual Americans adhering to these values. The
legitimacy of our government and our economy depend on the degree to which these
values are rewarded, which is why the values of equal opportunity and
nondiscrimination complement rather than impinge on our liberty.

If we Americans are individualistic at heart, if we instinctively chafe against a past of
tribal allegiances, traditions, customs, and castes, it would be a mistake to assume that
this is all we are. Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal
values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends. We value the imperatives of
family and the cross-generational obligations that family implies. We value community,
the neighborliness that expresses itself through raising the barn or coaching the soccer
team. We value patriotism and the obligations of citizenship, a sense of duty and
sacrifice on behalf of our nation. We value a faith in something bigger than ourselves,
whether that something expresses itself in formal religion or ethical precepts. And we
value the constellation of behaviors that express our mutual regard for one another:
honesty, fairness, humility, kindness, courtesy, and compassion.

In every society (and in every individual), these twin strands—the individualistic and
the communal, autonomy and solidarity—are in tension, and it has been one of the
blessings of America that the circumstances of our nation’s birth allowed us to negotiate
these tensions better than most. We did not have to go through any of the violent
upheavals that Europe was forced to endure as it shed its feudal past. Our passage from
an agricultural to an industrial society was eased by the sheer size of the continent, vast
tracts of land and abundant resources that allowed new immigrants to continually
remake themselves.

But we cannot avoid these tensions entirely. At times our values collide because in the
hands of men each one is subject to distortion and excess. Self-reliance and
independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a
frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we’ve seen
patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we’ve seen faith
calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the
impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to
acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves.

When this happens—when liberty is cited in the defense of a company’s decision to
dump toxins in our rivers, or when our collective interest in building an upscale new
mall is used to justify the destruction of somebody’s home—we depend on the strength
of countervailing values to temper our judgment and hold such excesses in check.

Sometimes finding the right balance is relatively easy. We all agree, for instance, that
society has a right to constrain individual freedom when it threatens to do harm to
others. The First Amendment doesn’t give you the right to yell “fire” in a crowded
theater; your right to practice your religion does not encompass human sacrifice.
Likewise, we all agree that there must be limits to the state’s power to control our


behavior, even if it’s for our own good. Not many Americans would feel comfortable
with the government monitoring what we eat, no matter how many deaths and how
much of our medical spending may be due to rising rates of obesity.

More often, though, finding the right balance between our competing values is difficult.
Tensions arise not because we have steered a wrong course, but simply because we live
in a complex and contradictory world. I firmly believe, for example, that since 9/11, we
have played fast and loose with constitutional principles in the fight against terrorism.
But I acknowledge that even the wisest president and most prudent Congress would
struggle to balance the critical demands of our collective security against the equally
compelling need to uphold civil liberties. I believe our economic policies pay too little
attention to the displacement of manufacturing workers and the destruction of
manufacturing towns. But I cannot wish away the sometimes competing demands of
economic security and competitiveness.

Unfortunately, too often in our national debates we don’t even get to the point where we
weigh these difficult choices. Instead, we either exaggerate the degree to which policies
we don’t like impinge on our most sacred values, or play dumb when our own preferred
policies conflict with important countervailing values. Conservatives, for instance, tend
to bristle when it comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right to
bear arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when it
comes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to control
people’s sexual practices. Conversely, it’s easy to get most liberals riled up about
government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman’s reproductive
freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential
costs of regulation to a small-business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.

In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we
draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works.
But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values
that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter
feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if
conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to
reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

The results of such an exercise can sometimes be surprising. The year that Democrats
regained the majority in the Illinois state senate, I sponsored a bill to require the
videotaping of interrogations and confessions in capital cases. While the evidence tells
me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes—
mass murder, the rape and murder of a child—so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the
community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the
ultimate punishment. On the other hand, the way capital cases were tried in Illinois at
the time was so rife with error, questionable police tactics, racial bias, and shoddy
lawyering that thirteen death row inmates had been exonerated and a Republican
governor had decided to institute a moratorium on all executions.

Despite what appeared to be a death penalty system ripe for reform, few people gave my
bill much chance of passing. The state prosecutors and police organizations were
adamantly opposed, believing that videotaping would be expensive and cumbersome,
and would hamstring their ability to close cases. Some who favored abolishing the death


penalty feared that any efforts at reform would detract from their larger cause. My
fellow legislators were skittish about appearing in any way to be soft on crime. And the
newly elected Democratic governor had announced his opposition to videotaping of
interrogations during the course of his campaign.

It would have been typical of today’s politics for each side to draw a line in the sand:
for death penalty opponents to harp on racism and police misconduct and for law
enforcement to suggest that my bill coddled criminals. Instead, over the course of
several weeks, we convened sometimes daily meetings between prosecutors, public
defenders, police organizations, and death penalty opponents, keeping our negotiations
as much as possible out of the press.

Instead of focusing on the serious disagreements around the table, I talked about the
common value that I believed everyone shared, regardless of how each of us might feel
about the death penalty: that is, the basic principle that no innocent person should end
up on death row, and that no person guilty of a capital offense should go free. When
police representatives presented concrete problems with the bill’s design that would
have impeded their investigations, we modified the bill. When police representatives
offered to videotape only confessions, we held firm, pointing out that the whole purpose
of the bill was to give the public confidence that confessions were obtained free of
coercion. At the end of the process, the bill had the support of all the parties involved. It
passed unanimously in the Illinois Senate and was signed into law.

Of course, this approach to policy making doesn’t always work. Sometimes, politicians
and interest groups welcome conflict in pursuit of a broader ideological goal. Most
antiabortion activists, for example, have openly discouraged legislative allies from even
pursuing those compromise measures that would have significantly reduced the
incidence of the procedure popularly known as partial-birth abortion, because the image
the procedure evokes in the mind of the public has helped them win converts to their
position.

And sometimes our ideological predispositions are just so fixed that we have trouble
seeing the obvious. Once, while still in the Illinois Senate, I listened to a Republican
colleague work himself into a lather over a proposed plan to provide school breakfasts
to preschoolers. Such a plan, he insisted, would crush their spirit of self-reliance. I had
to point out that not too many five-year-olds I knew were self-reliant, but children who
spent their formative years too hungry to learn could very well end up being charges of
the state.

Despite my best efforts, the bill still went down in defeat; Illinois preschoolers were
temporarily saved from the debilitating effects of cereal and milk (a version of the bill
would later pass). But my fellow legislator’s speech helps underscore one of the
differences between ideology and values: Values are faithfully applied to the facts
before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.








MUCH OF THE confusion surrounding the values debate arises out of a misperception
on the part of both politicians and the public that politics and government are
equivalent. To say that a value is important is not to say that it should be subject to
regulation or that it merits a new agency. Conversely, just because a value should not or
cannot be legislated doesn’t mean it isn’t a proper topic for public discussion.

I value good manners, for example. Every time I meet a kid who speaks clearly and
looks me in the eye, who says “yes, sir” and “thank you” and “please” and “excuse me,”
I feel more hopeful about the country. I don’t think I am alone in this. I can’t legislate
good manners. But I can encourage good manners whenever I’m addressing a group of
young people.

The same goes for competence. Nothing brightens my day more than dealing with
somebody, anybody, who takes pride in their work or goes the extra mile—an
accountant, a plumber, a three-star general, the person on the other end of the phone
who actually seems to want to solve your problem. My encounters with such
competence seem more sporadic lately; I seem to spend more time looking for
somebody in the store to help me or waiting for the deliveryman to show. Other people
must notice this; it makes us all cranky, and those of us in government, no less than in
business, ignore such perceptions at their own peril. (I am convinced—although I have
no statistical evidence to back it up—that antitax, antigovernment, antiunion sentiments
grow anytime people find themselves standing in line at a government office with only
one window open and three or four workers chatting among themselves in full view.)

Progressives in particular seem confused on this point, which is why we so often get our
clocks cleaned in elections. I recently gave a speech at the Kaiser Family Foundation
after they released a study showing that the amount of sex on television has doubled in
recent years. Now I enjoy HBO as much as the next guy, and I generally don’t care
what adults watch in the privacy of their homes. In the case of children, I think it’s
primarily the duty of parents to monitor what they are watching on television, and in my
speech I even suggested that everyone would benefit if parents—heaven forbid—simply
turned off the TV and tried to strike up a conversation with their kids.

Having said all that, I indicated that I wasn’t too happy with ads for erectile-dysfunction
drugs popping up every fifteen minutes whenever I watched a football game with my
daughters in the room. I offered the further observation that a popular show targeted at
teens, in which young people with no visible means of support spend several months
getting drunk and jumping naked into hot tubs with strangers, was not “the real world.”
I ended by suggesting that the broadcast and cable industries should adopt better
standards and technology to help parents control what streamed into their homes.

You would have thought I was Cotton Mather. In response to my speech, one
newspaper editorial intoned that the government had no business regulating protected
speech, despite the fact that I hadn’t called for regulation. Reporters suggested that I
was cynically tacking to the center in preparation for a national race. More than a few
supporters wrote our office, complaining that they had voted for me to beat back the
Bush agenda, not to act as the town scold.

And yet every parent I know, liberal or conservative, complains about the coarsening of
the culture, the promotion of easy materialism and instant gratification, the severing of


sexuality from intimacy. They may not want government censorship, but they want
those concerns recognized, their experiences validated. When, for fear of appearing
censorious, progressive political leaders can’t even acknowledge the problem, those
parents start listening to those leaders who will—leaders who may be less sensitive to
constitutional constraints.

Of course, conservatives have their own blind spots when it comes to addressing
problems in the culture. Take executive pay. In 1980, the average CEO made forty-two
times what an average hourly worker took home. By 2005, the ratio was 262 to 1.
Conservative outlets like the Wall Street Journal editorial page try to justify outlandish
salaries and stock options as necessary to attract top talent, and suggest that the
economy actually performs better when America’s corporate leaders are fat and happy.
But the explosion in CEO pay has had little to do with improved performance. In fact,
some of the country’s most highly compensated CEOs over the past decade have
presided over huge drops in earnings, losses in shareholder value, massive layoffs, and
the underfunding of their workers’ pension funds.

What accounts for the change in CEO pay is not any market imperative. It’s cultural. At
a time when average workers are experiencing little or no income growth, many of
America’s CEOs have lost any sense of shame about grabbing whatever their pliant,
handpicked corporate boards will allow. Americans understand the damage such an
ethic of greed has on our collective lives; in a recent survey, they ranked corruption in
government and business, and greed and materialism, as two of the three most important
moral challenges facing the nation (“raising kids with the right values” ranked first).
Conservatives may be right when they argue that the government should not try to
determine executive pay packages. But conservatives should at least be willing to speak
out against unseemly behavior in corporate boardrooms with the same moral force, the
same sense of outrage, that they direct against dirty rap lyrics.

Of course, there are limits to the power of the bully pulpit. Sometimes only the law can
fully vindicate our values, particularly when the rights and opportunities of the
powerless in our society are at stake. Certainly this has been true in our efforts to end
racial discrimination; as important as moral exhortation was in changing hearts and
minds of white Americans during the civil rights era, what ultimately broke the back of
Jim Crow and ushered in a new era of race relations were the Supreme Court cases
culminating in Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. As these laws were being debated, there were those who
argued that government should not interject itself into civil society, that no law could
force white people to associate with blacks. Upon hearing these arguments, Dr. King
replied, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him
from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.”

Sometimes we need both cultural transformation and government action—a change in
values and a change in policy—to promote the kind of society we want. The state of our
inner-city schools is a case in point. All the money in the world won’t boost student
achievement if parents make no effort to instill in their children the values of hard work
and delayed gratification. But when we as a society pretend that poor children will
fulfill their potential in dilapidated, unsafe schools with outdated equipment and
teachers who aren’t trained in the subjects they teach, we are perpetrating a lie on these
children, and on ourselves. We are betraying our values.


That is one of the things that makes me a Democrat, I suppose—this idea that our
communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity, should
express themselves not just in the church or the mosque or the synagogue; not just on
the blocks where we live, in the places where we work, or within our own families; but
also through our government. Like many conservatives, I believe in the power of culture
to determine both individual success and social cohesion, and I believe we ignore
cultural factors at our peril. But I also believe that our government can play a role in
shaping that culture for the better—or for the worse.



I OFTEN WONDER what makes it so difficult for politicians to talk about values in
ways that don’t appear calculated or phony. Partly, I think, it’s because those of us in
public life have become so scripted, and the gestures that candidates use to signify their
values have become so standardized (a stop at a black church, the hunting trip, the visit
to a NASCAR track, the reading in the kindergarten classroom) that it becomes harder
and harder for the public to distinguish between honest sentiment and political
stagecraft.

Then there’s the fact that the practice of modern politics itself seems to be value-free.
Politics (and political commentary) not only allows but often rewards behavior that we
would normally think of as scandalous: fabricating stories, distorting the obvious
meaning of what other people say, insulting or generally questioning their motives,
poking through their personal affairs in search of damaging information.

During my general election campaign for the U.S. Senate, for example, my Republican
opponent assigned a young man to track all my public appearances with a handheld
camera. This has become fairly routine operating procedure in many campaigns, but
whether because the young man was overzealous or whether he had been instructed to
try to provoke me, his tracking came to resemble stalking. From morning to night, he
followed me everywhere, usually from a distance of no more than five or ten feet. He
would film me riding down elevators. He would film me coming out of the restroom.
He would film me on my cell phone, talking to my wife and children.

At first, I tried reasoning with him. I stopped to ask him his name, told him that I
understood he had a job to do, and suggested that he keep enough of a distance to allow
me to have a conversation without him listening in. In the face of my entreaties, he
remained largely mute, other than to say his name was Justin. I suggested that he call
his boss and find out whether this was in fact what the campaign intended for him to do.
He told me that I was free to call myself and gave me the number. After two or three
days of this, I decided I’d had enough. With Justin fast on my heels, I strolled into the
press office of the state capitol building and asked some of the reporters who were
having lunch to gather round.

“Hey, guys,” I said, “I want to introduce you to Justin. Justin here’s been assigned by
the Ryan campaign to stalk me wherever I go.”

As I explained the situation, Justin stood there, continuing to film. The reporters turned
to him and started peppering him with questions.


“You follow him into the bathroom?”

“Are you this close to him all the time?”

Soon several news crews arrived with their cameras to film Justin filming me. Like a
prisoner of war, Justin kept repeating his name, his rank, and the telephone number of
his candidate’s campaign headquarters. By six o’clock, the story of Justin was on most
local broadcasts. The story ended up blanketing the state for a week—cartoons,
editorials, and sports radio chatter. After several days of defiance, my opponent
succumbed to the pressure, asked Justin to back up a few feet, and issued an apology.
Still, the damage to his campaign was done. People might not have understood our
contrasting views on Medicare or Middle East diplomacy. But they knew that my
opponent’s campaign had violated a value—civil behavior—that they considered
important.

The gap between what we deem appropriate behavior in everyday life and what it takes
to win a campaign is just one of the ways in which a politician’s values are tested. In
few other professions are you required, each and every day, to weigh so many
competing claims—between different sets of constituents, between the interests of your
state and the interests of the nation, between party loyalty and your own sense of
independence, between the value of service and obligations to your family. There is a
constant danger, in the cacophony of voices, that a politician loses his moral bearings
and finds himself entirely steered by the winds of public opinion.

Perhaps this explains why we long for that most elusive quality in our leaders—the
quality of authenticity, of being who you say you are, of possessing a truthfulness that
goes beyond words. My friend the late U.S. senator Paul Simon had that quality. For
most of his career, he baffled the pundits by garnering support from people who
disagreed, sometimes vigorously, with his liberal politics. It helped that he looked so
trustworthy, like a small-town doctor, with his glasses and bow tie and basset-hound
face. But people also sensed that he lived out his values: that he was honest, and that he
stood up for what he believed in, and perhaps most of all that he cared about them and
what they were going through.

That last aspect of Paul’s character—a sense of empathy—is one that I find myself
appreciating more and more as I get older. It is at the heart of my moral code, and it is
how I understand the Golden Rule—not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as
something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through
their eyes.

Like most of my values, I learned about empathy from my mother. She disdained any
kind of cruelty or thoughtlessness or abuse of power, whether it expressed itself in the
form of racial prejudice or bullying in the schoolyard or workers being underpaid.
Whenever she saw even a hint of such behavior in me she would look me square in the
eyes and ask, “How do you think that would make you feel?”

But it was in my relationship with my grandfather that I think I first internalized the full
meaning of empathy. Because my mother’s work took her overseas, I often lived with
my grandparents during my high school years, and without a father present in the house,
my grandfather bore the brunt of much of my adolescent rebellion. He himself was not


always easy to get along with; he was at once warmhearted and quick to anger, and in
part because his career had not been particularly successful, his feelings could also be
easily bruised. By the time I was sixteen we were arguing all the time, usually about me
failing to abide by what I considered to be an endless series of petty and arbitrary
rules—filling up the gas tank whenever I borrowed his car, say, or making sure that I
rinsed out the milk carton before I put it in the garbage.

With a certain talent for rhetoric, as well as an absolute certainty about the merits of my
own views, I found that I could generally win these arguments, in the narrow sense of
leaving my grandfather flustered, angry, and sounding unreasonable. But at some point,
perhaps in my senior year, such victories started to feel less satisfying. I started thinking
about the struggles and disappointments he had seen in his life. I started to appreciate
his need to feel respected in his own home. I realized that abiding by his rules would
cost me little, but to him it would mean a lot. I recognized that sometimes he really did
have a point, and that in insisting on getting my own way all the time, without regard to
his feelings or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself.

There’s nothing extraordinary about such an awakening, of course; in one form or
another it is what we all must go through if we are to grow up. And yet I find myself
returning again and again to my mother’s simple principle—“How would that make you
feel?”—as a guidepost for my politics.

It’s not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to be
suffering from an empathy deficit. We wouldn’t tolerate schools that don’t teach, that
are chronically underfunded and understaffed and underinspired, if we thought that the
children in them were like our children. It’s hard to imagine the CEO of a company
giving himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while cutting health-care coverage for his
workers if he thought they were in some sense his equals. And it’s safe to assume that
those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned
their own sons and daughters in harm’s way.

I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in
favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all, if they are like us,
then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.

But that does not mean that those who are struggling—or those of us who claim to
speak for those who are struggling—are thereby freed from trying to understand the
perspectives of those who are better off. Black leaders need to appreciate the legitimate
fears that may cause some whites to resist affirmative action. Union representatives
can’t afford not to understand the competitive pressures their employers may be under. I
am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush’s eyes, no matter how much I
may disagree with him. That’s what empathy does—it calls us all to task, the
conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the
oppressor. We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our
limited vision.

No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.

Of course, in the end a sense of mutual understanding isn’t enough. After all, talk is
cheap; like any value, empathy must be acted upon. When I was a community organizer


back in the eighties, I would often challenge neighborhood leaders by asking them
where they put their time, energy, and money. Those are the true tests of what we value,
I’d tell them, regardless of what we like to tell ourselves. If we aren’t willing to pay a
price for our values, if we aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize
them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.

By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing so
much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. We say we value the
legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of
debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of
American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then
structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less
and less of our time.

And yet a part of us knows better. We hang on to our values, even if they seem at times
tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed them
more often than we care to remember. What else is there to guide us? Those values are
our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people. And although we recognize that
they are subject to challenge, can be poked and prodded and debunked and turned inside
out by intellectuals and cultural critics, they have proven to be both surprisingly durable
and surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations. We can
make claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values must be tested
against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not just
words.

To do otherwise would be to relinquish our best selves.




Chapter Three

Our Constitution

THERE’S A SAYING that senators frequently use when asked to describe their first
year on Capitol Hill: “It’s like drinking from a fire hose.”

The description is apt, for during my first few months in the Senate everything seemed
to come at me at once. I had to hire staff and set up offices in Washington and Illinois. I
had to negotiate committee assignments and get up to speed on the issues pending
before the committees. There was the backlog of ten thousand constituent letters that
had accumulated since Election Day, and the three hundred speaking invitations that
were arriving every week. In half-hour blocks, I was shuttled from the Senate floor to
committee rooms to hotel lobbies to radio stations, entirely dependent on an assortment
of recently hired staffers in their twenties and thirties to keep me on schedule, hand me
the right briefing book, remind me whom I was meeting with, or steer me to the nearest
restroom.

Then, at night, there was the adjustment of living alone. Michelle and I had decided to
keep the family in Chicago, in part because we liked the idea of raising the girls outside
the hothouse environment of Washington, but also because the arrangement gave
Michelle a circle of support—from her mother, brother, other family, and friends—that
could help her manage the prolonged absences my job would require. So for the three
nights a week that I spent in Washington, I rented a small one-bedroom apartment near
Georgetown Law School, in a high-rise between Capitol Hill and downtown.

At first, I tried to embrace my newfound solitude, forcing myself to remember the
pleasures of bachelorhood—gathering take-out menus from every restaurant in the
neighborhood, watching basketball or reading late into the night, hitting the gym for a
midnight workout, leaving dishes in the sink and not making my bed. But it was no use;
after thirteen years of marriage, I found myself to be fully domesticated, soft and
helpless. My first morning in Washington, I realized I’d forgotten to buy a shower
curtain and had to scrunch up against the shower wall in order to avoid flooding the
bathroom floor. The next night, watching the game and having a beer, I fell asleep at
halftime, and woke up on the couch two hours later with a bad crick in my neck. Take-
out food didn’t taste so good anymore; the silence irked me. I found myself calling
home repeatedly, just to listen to my daughters’ voices, aching for the warmth of their
hugs and the sweet smell of their skin.

“Hey, sweetie!”

“Hey, Daddy.”

“What’s happening?”

“Since you called before?”

“Yeah.”


“Nothing. You wanna talk to Mommy?”

There were a handful of senators who also had young families, and whenever we met
we would compare notes on the pros and cons of moving to Washington, as well as the
difficulty in protecting family time from overzealous staff. But most of my new
colleagues were considerably older—the average age was sixty—and so as I made the
rounds to their offices, their advice usually related to the business of the Senate. They
explained to me the advantages of various committee assignments and the
temperaments of various committee chairmen. They offered suggestions on how to
organize staff, whom to talk to for extra office space, and how to manage constituent
requests. Most of the advice I found useful; occasionally it was contradictory. But
among Democrats at least, my meetings would end with one consistent
recommendation: As soon as possible, they said, I should schedule a meeting with
Senator Byrd—not only as a matter of senatorial courtesy, but also because Senator
Byrd’s senior position on the Appropriations Committee and general stature in the
Senate gave him considerable clout.

At eighty-seven years old, Senator Robert C. Byrd was not simply the dean of the
Senate; he had come to be seen as the very embodiment of the Senate, a living,
breathing fragment of history. Raised by his aunt and uncle in the hardscrabble coal-
mining towns of West Virginia, he possessed a native talent that allowed him to recite
long passages of poetry from memory and play the fiddle with impressive skill. Unable
to afford college tuition, he worked as a meat cutter, a produce salesman, and a welder
on battleships during World War II. When he returned to West Virginia after the war, he
won a seat in the state legislature, and he was elected to Congress in 1952.

In 1958, he made the jump to the Senate, and during the course of forty-seven years he
had held just about every office available—including six years as majority leader and
six years as minority leader. All the while he maintained the populist impulse that led
him to focus on delivering tangible benefits to the men and women back home: black
lung benefits and union protections for miners; roads and buildings and electrification
projects for desperately poor communities. In ten years of night courses while serving in
Congress he had earned his law degree, and his grasp of Senate rules was legendary.
Eventually, he had written a four-volume history of the Senate that reflected not just
scholarship and discipline but also an unsurpassed love of the institution that had shaped
his life’s work. Indeed, it was said that Senator Byrd’s passion for the Senate was
exceeded only by the tenderness he felt toward his ailing wife of sixty-eight years (who
has since passed away)—and perhaps by his reverence for the Constitution, a pocket-
sized copy of which he carried with him wherever he went and often pulled out to wave
in the midst of debate.

I had already left a message with Senator Byrd’s office requesting a meeting when I
first had an opportunity to see him in person. It was the day of our swearing in, and we
had been in the Old Senate Chamber, a dark, ornate place dominated by a large,
gargoyle-like eagle that stretched out over the presiding officer’s chair from an awning
of dark, bloodred velvet. The somber setting matched the occasion, as the Democratic
Caucus was meeting to organize itself after the difficult election and the loss of its
leader. After the new leadership team was installed, Minority Leader Harry Reid asked
Senator Byrd if he would say a few words. Slowly, the senior senator rose from his seat,
a slender man with a still-thick snowy mane, watery blue eyes, and a sharp, prominent


nose. For a moment he stood in silence, steadying himself with his cane, his head turned
upward, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Then he began to speak, in somber, measured tones, a
hint of the Appalachians like a knotty grain of wood beneath polished veneer.

I don’t recall the specifics of his speech, but I remember the broad themes, cascading
out from the well of the Old Senate Chamber in a rising, Shakespearean rhythm—the
clockwork design of the Constitution and the Senate as the essence of that charter’s
promise; the dangerous encroachment, year after year, of the Executive Branch on the
Senate’s precious independence; the need for every senator to reread our founding
documents, so that we might remain steadfast and faithful and true to the meaning of the
Republic. As he spoke, his voice grew more forceful; his forefinger stabbed the air; the
dark room seemed to close in on him, until he seemed almost a specter, the spirit of
Senates past, his almost fifty years in these chambers reaching back to touch the
previous fifty years, and the fifty years before that, and the fifty years before that; back
to the time when Jefferson, Adams, and Madison roamed through the halls of the
Capitol, and the city itself was still wilderness and farmland and swamp.

Back to a time when neither I nor those who looked like me could have sat within these
walls.

Listening to Senator Byrd speak, I felt with full force all the essential contradictions of
me in this new place, with its marble busts, its arcane traditions, its memories and its
ghosts. I pondered the fact that, according to his own autobiography, Senator Byrd had
received his first taste of leadership in his early twenties, as a member of the Raleigh
County Ku Klux Klan, an association that he had long disavowed, an error he
attributed—no doubt correctly—to the time and place in which he’d been raised, but
which continued to surface as an issue throughout his career. I thought about how he
had joined other giants of the Senate, like J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and Richard
Russell of Georgia, in Southern resistance to civil rights legislation. I wondered if this
would matter to the liberals who now lionized Senator Byrd for his principled
opposition to the Iraq War resolution—the MoveOn.org crowd, the heirs of the political
counterculture the senator had spent much of his career disdaining.

I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd’s life—like most of ours—has been the
struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light. And in that sense I
realized that he really was a proper emblem for the Senate, whose rules and design
reflect the grand compromise of America’s founding: the bargain between Northern
states and Southern states, the Senate’s role as a guardian against the passions of the
moment, a defender of minority rights and state sovereignty, but also a tool to protect
the wealthy from the rabble, and assure slaveholders of noninterference with their
peculiar institution. Stamped into the very fiber of the Senate, within its genetic code,
was the same contest between power and principle that characterized America as a
whole, a lasting expression of that great debate among a few brilliant, flawed men that
had concluded with the creation of a form of government unique in its genius—yet
blind to the whip and the chain.

The speech ended; fellow senators clapped and congratulated Senator Byrd for his
magnificent oratory. I went over to introduce myself and he grasped my hand warmly,
saying how much he looked forward to sitting down for a visit. Walking back to my
office, I decided I would unpack my old constitutional law books that night and reread


the document itself. For Senator Byrd was right: To understand what was happening in
Washington in 2005, to understand my new job and to understand Senator Byrd, I
needed to circle back to the start, to America’s earliest debates and founding documents,
to trace how they had played out over time, and make judgments in light of subsequent
history.



IF YOU ASK my eight-year-old what I do for a living, she might say I make laws. And
yet one of the surprising things about Washington is the amount of time spent arguing
not about what the law should be, but rather what the law is. The simplest statute—a
requirement, say, that companies provide bathroom breaks to their hourly workers—can
become the subject of wildly different interpretations, depending on whom you are
talking to: the congressman who sponsored the provision, the staffer who drafted it, the
department head whose job it is to enforce it, the lawyer whose client finds it
inconvenient, or the judge who may be called upon to apply it.

Some of this is by design, a result of the complex machinery of checks and balances.
The diffusion of power between the branches, as well as between federal and state
governments, means that no law is ever final, no battle truly finished; there is always the
opportunity to strengthen or weaken what appears to be done, to water down a
regulation or block its implementation, to contract an agency’s power with a cut in its
budget, or to seize control of an issue where a vacuum has been left.

Partly it’s the nature of the law itself. Much of the time, the law is settled and plain. But
life turns up new problems, and lawyers, officials, and citizens debate the meaning of
terms that seemed clear years or even months before. For in the end laws are just words
on a page—words that are sometimes malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and
trust as they are in a story or poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are
subject to erosion, sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye.

The legal controversies that were stirring Washington in 2005 went beyond the standard
problems of legal interpretation, however. Instead, they involved the question of
whether those in power were bound by any rules of law at all.

When it came to questions of national security in the post–9/11 era, for example, the
White House stood fast against any suggestion that it was answerable to Congress or the
courts. During the hearings to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state,
arguments flared over everything from the scope of Congress’s resolution authorizing
the war in Iraq to the willingness of executive branch members to testify under oath.
During the debate surrounding the confirmation of Alberto Gonzalez, I reviewed memos
drafted in the attorney general’s office suggesting that techniques like sleep deprivation
or repeated suffocation did not constitute torture so long as they did not cause “severe
pain” of the sort “accompanying organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even
death”; transcripts that suggested the Geneva Conventions did not apply to “enemy
combatants” captured in a war in Afghanistan; opinions that the Fourth Amendment did
not apply to U.S. citizens labeled “enemy combatants” and captured on U.S. soil.

This attitude was by no means confined to the White House. I remember heading
toward the Senate floor one day in early March and being stopped briefly by a dark-


haired young man. He led me over to his parents, and explained that they had traveled
from Florida in a last-ditch effort to save a young woman—Terri Schiavo—who had
fallen into a deep coma, and whose husband was now planning to remove her from life
support. It was a heartbreaking story, but I told them there was little precedent for
Congress intervening in such cases—not realizing at the time that Tom DeLay and Bill
Frist made their own precedent.

The scope of presidential power during wartime. The ethics surrounding end-of-life
decisions. These weren’t easy issues; as much as I disagreed with Republican policies, I
believed they were worthy of serious debate. No, what troubled me was the process—or
lack of process—by which the White House and its congressional allies disposed of
opposing views; the sense that the rules of governing no longer applied, and that there
were no fixed meanings or standards to which we could appeal. It was as if those in
power had decided that habeas corpus and separation of powers were niceties that only
got in the way, that they complicated what was obvious (the need to stop terrorists) or
impeded what was right (the sanctity of life) and could therefore be disregarded, or at
least bent to strong wills.

The irony, of course, was that such disregard of the rules and the manipulation of
language to achieve a particular outcome were precisely what conservatives had long
accused liberals of doing. It was one of the rationales behind Newt Gingrich’s Contract
with America—the notion that the Democratic barons who then controlled the House of
Representatives consistently abused the legislative process for their own gain. It was the
basis for the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, the scorn heaped on the sad
phrase “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” It was the basis of
conservative broadsides against liberal academics, those high priests of political
correctness, it was argued, who refused to acknowledge any eternal truths or hierarchies
of knowledge and indoctrinated America’s youth with dangerous moral relativism.

And it was at the very heart of the conservative assault on the federal courts.

Gaining control of the courts generally and the Supreme Court in particular had become
the holy grail for a generation of conservative activists—and not just, they insisted,
because they viewed the courts as the last bastion of pro-abortion, pro-affirmative-
action, pro-homosexual, pro-criminal, pro-regulation, anti-religious liberal elitism.
According to these activists, liberal judges had placed themselves above the law, basing
their opinions not on the Constitution but on their own whims and desired results,
finding rights to abortion or sodomy that did not exist in the text, subverting the
democratic process and perverting the Founding Fathers’ original intent. To return the
courts to their proper role required the appointment of “strict constructionists” to the
federal bench, men and women who understood the difference between interpreting and
making law, men and women who would stick to the original meaning of the Founders’
words. Men and women who would follow the rules.

Those on the left saw the situation quite differently. With conservative Republicans
making gains in the congressional and presidential elections, many liberals viewed the
courts as the only thing standing in the way of a radical effort to roll back civil rights,
women’s rights, civil liberties, environmental regulation, church/state separation, and
the entire legacy of the New Deal. During the Bork nomination, advocacy groups and
Democratic leaders organized their opposition with a sophistication that had never been


seen for a judicial confirmation. When the nomination was defeated, conservatives
realized that they would have to build their own grassroots army.

Since then, each side had claimed incremental advances (Scalia and Thomas for
conservatives, Ginsburg and Breyer for liberals) and setbacks (for conservatives, the
widely perceived drift toward the center by O’Connor, Kennedy, and especially Souter;
for liberals, the packing of lower federal courts with Reagan and Bush I appointees).
Democrats complained loudly when Republicans used control of the Judiciary
Committee to block sixty-one of Clinton’s appointments to appellate and district courts,
and for the brief time that they held the majority, the Democrats tried the same tactics
on George W. Bush’s nominees.

But when the Democrats lost their Senate majority in 2002, they had only one arrow left
in their quiver, a strategy that could be summed up in one word, the battle cry around
which the Democratic faithful now rallied:

Filibuster!

The Constitution makes no mention of the filibuster; it is a Senate rule, one that dates
back to the very first Congress. The basic idea is simple: Because all Senate business is
conducted by unanimous consent, any senator can bring proceedings to a halt by
exercising his right to unlimited debate and refusing to move on to the next order of
business. In other words, he can talk. For as long as he wants. He can talk about the
substance of a pending bill, or about the motion to call the pending bill. He can choose
to read the entire seven-hundred-page defense authorization bill, line by line, into the
record, or relate aspects of the bill to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the flight of
the hummingbird, or the Atlanta phone book. So long as he or like-minded colleagues
are willing to stay on the floor and talk, everything else has to wait—which gives each
senator an enormous amount of leverage, and a determined minority effective veto
power over any piece of legislation.

The only way to break a filibuster is for three-fifths of the Senate to invoke something
called cloture—that is, the cessation of debate. Effectively this means that every action
pending before the Senate—every bill, resolution, or nomination—needs the support of
sixty senators rather than a simple majority. A series of complex rules has evolved,
allowing both filibusters and cloture votes to proceed without fanfare: Just the threat of
a filibuster will often be enough to get the majority leader’s attention, and a cloture vote
will then be organized without anybody having to spend their evenings sleeping in
armchairs and cots. But throughout the Senate’s modern history, the filibuster has
remained a preciously guarded prerogative, one of the distinguishing features, it is
said—along with six-year terms and the allocation of two senators to each state,
regardless of population—that separates the Senate from the House and serves as a
firewall against the dangers of majority overreach.

There is another, grimmer history to the filibuster, though, one that carries special
relevance for me. For almost a century, the filibuster was the South’s weapon of choice
in its efforts to protect Jim Crow from federal interference, the legal blockade that
effectively gutted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Decade after decade,
courtly, erudite men like Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia (after whom the most
elegant suite of Senate offices is named) used the filibuster to choke off any and every


piece of civil rights legislation before the Senate, whether voting rights bills, or fair
employment bills, or anti-lynching bills. With words, with rules, with procedures and
precedents—with law—Southern senators had succeeded in perpetuating black
subjugation in ways that mere violence never could. The filibuster hadn’t just stopped
bills. For many blacks in the South, the filibuster had snuffed out hope.

Democrats used the filibuster sparingly in George Bush’s first term: Of the President’s
two-hundred-plus judicial nominees, only ten were prevented from getting to the floor
for an up-or-down vote. Still, all ten were nominees to appellate courts, the courts that
counted; all ten were standard-bearers for the conservative cause; and if Democrats
maintained their filibuster on these ten fine jurists, conservatives argued, there would be
nothing to prevent them from having their way with future Supreme Court nominees.

So it came to pass that President Bush—emboldened by a bigger Republican majority in
the Senate and his self-proclaimed mandate—decided in the first few weeks of his
second term to renominate seven previously filibustered judges. As a poke in the eye to
the Democrats, it produced the desired response. Democratic Leader Harry Reid called
it “a big wet kiss to the far right” and renewed the threat of a filibuster. Advocacy
groups on the left and the right rushed to their posts and sent out all-points alerts,
dispatching emails and direct mail that implored donors to fund the air wars to come.
Republicans, sensing that this was the time to go in for the kill, announced that if
Democrats continued in their obstructionist ways, they would have no choice but to
invoke the dreaded “nuclear option,” a novel procedural maneuver that would involve
the Senate’s presiding officer (perhaps Vice President Cheney himself) ignoring the
opinion of the Senate parliamentarian, breaking two hundred years of Senate precedent,
and deciding, with a simple bang of the gavel, that the use of filibusters was no longer
permissible under the Senate rules—at least when it came to judicial nominations.

To me, the threat to eliminate the filibuster on judicial nominations was just one more
example of Republicans changing the rules in the middle of the game. Moreover, a good
argument could be made that a vote on judicial nominations was precisely the situation
where the filibuster’s supermajority requirement made sense: Because federal judges
receive lifetime appointments and often serve through the terms of multiple presidents,
it behooves a president—and benefits our democracy—to find moderate nominees who
can garner some measure of bipartisan support. Few of the Bush nominees in question
fell into the “moderate” category; rather, they showed a pattern of hostility toward civil
rights, privacy, and checks on executive power that put them to the right of even most
Republican judges (one particularly troubling nominee had derisively called Social
Security and other New Deal programs “the triumph of our own socialist revolution”).

Still, I remember muffling a laugh the first time I heard the term “nuclear option.” It
seemed to perfectly capture the loss of perspective that had come to characterize judicial
confirmations, part of the spin-fest that permitted groups on the left to run ads featuring
scenes of Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington without any mention that
Strom Thurmond and Jim Eastland had played Mr. Smith in real life; the shameless
mythologizing that allowed Southern Republicans to rise on the Senate floor and
somberly intone about the impropriety of filibusters, without even a peep of
acknowledgment that it was the politicians from their states—their direct political
forebears—who had perfected the art for a malicious cause.


Not many of my fellow Democrats appreciated the irony. As the judicial confirmation
process began heating up, I had a conversation with a friend in which I admitted
concern with some of the strategies we were using to discredit and block nominees. I
had no doubt of the damage that some of Bush’s judicial nominees might do; I would
support the filibuster of some of these judges, if only to signal to the White House the
need to moderate its next selections. But elections ultimately meant something, I told
my friend. Instead of relying on Senate procedures, there was one way to ensure that
judges on the bench reflected our values, and that was to win at the polls.

My friend shook her head vehemently. “Do you really think that if the situations were
reversed, Republicans would have any qualms about using the filibuster?” she asked.

I didn’t. And yet I doubted that our use of the filibuster would dispel the image of
Democrats always being on the defensive—a perception that we used the courts and
lawyers and procedural tricks to avoid having to win over popular opinion. The
perception wasn’t entirely fair: Republicans no less than Democrats often asked the
courts to overturn democratic decisions (like campaign finance laws) that they didn’t
like. Still, I wondered if, in our reliance on the courts to vindicate not only our rights but
also our values, progressives had lost too much faith in democracy.

Just as conservatives appeared to have lost any sense that democracy must be more than
what the majority insists upon. I thought back to an afternoon several years earlier,
when as a member of the Illinois legislature I had argued for an amendment to include a
mother’s health exception in a Republican bill to ban partial-birth abortion. The
amendment failed on a party line vote, and afterward, I stepped out into the hallway
with one of my Republican colleagues. Without the amendment, I said, the law would
be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. He turned to me and said it didn’t
matter what amendment was attached—judges would do whatever they wanted to do
anyway.

“It’s all politics,” he had said, turning to leave. “And right now we’ve got the votes.”



DO ANY OF these fights matter? For many of us, arguments over Senate procedure,
separation of powers, judicial nominations, and rules of constitutional interpretation
seem pretty esoteric, distant from our everyday concerns—just one more example of
partisan jousting.

In fact, they do matter. Not only because the procedural rules of our government help
define the results—on everything from whether the government can regulate polluters to
whether government can tap your phone—but because they define our democracy just
as much as elections do. Our system of self-governance is an intricate affair; it is
through that system, and by respecting that system, that we give shape to our values and
shared commitments.

Of course, I’m biased. For ten years before coming to Washington, I taught
constitutional law at the University of Chicago. I loved the law school classroom: the
stripped-down nature of it, the high-wire act of standing in front of a room at the
beginning of each class with just blackboard and chalk, the students taking measure of


me, some intent or apprehensive, others demonstrative in their boredom, the tension
broken by my first question—“What’s this case about?”—and the hands tentatively
rising, the initial responses and me pushing back against whatever arguments surfaced,
until slowly the bare words were peeled back and what had appeared dry and lifeless
just a few minutes before suddenly came alive, and my students’ eyes stirred, the text
becoming for them a part not just of the past but of their present and their future.

Sometimes I imagined my work to be not so different from the work of the theology
professors who taught across campus—for, as I suspect was true for those teaching
Scripture, I found that my students often felt they knew the Constitution without having
really read it. They were accustomed to plucking out phrases that they’d heard and
using them to bolster their immediate arguments, or ignoring passages that seemed to
contradict their views.

But what I appreciated most about teaching constitutional law, what I wanted my
students to appreciate, was just how accessible the relevant documents remain after two
centuries. My students may have used me as a guide, but they needed no intermediary,
for unlike the books of Timothy or Luke, the founding documents—the Declaration of
Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution—present themselves as the
product of men. We have a record of the Founders’ intentions, I would tell my students,
their arguments and their palace intrigues. If we can’t always divine what was in their
hearts, we can at least cut through the mist of time and have some sense of the core
ideals that motivated their work.

So how should we understand our Constitution, and what does it say about the current
controversies surrounding the courts? To begin with, a careful reading of our founding
documents reminds us just how much all of our attitudes have been shaped by them.
Take the idea of inalienable rights. More than two hundred years after the Declaration
of Independence was written and the Bill of Rights was ratified, we continue to argue
about the meaning of a “reasonable” search, or whether the Second Amendment
prohibits all gun regulation, or whether the desecration of the flag should be considered
speech. We debate whether such basic common-law rights as the right to marry or the
right to maintain our bodily integrity are implicitly, if not explicitly, recognized by the
Constitution, and whether these rights encompass personal decisions involving abortion,
or end-of-life care, or homosexual partnerships.

And yet for all our disagreements we would be hard pressed to find a conservative or
liberal in America today, whether Republican or Democrat, academic or layman, who
doesn’t subscribe to the basic set of individual liberties identified by the Founders and
enshrined in our Constitution and our common law: the right to speak our minds; the
right to worship how and if we wish; the right to peaceably assemble to petition our
government; the right to own, buy, and sell property and not have it taken without fair
compensation; the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures; the right not
to be detained by the state without due process; the right to a fair and speedy trial; and
the right to make our own determinations, with minimal restriction, regarding family
life and the way we raise our children.

We consider these rights to be universal, a codification of liberty’s meaning,
constraining all levels of government and applicable to all people within the boundaries
of our political community. Moreover, we recognize that the very idea of these


universal rights presupposes the equal worth of every individual. In that sense, wherever
we lie on the political spectrum, we all subscribe to the Founders’ teachings.

We also understand that a declaration is not a government; a creed is not enough. The
Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom,
an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if everybody is truly free, without the
constraints of birth or rank or an inherited social order—if my notion of faith is no
better or worse than yours, and my notions of truth and goodness and beauty are as true
and good and beautiful as yours—then how can we ever hope to form a society that
coheres? Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke suggested that free men would
form governments as a bargain to ensure that one man’s freedom did not become
another man’s tyranny; that they would sacrifice individual license to better preserve
their liberty. And building on this concept, political theorists writing before the
American Revolution concluded that only a democracy could fulfill the need for both
freedom and order—a form of government in which those who are governed grant their
consent, and the laws constraining liberty are uniform, predictable, and transparent,
applying equally to the rulers and the ruled.

The Founders were steeped in these theories, and yet they were faced with a
discouraging fact: In the history of the world to that point, there were scant examples of
functioning democracies, and none that were larger than the city-states of ancient
Greece. With thirteen far-flung states and a diverse population of three or four million,
an Athenian model of democracy was out of the question, the direct democracy of the
New England town meeting unmanageable. A republican form of government, in which
the people elected representatives, seemed more promising, but even the most optimistic
republicans had assumed that such a system could work only for a geographically
compact and homogeneous political community—a community in which a common
culture, a common faith, and a well-developed set of civic virtues on the part of each
and every citizen limited contention and strife.

The solution that the Founders arrived at, after contentious debate and multiple drafts,
proved to be their novel contribution to the world. The outlines of Madison’s
constitutional architecture are so familiar that even schoolchildren can recite them: not
only rule of law and representative government, not just a bill of rights, but also the
separation of the national government into three coequal branches, a bicameral
Congress, and a concept of federalism that preserved authority in state governments, all
of it designed to diffuse power, check factions, balance interests, and prevent tyranny by
either the few or the many. Moreover, our history has vindicated one of the Founders’
central insights: that republican self-government could actually work better in a large
and diverse society, where, in Hamilton’s words, the “jarring of parties” and differences
of opinion could “promote deliberation and circumspection.” As with our understanding
of the Declaration, we debate the details of constitutional construction; we may object to
Congress’s abuse of expanded commerce clause powers to the detriment of the states, or
to the erosion of Congress’s power to declare war. But we are confident in the
fundamental soundness of the Founders’ blueprints and the democratic house that
resulted. Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.

So if we all believe in individual liberty and we all believe in these rules of democracy,
what is the modern argument between conservatives and liberals really about? If we’re
honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that much of the time we are arguing about results—


the actual decisions that the courts and the legislature make about the profound and
difficult issues that help shape our lives. Should we let teachers lead our children in
prayer and leave open the possibility that the minority faiths of some children are
diminished? Or do we forbid such prayer and force parents of faith to hand over their
children to a secular world eight hours a day? Is a university being fair by taking the
history of racial discrimination and exclusion into account when filling a limited
number of slots in its medical school? Or does fairness demand that universities treat
every applicant in a color-blind fashion? More often than not, if a particular procedural
rule—the right to filibuster, say, or the Supreme Court’s approach to constitutional
interpretation—helps us win the argument and yields the outcome we want, then for that
moment at least we think it’s a pretty good rule. If it doesn’t help us win, then we tend
not to like it so much.

In that sense, my colleague in the Illinois legislature was right when he said that today’s
constitutional arguments can’t be separated from politics. But there’s more than just
outcomes at stake in our current debates about the Constitution and the proper role of
the courts. We’re also arguing about how to argue—the means, in a big, crowded, noisy
democracy, of settling our disputes peacefully. We want to get our way, but most of us
also recognize the need for consistency, predictability, and coherence. We want the
rules governing our democracy to be fair.

And so, when we get in a tussle about abortion or flag burning, we appeal to a higher
authority—the Founding Fathers and the Constitution’s ratifiers—to give us more
direction. Some, like Justice Scalia, conclude that the original understanding must be
followed and that if we strictly obey this rule, then democracy is respected.

Others, like Justice Breyer, don’t dispute that the original meaning of constitutional
provisions matters. But they insist that sometimes the original understanding can take
you only so far—that on the truly hard cases, the truly big arguments, we have to take
context, history, and the practical outcomes of a decision into account. According to this
view, the Founding Fathers and original ratifiers have told us how to think but are no
longer around to tell us what to think. We are on our own, and have only our own
reason and our judgment to rely on.

Who’s right? I’m not unsympathetic to Justice Scalia’s position; after all, in many cases
the language of the Constitution is perfectly clear and can be strictly applied. We don’t
have to interpret how often elections are held, for example, or how old a president must
be, and whenever possible judges should hew as closely as possible to the clear meaning
of the text.

Moreover, I understand the strict constructionists’ reverence for the Founders; indeed,
I’ve often wondered whether the Founders themselves recognized at the time the scope
of their accomplishment. They didn’t simply design the Constitution in the wake of
revolution; they wrote the Federalist Papers to support it, shepherded the document
through ratification, and amended it with the Bill of Rights—all in the span of a few
short years. As we read these documents, they seem so incredibly right that it’s easy to
believe they are the result of natural law if not divine inspiration. So I appreciate the
temptation on the part of Justice Scalia and others to assume our democracy should be
treated as fixed and unwavering; the fundamentalist faith that if the original
understanding of the Constitution is followed without question or deviation, and if we


remain true to the rules that the Founders set forth, as they intended, then we will be
rewarded and all good will flow.

Ultimately, though, I have to side with Justice Breyer’s view of the Constitution—that it
is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-
changing world.

How could it be otherwise? The constitutional text provides us with the general
principle that we aren’t subject to unreasonable searches by the government. It can’t tell
us the Founders’ specific views on the reasonableness of an NSA computer data-mining
operation. The constitutional text tells us that freedom of speech must be protected, but
it doesn’t tell us what such freedom means in the context of the Internet.

Moreover, while much of the Constitution’s language is clear and can be strictly
applied, our understanding of many of its most important provisions—like the due
process clause and the equal protection clause—has evolved greatly over time. The
original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, would certainly
allow sex discrimination and might even allow racial segregation—an understanding of
equality to which few of us would want to return.

Finally, anyone looking to resolve our modern constitutional dispute through strict
construction has one more problem: The Founders and ratifiers themselves disagreed
profoundly, vehemently, on the meaning of their masterpiece. Before the ink on the
constitutional parchment was dry, arguments had erupted, not just about minor
provisions but about first principles, not just between peripheral figures but within the
Revolution’s very core. They argued about how much power the national government
should have—to regulate the economy, to supersede state laws, to form a standing
army, or to assume debt. They argued about the president’s role in establishing treaties
with foreign powers, and about the Supreme Court’s role in determining the law. They
argued about the meaning of such basic rights as freedom of speech and freedom of
assembly, and on several occasions, when the fragile state seemed threatened, they were
not averse to ignoring those rights altogether. Given what we know of this scrum, with
all its shifting alliances and occasionally underhanded tactics, it is unrealistic to believe
that a judge, two hundred years later, can somehow discern the original intent of the
Founders or ratifiers.

Some historians and legal theorists take the argument against strict construction one
step further. They conclude that the Constitution itself was largely a happy accident, a
document cobbled together not as the result of principle but as the result of power and
passion; that we can never hope to discern the Founders’ “original intentions” since the
intentions of Jefferson were never those of Hamilton, and those of Hamilton differed
greatly from those of Adams; that because the “rules” of the Constitution were
contingent on time and place and the ambitions of the men who drafted them, our
interpretation of the rules will necessarily reflect the same contingency, the same raw
competition, the same imperatives—cloaked in high-minded phrasing—of those
factions that ultimately prevail. And just as I recognize the comfort offered by the strict
constructionist, so I see a certain appeal to this shattering of myth, to the temptation to
believe that the constitutional text doesn’t constrain us much at all, so that we are free to
assert our own values unencumbered by fidelity to the stodgy traditions of a distant past.
It’s the freedom of the relativist, the rule breaker, the teenager who has discovered his


parents are imperfect and has learned to play one off of the other—the freedom of the
apostate.

And yet, ultimately, such apostasy leaves me unsatisfied as well. Maybe I am too
steeped in the myth of the founding to reject it entirely. Maybe like those who reject
Darwin in favor of intelligent design, I prefer to assume that someone’s at the wheel. In
the end, the question I keep asking myself is why, if the Constitution is only about
power and not about principle, if all we are doing is just making it up as we go along,
has our own republic not only survived but served as the rough model for so many of
the successful societies on earth?

The answer I settle on—which is by no means original to me—requires a shift in
metaphors, one that sees our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation
to be had. According to this conception, the genius of Madison’s design is not that it
provides us a fixed blueprint for action, the way a draftsman plots a building’s
construction. It provides us with a framework and with rules, but fidelity to these rules
will not guarantee a just society or assure agreement on what’s right. It won’t tell us
whether abortion is good or bad, a decision for a woman to make or a decision for a
legislature. Nor will it tell us whether school prayer is better than no prayer at all.

What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way by which we argue
about our future. All of its elaborate machinery—its separation of powers and checks
and balances and federalist principles and Bill of Rights—are designed to force us into a
conversation, a “deliberative democracy” in which all citizens are required to engage in
a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their
point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent. Because power in our
government is so diffuse, the process of making law in America compels us to entertain
the possibility that we are not always right and to sometimes change our minds; it
challenges us to examine our motives and our interests constantly, and suggests that
both our individual and collective judgments are at once legitimate and highly fallible.

The historical record supports such a view. After all, if there was one impulse shared by
all the Founders, it was a rejection of all forms of absolute authority, whether the king,
the theocrat, the general, the oligarch, the dictator, the majority, or anyone else who
claims to make choices for us. George Washington declined Caesar’s crown because of
this impulse, and stepped down after two terms. Hamilton’s plans for leading a New
Army foundered and Adams’s reputation after the Alien and Sedition Acts suffered for
failing to abide by this impulse. It was Jefferson, not some liberal judge in the sixties,
who called for a wall between church and state—and if we have declined to heed
Jefferson’s advice to engage in a revolution every two or three generations, it’s only
because the Constitution itself proved a sufficient defense against tyranny.

It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in its structure,
in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of
any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock
future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and
minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The
Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they also trusted
in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were suspicious of abstraction
and liked asking questions, which is why at every turn in our early history theory


yielded to fact and necessity. Jefferson helped consolidate the power of the national
government even as he claimed to deplore and reject such power. Adams’s ideal of a
politics grounded solely in the public interest—a politics without politics—was proven
obsolete the moment Washington stepped down from office. It may be the vision of the
Founders that inspires us, but it was their realism, their practicality and flexibility and
curiosity, that ensured the Union’s survival.

I confess that there is a fundamental humility to this reading of the Constitution and our
democratic process. It seems to champion compromise, modesty, and muddling
through; to justify logrolling, deal-making, self-interest, pork barrels, paralysis, and
inefficiency—all the sausage-making that no one wants to see and that editorialists
throughout our history have often labeled as corrupt. And yet I think we make a mistake
in assuming that democratic deliberation requires abandonment of our highest ideals, or
of a commitment to the common good. After all, the Constitution ensures our free
speech not just so that we can shout at one another as loud as we please, deaf to what
others might have to say (although we have that right). It also offers us the possibility of
a genuine marketplace of ideas, one in which the “jarring of parties” works on behalf of
“deliberation and circumspection”; a marketplace in which, through debate and
competition, we can expand our perspective, change our minds, and eventually arrive
not merely at agreements but at sound and fair agreements.

The Constitution’s system of checks and balances, separation of powers, and federalism
may often lead to groups with fixed interests angling and sparring for narrow advantage,
but it doesn’t have to. Such diffusion of power may also force groups to take other
interests into account and, indeed, may even alter over time how those groups think and
feel about their own interests.

The rejection of absolutism implicit in our constitutional structure may sometimes make
our politics seem unprincipled. But for most of our history it has encouraged the very
process of information gathering, analysis, and argument that allows us to make better,
if not perfect, choices, not only about the means to our ends but also about the ends
themselves. Whether we are for or against affirmative action, for or against prayer in
schools, we must test out our ideals, vision, and values against the realities of a common
life, so that over time they may be refined, discarded, or replaced by new ideals, sharper
visions, deeper values. Indeed, it is that process, according to Madison, that brought
about the Constitution itself, through a convention in which “no man felt himself
obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he was satisfied of their propriety and
truth, and was open to the force of argument.”



IN SUM, the Constitution envisions a road map by which we marry passion to reason,
the ideal of individual freedom to the demands of community. And the amazing thing is
that it’s worked. Through the early days of the Union, through depressions and world
wars, through the multiple transformations of the economy and Western expansion and
the arrival of millions of immigrants to our shores, our democracy has not only survived
but has thrived. It has been tested, of course, during times of war and fear, and it will no
doubt be tested again in the future.


But only once has the conversation broken down completely, and that was over the one
subject the Founders refused to talk about.

The Declaration of Independence may have been, in the words of historian Joseph Ellis,
“a transformative moment in world history, when all laws and human relationships
dependent on coercion would be swept away forever.” But that spirit of liberty didn’t
extend, in the minds of the Founders, to the slaves who worked their fields, made their
beds, and nursed their children.

The Constitution’s exquisite machinery would secure the rights of citizens, those
deemed members of America’s political community. But it provided no protection to
those outside the constitutional circle—the Native American whose treaties proved
worthless before the court of the conqueror, or the black man Dred Scott, who would
walk into the Supreme Court a free man and leave a slave.

Democratic deliberation might have been sufficient to expand the franchise to white
men without property and eventually women; reason, argument, and American
pragmatism might have eased the economic growing pains of a great nation and helped
lessen religious and class tensions that would plague other nations. But deliberation
alone could not provide the slave his freedom or cleanse America of its original sin. In
the end, it was the sword that would sever his chains.

What does this say about our democracy? There’s a school of thought that sees the
Founding Fathers only as hypocrites and the Constitution only as a betrayal of the grand
ideals set forth by the Declaration of Independence; that agrees with early abolitionists
that the Great Compromise between North and South was a pact with the Devil. Others,
representing the safer, more conventional wisdom, will insist that all the constitutional
compromise on slavery—the omission of abolitionist sentiments from the original draft
of the Declaration, the Three-fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause and the
Importation Clause, the self-imposed gag rule that the Twenty-fourth Congress would
place on all debate regarding the issue of slavery, the very structure of federalism and
the Senate—was a necessary, if unfortunate, requirement for the formation of the
Union; that in their silence, the Founders only sought to postpone what they were
certain would be slavery’s ultimate demise; that this single lapse cannot detract from the
genius of the Constitution, which permitted the space for abolitionists to rally and the
debate to proceed, and provided the framework by which, after the Civil War had been
fought, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments could be passed, and the
Union finally perfected.

How can I, an American with the blood of Africa coursing through my veins, choose
sides in such a dispute? I can’t. I love America too much, am too invested in what this
country has become, too committed to its institutions, its beauty, and even its ugliness,
to focus entirely on the circumstances of its birth. But neither can I brush aside the
magnitude of the injustice done, or erase the ghosts of generations past, or ignore the
open wound, the aching spirit, that ails this country still.

The best I can do in the face of our history is remind myself that it has not always been
the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the
conditions for liberty. The hard, cold facts remind me that it was unbending idealists
like William Lloyd Garrison who first sounded the clarion call for justice; that it was


slaves and former slaves, men like Denmark Vesey and Frederick Douglass and women
like Harriet Tubman, who recognized power would concede nothing without a fight. It
was the wild-eyed prophecies of John Brown, his willingness to spill blood and not just
words on behalf of his visions, that helped force the issue of a nation half slave and half
free. I’m reminded that deliberation and the constitutional order may sometimes be the
luxury of the powerful, and that it has sometimes been the cranks, the zealots, the
prophets, the agitators, and the unreasonable—in other words, the absolutists—that have
fought for a new order. Knowing this, I can’t summarily dismiss those possessed of
similar certainty today—the antiabortion activist who pickets my town hall meeting, or
the animal rights activist who raids a laboratory—no matter how deeply I disagree with
their views. I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty—for sometimes absolute
truths may well be absolute.



I’M LEFT THEN with Lincoln, who like no man before or since understood both the
deliberative function of our democracy and the limits of such deliberation. We
remember him for the firmness and depth of his convictions—his unyielding opposition
to slavery and his determination that a house divided could not stand. But his presidency
was guided by a practicality that would distress us today, a practicality that led him to
test various bargains with the South in order to maintain the Union without war; to
appoint and discard general after general, strategy after strategy, once war broke out; to
stretch the Constitution to the breaking point in order to see the war through to a
successful conclusion. I like to believe that for Lincoln, it was never a matter of
abandoning conviction for the sake of expediency. Rather, it was a matter of
maintaining within himself the balance between two contradictory ideas—that we must
talk and reach for common understandings, precisely because all of us are imperfect and
can never act with the certainty that God is on our side; and yet at times we must act
nonetheless, as if we are certain, protected from error only by providence.

That self-awareness, that humility, led Lincoln to advance his principles through the
framework of our democracy, through speeches and debate, through the reasoned
arguments that might appeal to the better angels of our nature. It was this same humility
that allowed him, once the conversation between North and South broke down and war
became inevitable, to resist the temptation to demonize the fathers and sons who did
battle on the other side, or to diminish the horror of war, no matter how just it might be.
The blood of slaves reminds us that our pragmatism can sometimes be moral cowardice.
Lincoln, and those buried at Gettysburg, remind us that we should pursue our own
absolute truths only if we acknowledge that there may be a terrible price to pay.



SUCH LATE-NIGHT meditations proved unnecessary in my immediate decision about
George W. Bush’s nominees to the federal court of appeals. In the end, the crisis in the
Senate was averted, or at least postponed: Seven Democratic senators agreed not to
filibuster three of Bush’s five controversial nominees, and pledged that in the future
they would reserve the filibuster for more “extraordinary circumstances.” In exchange,
seven Republicans agreed to vote against a “nuclear option” that would permanently
eliminate the filibuster—again, with the caveat that they could change their minds in the
event of “extraordinary circumstances.” What constituted “extraordinary circumstances”


no one could say, and both Democratic and Republican activists, itching for a fight,
complained bitterly at what they perceived to be their side’s capitulation.

I declined to be a part of what would be called the Gang of Fourteen; given the profiles
of some of the judges involved, it was hard to see what judicial nominee might be so
much worse as to constitute an “extraordinary circumstance” worthy of filibuster. Still, I
could not fault my colleagues for their efforts. The Democrats involved had made a
practical decision—without the deal, the “nuclear option” would have likely gone
through.

No one was more ecstatic with this turn of events than Senator Byrd. The day the deal
was announced, he walked triumphantly down the halls of the Capitol with Republican
John Warner of Virginia, the younger members of the Gang trailing behind the old
lions. “We have kept the Republic!” Senator Byrd announced to a pack of reporters, and
I smiled to myself, thinking back to the visit that the two of us had finally been able to
arrange a few months earlier.

It was in Senator Byrd’s hideaway on the first floor of the Capitol, tucked alongside a
series of small, beautifully painted rooms where Senate committees once regularly met.
His secretary had led me into his private office, which was filled with books and what
looked to be aging manuscripts, the walls lined with old photographs and campaign
memorabilia. Senator Byrd asked me if it would be all right if we took a few
photographs together, and we shook hands and smiled for the photographer who was
present. After the secretary and the photographer had left, we sat down in a pair of well-
worn chairs. I inquired after his wife, who I had heard had taken a turn for the worse,
and asked about some of the figures in the photos. Eventually I asked him what advice
he would give me as a new member of the Senate.

“Learn the rules,” he said. “Not just the rules, but the precedents as well.” He pointed to
a series of thick binders behind him, each one affixed with a handwritten label. “Not
many people bother to learn them these days. Everything is so rushed, so many
demands on a senator’s time. But these rules unlock the power of the Senate. They’re
the keys to the kingdom.”

We spoke about the Senate’s past, the presidents he had known, the bills he had
managed. He told me I would do well in the Senate but that I shouldn’t be in too much
of a rush—so many senators today became fixated on the White House, not
understanding that in the constitutional design it was the Senate that was supreme, the
heart and soul of the Republic.

“So few people read the Constitution today,” Senator Byrd said, pulling out his copy
from his breast pocket. “I’ve always said, this document and the Holy Bible, they’ve
been all the guidance I need.”

Before I left, he insisted that his secretary bring in a set of his Senate histories for me to
have. As he slowly set the beautifully bound books on the table and searched for a pen, I
told him how remarkable it was that he had found the time to write.


“Oh, I have been very fortunate,” he said, nodding to himself. “Much to be thankful for.
There’s not much I wouldn’t do over.” Suddenly he paused and looked squarely into my
eyes. “I only have one regret, you know. The foolishness of youth…”

We sat there for a moment, considering the gap of years and experience between us.

“We all have regrets, Senator,” I said finally. “We just ask that in the end, God’s grace
shines upon us.”

He studied my face for a moment, then nodded with the slightest of smiles and flipped
open the cover of one of the books. “God’s grace. Yes indeed. Let me sign these for you
then,” he said, and taking one hand to steady the other, he slowly scratched his name on
the gift.


Chapter Four

Politics

ONE OF MY favorite tasks of being a senator is hosting town hall meetings. I held
thirty-nine of them my first year in the Senate, all across Illinois, in tiny rural towns like
Anna and prosperous suburbs like Naperville, in black churches on the South Side and a
college in Rock Island. There’s not a lot of fanfare involved. My staff will call up the
local high school, library, or community college to see if they’re willing to host the
event. A week or so in advance, we advertise in the town newspaper, in church
bulletins, and on the local radio station. On the day of the meeting I’ll show up a half
hour early to chat with town leaders and we’ll discuss local issues, perhaps a road in
need of repaving or plans for a new senior center. After taking a few photographs, we
enter the hall where the crowd is waiting. I shake hands on my way to the stage, which
is usually bare except for a podium, a microphone, a bottle of water, and an American
flag posted in its stand. And then, for the next hour or so, I answer to the people who
sent me to Washington.

Attendance varies at these meetings: We’ve had as few as fifty people turn out, as many
as two thousand. But however many people show up, I am grateful to see them. They
are a cross-section of the counties we visit: Republican and Democrat, old and young,
fat and skinny, truck drivers, college professors, stay-at-home moms, veterans,
schoolteachers, insurance agents, CPAs, secretaries, doctors, and social workers. They
are generally polite and attentive, even when they disagree with me (or one another).
They ask me about prescription drugs, the deficit, human rights in Myanmar, ethanol,
bird flu, school funding, and the space program. Often they will surprise me: A young
flaxen-haired woman in the middle of farm country will deliver a passionate plea for
intervention in Darfur, or an elderly black gentleman in an inner-city neighborhood will
quiz me on soil conservation.

And as I look out over the crowd, I somehow feel encouraged. In their bearing I see
hard work. In the way they handle their children I see hope. My time with them is like a
dip in a cool stream. I feel cleansed afterward, glad for the work I have chosen.

At the end of the meeting, people will usually come up to shake hands, take pictures, or
nudge their child forward to ask for an autograph. They slip things into my hand—
articles, business cards, handwritten notes, armed-services medallions, small religious
objects, good-luck charms. And sometimes someone will grab my hand and tell me that
they have great hopes for me, but that they are worried that Washington is going to
change me and I will end up just like all the rest of the people in power.

Please stay who you are, they will say to me.

Please don’t disappoint us.



IT IS AN American tradition to attribute the problem with our politics to the quality of
our politicians. At times this is expressed in very specific terms: The president is a


moron, or Congressman So-and-So is a bum. Sometimes a broader indictment is issued,
as in “They’re all in the pockets of the special interests.” Most voters conclude that
everyone in Washington is “just playing politics,” meaning that votes or positions are
taken contrary to conscience, that they are based on campaign contributions or the polls
or loyalty to party rather than on trying to do what is right. Often, the fiercest criticism
is reserved for the politician from one’s own ranks, the Democrat who “doesn’t stand
for anything” or the “Republican in Name Only.” All of which leads to the conclusion
that if we want anything to change in Washington, we’ll need to throw the rascals out.

And yet year after year we keep the rascals right where they are, with the reelection rate
for House members hovering at around 96 percent.

Political scientists can give you a number of reasons for this phenomenon. In today’s
interconnected world, it’s difficult to penetrate the consciousness of a busy and
distracted electorate. As a result, winning in politics mainly comes down to a simple
matter of name recognition, which is why most incumbents spend inordinate amounts of
their time between elections making sure their names are repeated over and over again,
whether at ribbon cuttings or Fourth of July parades or on the Sunday morning talk
show circuit. There’s the well-known fund-raising advantage that incumbents enjoy, for
interest groups—whether on the left or the right—tend to go with the odds when it
comes to political contributions. And there’s the role of political gerrymandering in
insulating House members from significant challenge: These days, almost every
congressional district is drawn by the ruling party with computer-driven precision to
ensure that a clear majority of Democrats or Republicans reside within its borders.
Indeed, it’s not a stretch to say that most voters no longer choose their representatives;
instead, representatives choose their voters.

Another factor comes into play, though, one that is rarely mentioned but that helps
explain why polls consistently show voters hating Congress but liking their
congressman. Hard as it may be to believe, most politicians are pretty likable folks.

Certainly I found this to be true of my Senate colleagues. One-on-one they made for
wonderful company—I would be hard-pressed to name better storytellers than Ted
Kennedy or Trent Lott, or sharper wits than Kent Conrad or Richard Shelby, or warmer
individuals than Debbie Stabenow or Mel Martinez. As a rule they proved to be
intelligent, thoughtful, and hardworking people, willing to devote long hours and
attention to the issues affecting their states. Yes, there were those who lived up to the
stereotype, those who talked interminably or bullied their staffs; and the more time I
spent on the Senate floor, the more frequently I could identify in each senator the flaws
that we all suffer from to varying degrees—a bad temper here, a deep stubbornness or
unquenchable vanity there. For the most part, though, the quotient of such attributes in
the Senate seemed no higher than would be found in any random slice of the general
population. Even when talking to those colleagues with whom I most deeply disagreed,
I was usually struck by their basic sincerity—their desire to get things right and leave
the country better and stronger; their desire to represent their constituents and their
values as faithfully as circumstances would allow.

So what happened to make these men and women appear as the grim, uncompromising,
insincere, and occasionally mean characters that populate our nightly news? What was it
about the process that prevented reasonable, conscientious people from doing the


nation’s business? The longer I served in Washington, the more I saw friends studying
my face for signs of a change, probing me for a newfound pomposity, searching for
hints of argumentativeness or guardedness. I began examining myself in the same way;
I began to see certain characteristics that I held in common with my new colleagues, and
I wondered what might prevent my own transformation into the stock politician of bad
TV movies.



ONE PLACE TO start my inquiry was to understand the nature of ambition, for in this
regard at least, senators are different. Few people end up being United States senators
by accident; at a minimum, it requires a certain megalomania, a belief that of all the
gifted people in your state, you are somehow uniquely qualified to speak on their
behalf; a belief sufficiently strong that you are willing to endure the sometimes
uplifting, occasionally harrowing, but always slightly ridiculous process we call
campaigns.

Moreover, ambition alone is not enough. Whatever the tangle of motives, both sacred
and profane, that push us toward the goal of becoming a senator, those who succeed
must exhibit an almost fanatical single-mindedness, often disregarding their health,
relationships, mental balance, and dignity. After my primary campaign was over, I
remember looking at my calendar and realizing that over a span of a year and a half, I
had taken exactly seven days off. The rest of the time I had typically worked twelve to
sixteen hours a day. This was not something I was particularly proud of. As Michelle
pointed out to me several times a week during the campaign, it just wasn’t normal.

Neither ambition nor single-mindedness fully accounts for the behavior of politicians,
however. There is a companion emotion, perhaps more pervasive and certainly more
destructive, an emotion that, after the giddiness of your official announcement as a
candidate, rapidly locks you in its grip and doesn’t release you until after Election Day.
That emotion is fear. Not just fear of losing—although that is bad enough—but fear of
total, complete humiliation.

I still burn, for example, with the thought of my one loss in politics, a drubbing in 2000
at the hands of incumbent Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush. It was a race in which
everything that could go wrong did go wrong, in which my own mistakes were
compounded by tragedy and farce. Two weeks after announcing my candidacy, with a
few thousand dollars raised, I commissioned my first poll and discovered that Mr.
Rush’s name recognition stood at about 90 percent, while mine stood at 11 percent. His
approval rating hovered around 70 percent—mine at 8. In that way I learned one of the
cardinal rules of modern politics: Do the poll before you announce.

Things went downhill from there. In October, on my way to a meeting to secure an
endorsement from one of the few party officials who had not already committed to my
opponent, I heard a news flash on the radio that Congressman Rush’s adult son had
been shot and killed by a pair of drug dealers outside his house. I was shocked and
saddened for the congressman, and effectively suspended my campaign for a month.

Then, during the Christmas holidays, after having traveled to Hawaii for an abbreviated
five-day trip to visit my grandmother and reacquaint myself with Michelle and then-


eighteen-month-old Malia, the state legislature was called back into special session to
vote on a piece of gun control legislation. With Malia sick and unable to fly, I missed
the vote, and the bill failed. Two days later, I got off the red-eye at O’Hare Airport, a
wailing baby in tow, Michelle not speaking to me, and was greeted by a front-page story
in the Chicago Tribune indicating that the gun bill had fallen a few votes short, and that
state senator and congressional candidate Obama “had decided to remain on vacation”
in Hawaii. My campaign manager called, mentioning the potential ad the congressman
might be running soon—palm trees, a man in a beach chair and straw hat sipping a mai
tai, a slack key guitar being strummed softly in the background, the voice-over
explaining, “While Chicago suffered the highest murder rate in its history, Barack
Obama…”

I stopped him there, having gotten the idea.

And so, less than halfway into the campaign, I knew in my bones that I was going to
lose. Each morning from that point forward I awoke with a vague sense of dread,
realizing that I would have to spend the day smiling and shaking hands and pretending
that everything was going according to plan. In the few weeks before the primary, my
campaign recovered a bit: I did well in the sparsely covered debates, received some
positive coverage for proposals on health care and education, and even received the
Tribune endorsement. But it was too little too late. I arrived at my victory party to
discover that the race had already been called and that I had lost by thirty-one points.

I’m not suggesting that politicians are unique in suffering such disappointments. It’s
that unlike most people, who have the luxury of licking their wounds privately, the
politician’s loss is on public display. There’s the cheerful concession speech you have
to make to a half-empty ballroom, the brave face you put on as you comfort staff and
supporters, the thank-you calls to those who helped, and the awkward requests for
further help in retiring debt. You perform these tasks as best you can, and yet no matter
how much you tell yourself differently—no matter how convincingly you attribute the
loss to bad timing or bad luck or lack of money—it’s impossible not to feel at some
level as if you have been personally repudiated by the entire community, that you don’t
quite have what it takes, and that everywhere you go the word “loser” is flashing
through people’s minds. They’re the sorts of feelings that most people haven’t
experienced since high school, when the girl you’d been pining over dismissed you with
a joke in front of her friends, or you missed a pair of free throws with the big game on
the line—the kinds of feelings that most adults wisely organize their lives to avoid.

Imagine then the impact of these same emotions on the average big-time politician, who
(unlike me) has rarely failed at anything in his life—who was the high school
quarterback or the class valedictorian and whose father was a senator or admiral and
who has been told since he was a child that he was destined for great things. I remember
talking once to a corporate executive who had been a big supporter of Vice President Al
Gore during the 2000 presidential race. We were in his suitably plush office,
overlooking all of midtown Manhattan, and he began describing to me a meeting that
had taken place six months or so after the election, when Gore was seeking investors for
his then-fledgling television venture.

“It was strange,” the executive told me. “Here he was, a former vice president, a man
who just a few months earlier had been on the verge of being the most powerful man on


the planet. During the campaign, I would take his calls any time of day, would rearrange
my schedule whenever he wanted to meet. But suddenly, after the election, when he
walked in, I couldn’t help feeling that the meeting was a chore. I hate to admit it,
because I really like the guy. But at some level he wasn’t Al Gore, former vice
president. He was just one of the hundred guys a day who are coming to me looking for
money. It made me realize what a big steep cliff you guys are on.”

A big steep cliff, the precipitous fall. Over the past five years, Al Gore has shown the
satisfaction and influence that a life after politics can bring, and I suspect the executive
is eagerly taking the former vice president’s calls once again. Still, in the aftermath of
his 2000 loss, I imagine Gore would have sensed the change in his friend. Sitting there,
pitching his television idea, trying to make the best of a bad situation, he might have
thought how ridiculous were the circumstances in which he found himself; how after a
lifetime of work he could have lost it all because of a butterfly ballot that didn’t align,
while his friend the executive, sitting across from him with the condescending smile,
could afford to come in second in his business year after year, maybe see his company’s
stock tumble or make an ill-considered investment, and yet still be considered
successful, still enjoy the pride of accomplishment, the lavish compensation, the
exercise of power. It wasn’t fair, but that wouldn’t change the facts for the former vice
president. Like most men and women who followed the path of public life, Gore knew
what he was getting himself into the moment he decided to run. In politics, there may be
second acts, but there is no second place.







MOST OF THE other sins of politics are derivative of this larger sin—the need to win,
but also the need not to lose. Certainly that’s what the money chase is all about. There
was a time, before campaign finance laws and snooping reporters, when money shaped
politics through outright bribery; when a politician could treat his campaign fund as his
personal bank account and accept fancy junkets; when big honoraria from those who
sought influence were commonplace, and the shape of legislation went to the highest
bidder. If recent news reports are accurate, these ranker forms of corruption have not
gone away entirely; apparently there are still those in Washington who view politics as
a means of getting rich, and who, while generally not dumb enough to accept bags of
small bills, are perfectly prepared to take care of contributors and properly feather their
beds until the time is finally ripe to jump into the lucrative practice of lobbying on
behalf of those they once regulated.

More often, though, that’s not the way money influences politics. Few lobbyists proffer
an explicit quid pro quo to elected officials. They don’t have to. Their influence comes
simply from having more access to those officials than the average voter, having better
information than the average voter, and having more staying power when it comes to
promoting an obscure provision in the tax code that means billions for their clients and
that nobody else cares about.


As for most politicians, money isn’t about getting rich. In the Senate, at least, most
members are already rich. It’s about maintaining status and power; it’s about scaring off
challengers and fighting off the fear. Money can’t guarantee victory—it can’t buy
passion, charisma, or the ability to tell a story. But without money, and the television
ads that consume all the money, you are pretty much guaranteed to lose.

The amounts of money involved are breathtaking, particularly in big state races with
multiple media markets. While in the state legislature, I never needed to spend more
than $100,000 on a race; in fact, I developed a reputation for being something of a stick-
in-the-mud when it came to fund-raising, coauthoring the first campaign finance
legislation to pass in twenty-five years, refusing meals from lobbyists, rejecting checks
from gaming and tobacco interests. When I decided to run for the U.S. Senate, my
media consultant, David Axelrod, had to sit me down to explain the facts of life. Our
campaign plan called for a bare-bones budget, a heavy reliance on grassroots support
and “earned media”—that is, an ability to make our own news. Still, David informed me
that one week of television advertising in the Chicago media market would cost
approximately half a million dollars. Covering the rest of the state for a week would run
about $250,000. Figuring four weeks of TV, and all the overhead and staff for a
statewide campaign, the final budget for the primary would be around $5 million.
Assuming I won the primary, I would then need to raise another $10 or $15 million for
the general election.

I went home that night and in neat columns proceeded to write down all the people I
knew who might give me a contribution. Next to their names, I wrote down the
maximum amounts that I would feel comfortable asking them for.

My grand total came to $500,000.

Absent great personal wealth, there is basically one way of raising the kind of money
involved in a U.S. Senate race. You have to ask rich people for it. In the first three
months of my campaign, I would shut myself in a room with my fund-raising assistant
and cold-call previous Democratic donors. It was not fun. Sometimes people would
hang up on me. More often their secretary would take a message and I wouldn’t get a
return call, and I would call back two or three times until either I gave up or the person I
was calling finally answered and gave me the courtesy of a person-to-person rejection. I
started engaging in elaborate games of avoidance during call time—frequent bathroom
breaks, extended coffee runs, suggestions to my policy staff that we fine-tune that
education speech for the third or fourth time. At times during these sessions I thought of
my grandfather, who in middle age had sold life insurance but wasn’t very good at it. I
recalled his anguish whenever he tried to schedule appointments with people who
would rather have had a root canal than talk to an insurance agent, as well as the
disapproving glances he received from my grandmother, who for most of their marriage
made more money than he did.

More than ever, I understood how my grandfather must have felt.

At the end of three months, our campaign had raised just $250,000—well below the
threshold of what it would take to be credible. To make matters worse, my race featured
what many politicians consider their worst nightmare: a self-financing candidate with
bottomless pockets. His name was Blair Hull, and he had sold his financial trading


business to Goldman Sachs a few years earlier for $531 million. Undoubtedly he had a
genuine, if undefined, desire to serve, and by all accounts he was a brilliant man. But on
the campaign trail he was almost painfully shy, with the quirky, inward manner of
someone who’d spent most of his life alone in front of a computer screen. I suspect that
like many people, he figured that being a politician—unlike being a doctor or airline
pilot or plumber—required no special expertise in anything useful, and that a
businessman like himself could perform at least as well, and probably better, than any
of the professional pols he saw on TV. In fact, Mr. Hull viewed his facility with
numbers as an invaluable asset: At one point in the campaign, he divulged to a reporter
a mathematical formula that he’d developed for winning campaigns, an algorithm that
began

Probability = 1/(1 + exp(-1 × (-3.9659056 + (General Election Weight × 1.92380219)…

and ended several indecipherable factors later.

All of which made it easy to write off Mr. Hull as an opponent—until one morning in
April or May, when I pulled out of the circular driveway of my condo complex on the
way to the office and was greeted by row upon row of large red, white, and blue lawn
signs marching up and down the block. BLAIR HULL FOR U.S. SENATE, the signs
read, and for the next five miles I saw them on every street and along every major
thoroughfare, in every direction and in every nook and cranny, in barbershop windows
and posted on abandoned buildings, in front of bus stops and behind grocery store
counters—Hull signs everywhere, dotting the landscape like daisies in spring.

There is a saying in Illinois politics that “signs don’t vote,” meaning that you can’t
judge a race by how many signs a candidate has. But nobody in Illinois had ever seen
during the course of an entire campaign the number of signs and billboards that Mr.
Hull had put up in a single day, or the frightening efficiency with which his crews of
paid workers could yank up everybody else’s yard signs and replace them with Hull
signs in the span of a single evening. We began to read about certain neighborhood
leaders in the black community who had suddenly decided that Mr. Hull was a
champion of the inner city, certain downstate leaders who extolled Mr. Hull’s support of
the family farm. And then the television ads hit, six months out and ubiquitous until
Election Day, on every station around the state around the clock—Blair Hull with
seniors, Blair Hull with children, Blair Hull ready to take back Washington from the
special interests. By January 2004, Mr. Hull had moved into first place in the polls and
my supporters began swamping me with calls, insisting that I had to do something,
telling me I had to get on TV immediately or all would be lost.

What could I do? I explained that unlike Mr. Hull I practically had a negative net worth.
Assuming the best-case scenario, our campaign would have enough money for exactly
four weeks of television ads, and given this fact it probably didn’t make sense for us to
blow the entire campaign budget in August. Everybody just needed to be patient, I
would tell supporters. Stay confident. Don’t panic. Then I’d hang up the phone, look out
the window, and happen to catch sight of the RV in which Hull tooled around the state,
big as an ocean liner and reputedly just as well appointed, and I would wonder to myself
if perhaps it was time to panic after all.


In many ways, I was luckier than most candidates in such circumstances. For whatever
reason, at some point my campaign began to generate that mysterious, elusive quality of
momentum, of buzz; it became fashionable among wealthy donors to promote my
cause, and small donors around the state began sending checks through the Internet at a
pace we had never anticipated. Ironically, my dark-horse status protected me from some
of the more dangerous pitfalls of fund-raising: Most of the corporate PACs avoided me,
and so I owed them nothing; the handful of PACs that did give, like the League of
Conservation Voters, typically represented causes I believed in and had long fought for.
Mr. Hull still ended up outspending me by a factor of six to one. But to his credit
(although perhaps to his regret) he never ran a negative TV ad against me. My poll
numbers stayed within shouting distance of his, and in the final weeks of the campaign,
just as my own TV spots started running and my numbers began to surge, his campaign
imploded when allegations surfaced that he’d had some ugly run-ins with an ex-wife.

So for me, at least, the lack of wealth or significant corporate support wasn’t a barrier to
victory. Still, I can’t assume that the money chase didn’t alter me in some ways.
Certainly it eliminated any sense of shame I once had in asking strangers for large sums
of money. By the end of the campaign, the banter and small talk that had once
accompanied my solicitation calls were eliminated. I cut to the chase and tried not to
take no for an answer.

But I worry that there was also another change at work. Increasingly I found myself
spending time with people of means—law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge
fund managers and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people,
knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than
a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost
uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale
that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free
market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might
be any social ill that could not be cured by a high SAT score. They had no patience with
protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to
those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were
adamantly prochoice and antigun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious
sentiment.

And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways—I had gone to
the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many
of the same ways—I found myself avoiding certain topics during conversations with
them, papering over possible differences, anticipating their expectations. On core issues
I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d
received from George Bush should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to share
with them some of the perspectives I was hearing from other portions of the electorate:
the legitimate role of faith in politics, say, or the deep cultural meaning of guns in rural
parts of the state.

Still, I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy
donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above
the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and
frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population—that is, the people that I’d
entered public life to serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for


every senator: The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your interactions.
You may fight it, with town hall meetings and listening tours and stops by the old
neighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in a different orbit from most
of the people you represent.

And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you don’t want to
have to go through all the misery of raising all that money in small increments all over
again. You realize that you no longer have the cachet you did as the upstart, the fresh
face; you haven’t changed Washington, and you’ve made a lot of people unhappy with
difficult votes. The path of least resistance—of fund-raisers organized by the special
interests, the corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops—starts to look awfully
tempting, and if the opinions of these insiders don’t quite jibe with those you once held,
you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of compromise, of learning
the ropes. The problems of ordinary people, the voices of the Rust Belt town or the
dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather than a palpable reality, abstractions to
be managed rather than battles to be fought.



THERE ARE OTHER forces at work on a senator. As important as money is in
campaigns, it’s not just fund-raising that puts a candidate over the top. If you want to
win in politics—if you don’t want to lose—then organized people can be just as
important as cash, particularly in the low-turnout primaries that, in the world of the
gerrymandered political map and divided electorates, are often the most significant race
a candidate faces. Few people these days have the time or inclination to volunteer on a
political campaign, particularly since the day-to-day tasks of working on a campaign
generally involve licking envelopes and knocking on doors, not drafting speeches and
thinking big thoughts. And so, if you are a candidate in need of political workers or
voter lists, you go where people are already organized. For Democrats, this means the
unions, the environmental groups, and the prochoice groups. For Republicans, it means
the religious right, local chambers of commerce, the NRA, and the antitax
organizations.

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term “special interests,” which lumps
together ExxonMobil and bricklayers, the pharmaceutical lobby and the parents of
special-ed kids. Most political scientists would probably disagree with me, but to my
mind, there’s a difference between a corporate lobby whose clout is based on money
alone, and a group of like-minded individuals—whether they be textile workers, gun
aficionados, veterans, or family farmers—coming together to promote their interests;
between those who use their economic power to magnify their political influence far
beyond what their numbers might justify, and those who are simply seeking to pool
their votes to sway their representatives. The former subvert the very idea of
democracy. The latter are its essence.

Still, the impact of interest groups on candidates for office is not always pretty. To
maintain an active membership, keep the donations coming in, and be heard above the
din, the groups that have an impact on politics aren’t fashioned to promote the public
interest. They aren’t searching for the most thoughtful, well-qualified, or broad-minded
candidate to support. Instead, they are focused on a narrow set of concerns—their


pensions, their crop supports, their cause. Simply put, they have an ax to grind. And
they want you, the elected official, to help them grind it.

During my own primary campaign, for example, I must have filled out at least fifty
questionnaires. None of them were subtle. Typically they would contain a list of ten or
twelve questions, phrased along the following lines: “If elected, will you solemnly
pledge to repeal the Scrooge Law, which has resulted in widows and orphans being
kicked to the curb?”

Time dictated that I fill out only those questionnaires sent by organizations that might
actually endorse me (given my voting record, the NRA and National Right to Life, for
example, did not make the cut), so I could usually answer “yes” to most questions
without any major discomfort. But every so often I would come across a question that
gave me pause. I might agree with a union on the need to enforce labor and
environmental standards in our trade laws, but did I believe that NAFTA should be
repealed? I might agree that universal health care should be one of the nation’s top
priorities, but did it follow that a constitutional amendment was the best way to achieve
that goal? I found myself hedging on such questions, writing in the margins, explaining
the difficult policy choices involved. My staff would shake their heads. Get one answer
wrong, they explained, and the endorsement, the workers, and the mailing list would all
go to the other guy. Get them all right, I thought, and you have just locked yourself into
the pattern of reflexive, partisan jousting that you have promised to help end.

Say one thing during the campaign and do another thing once in office, and you’re a
typical, two-faced politician.

I lost some endorsements by not giving the right answer. A couple of times, a group
surprised us and gave me their endorsement despite a wrong answer.

And then sometimes it didn’t matter how you filled out your questionnaire. In addition
to Mr. Hull, my most formidable opponent in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate
was the Illinois state comptroller, Dan Hynes, a fine man and able public servant whose
father, Tom Hynes, happened to be a former state senate president, Cook County
assessor, ward committeeman, Democratic National Committee member, and one of the
most well-connected political figures in the state. Before even entering the race, Dan
had already sewn up the support of 85 of the 102 Democratic county chairmen in the
state, the majority of my colleagues in the state legislature, and Mike Madigan, who
served as both Speaker of the House and chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party.
Scrolling down the list of endorsements on Dan’s website was like watching the credits
at the end of a movie—you left before it was finished.

Despite all this, I held out hope for a few endorsements of my own, particularly those of
organized labor. For seven years I had been their ally in the state legislature, sponsoring
many of their bills and making their case on the floor. I knew that traditionally the AFL-
CIO endorsed those who had a strong record of voting on their behalf. But as the
campaign got rolling, odd things began to happen. The Teamsters held their
endorsement session in Chicago on a day when I had to be in Springfield for a vote;
they refused to reschedule, and Mr. Hynes got their endorsement without them ever
talking to me. Visiting a labor reception during the Illinois State Fair, we were told that
no campaign signs would be allowed; when my staff and I arrived, we discovered the


room plastered with Hynes posters. On the evening of the AFL-CIO endorsement
session, I noticed a number of my labor friends averting their eyes as I walked through
the room. An older guy who headed up one of the state’s bigger locals walked up and
patted me on the back.

“It’s nothing personal, Barack,” he said with a rueful smile. “You know, Tom Hynes
and me go back fifty years. Grew up in the same neighborhood. Belonged to the same
parish. Hell, I watched Danny grow up.”

I told him I understood.

“Maybe you could run for Danny’s spot once he goes to the Senate. Whaddya think?
You’d make a heck of a comptroller.”

I went over to my staff to tell them we would not be getting the AFL-CIO endorsement.

Again things worked out. The leaders of several of the largest service workers unions—
the Illinois Federation of Teachers, SEIU, AFSCME, and UNITE HERE, representing
textile, hotel, and foodservice workers—broke ranks and chose to endorse me over
Hynes, support that proved critical in giving my campaign some semblance of weight. It
was a risky move on their part; had I lost, those unions might have paid a price in
access, in support, in credibility with their members.

So I owe those unions. When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right
away. I don’t consider this corrupting in any way; I don’t mind feeling obligated toward
home health-care workers who clean bedpans every day for little more than the
minimum wage, or toward teachers in some of the toughest schools in the country,
many of whom have to dip into their own pockets at the beginning of every school year
to buy crayons and books for their students. I got into politics to fight for these folks,
and I’m glad a union is around to remind me of their struggles.

But I also understand that there will be times when these obligations collide with other
obligations—the obligation to inner-city children who are unable to read, say, or the
obligation to children not yet born whom we are saddling with debt. Already there have
been some strains—I’ve proposed experimenting with merit pay for teachers, for
example, and have called for raising fuel-efficiency standards despite opposition from
my friends at the United Auto Workers. I like to tell myself that I will continue to weigh
the issues on the merits—just as I hope my Republican counterpart will weigh the no-
new-tax pledge or opposition to stem cell research that he made before the election in
light of what’s best for the country as a whole, regardless of what his supporters
demand. I hope that I can always go to my union friends and explain why my position
makes sense, how it’s consistent with both my values and their long-term interests.

But I suspect that the union leaders won’t always see it that way. There may be times
when they will see it as betrayal. They may alert their members that I have sold them
out. I may get angry mail and angry phone calls. They may not endorse me the next
time around.

And perhaps, if that happens to you enough times, and you almost lose a race because a
critical constituency is mad at you, or you find yourself fending off a primary challenger


who’s calling you a traitor, you start to lose your stomach for confrontation. You ask
yourself, just what does good conscience dictate exactly: that you avoid capture by
“special interests” or that you avoid dumping on your friends? The answer is not
obvious. So you start voting as you would answer a questionnaire. You don’t ponder
your positions too deeply. You check the yes box up and down the line.



POLITICIANS HELD CAPTIVE by their big-money contributors or succumbing to
interest-group pressure—this is a staple of modern political reporting, the story line that
weaves its way into just about every analysis of what’s wrong with our democracy. But
for the politician who is worried about keeping his seat, there is a third force that pushes
and pulls at him, that shapes the nature of political debate and defines the scope of what
he feels he can and can’t do, the positions he can and can’t take. Forty or fifty years ago,
that force would have been the party apparatus: the big-city bosses, the political fixers,
the power brokers in Washington who could make or break a career with a phone call.
Today, that force is the media.

A disclaimer here: For a three-year span, from the time that I announced my candidacy
for the Senate to the end of my first year as a senator, I was the beneficiary of
unusually—and at times undeservedly—positive press coverage. No doubt some of this
had to do with my status as an underdog in my Senate primary, as well as my novelty as
a black candidate with an exotic background. Maybe it also had something to do with
my style of communicating, which can be rambling, hesitant, and overly verbose (both
my staff and Michelle often remind me of this), but which perhaps finds sympathy in
the literary class.

Moreover, even when I’ve been at the receiving end of negative stories, the political
reporters I’ve dealt with have generally been straight shooters. They’ve taped our
conversations, tried to provide the context for my statements, and called me to get a
response whenever I’ve been criticized.

So personally, at least, I have no cause for complaint. That doesn’t mean, though, that I
can afford to ignore the press. Precisely because I’ve watched the press cast me in a
light that can be hard to live up to, I am mindful of how rapidly that process can work in
reverse.

Simple math tells the tale. In the thirty-nine town hall meetings I held during my first
year in office, turnout at each meeting averaged four to five hundred people, which
means that I was able to meet with maybe fifteen to twenty thousand people. Should I
sustain this pace for the remainder of my term, I will have had direct, personal contact
with maybe ninety-five to one hundred thousand of my constituents by the time Election
Day rolls around.

In contrast, a three-minute story on the lowest-rated local news broadcast in the Chicago
media market may reach two hundred thousand people. In other words, I—like every
politician at the federal level—am almost entirely dependent on the media to reach my
constituents. It is the filter through which my votes are interpreted, my statements
analyzed, my beliefs examined. For the broad public at least, I am who the media says I
am. I say what they say I say. I become who they say I’ve become.


The media’s influence on our politics comes in many forms. What gets the most
attention these days is the growth of an unabashedly partisan press: talk radio, Fox
News, newspaper editorialists, the cable talk-show circuit, and most recently the
bloggers, all of them trading insults, accusations, gossip, and innuendo twenty-four
hours a day, seven days a week. As others have noted, this style of opinion journalism
isn’t really new; in some ways, it marks a return to the dominant tradition of American
journalism, an approach to the news that was nurtured by publishers like William
Randolph Hearst and Colonel McCormick before a more antiseptic notion of objective
journalism emerged after World War II.

Still, it’s hard to deny that all the sound and fury, magnified through television and the
Internet, coarsens the political culture. It makes tempers flare, helps breed distrust. And
whether we politicians like to admit it or not, the constant vitriol can wear on the spirit.
Oddly enough, the cruder broadsides you don’t worry about too much; if Rush
Limbaugh’s listeners enjoy hearing him call me “Osama Obama,” my attitude is, let
them have their fun. It’s the more sophisticated practitioners who can sting you, in part
because they have more credibility with the general public, in part because of the skill
with which they can pounce on your words and make you seem like a jerk.

In April 2005, for example, I appeared on the program to dedicate the new Lincoln
Presidential Library in Springfield. It was a five-minute speech in which I suggested
that Abraham Lincoln’s humanity, his imperfections, were the qualities that made him
so compelling. “In [Lincoln’s] rise from poverty,” I said in one part of my remarks, “his
self-study and ultimate mastery of language and of law, in his capacity to overcome
personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat—in all of this, we
see a fundamental element of the American character, a belief that we can constantly
remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”

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.



That may be a little dramatic. Still, no legislator, state or federal, is immune from such
difficult moments—and they are always far worse for the party out of power. As a
member of the majority, you will have some input in any bill that’s important to you
before it hits the floor. You can ask the committee chairman to include language that
helps your constituents or eliminate language that hurts them. You can even ask the
majority leader or the chief sponsor to hold the bill until a compromise more to your
liking is reached.

If you’re in the minority party, you have no such protection. You must vote yes or no on
whatever bill comes up, with the knowledge that it’s unlikely to be a compromise that
either you or your supporters consider fair or just. In an era of indiscriminate logrolling
and massive omnibus spending bills, you can also rest assured that no matter how many
bad provisions there are in the bill, there will be something—funding for body armor for


our troops, say, or some modest increase in veterans’ benefits—that makes the bill
painful to oppose.

In its first term, at least, the Bush White House was a master of such legislative
gamesmanship. There’s an instructive story about the negotiations surrounding the first
round of Bush tax cuts, when Karl Rove invited a Democratic senator over to the White
House to discuss the senator’s potential support for the President’s package. Bush had
won the senator’s state handily in the previous election—in part on a platform of tax
cuts—and the senator was generally supportive of lower marginal rates. Still, he was
troubled by the degree to which the proposed tax cuts were skewed toward the wealthy
and suggested a few changes that would moderate the package’s impact.

“Make these changes,” the senator told Rove, “and not only will I vote for the bill, but I
guarantee you’ll get seventy votes out of the Senate.”

“We don’t want seventy votes,” Rove reportedly replied. “We want fifty-one.”

Rove may or may not have thought the White House bill was good policy, but he knew
a political winner when he saw one. Either the senator voted aye and helped pass the
President’s program, or he voted no and became a plump target during the next election.

In the end, the senator—like several red state Democrats—voted aye, which no doubt
reflected the prevailing sentiment about tax cuts in his home state. Still, stories like this
illustrate some of the difficulties that any minority party faces in being “bipartisan.”
Everybody likes the idea of bipartisanship. The media, in particular, is enamored with
the term, since it contrasts neatly with the “partisan bickering” that is the dominant story
line of reporting on Capitol Hill.

Genuine bipartisanship, though, assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and that
the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upon
goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majority
will be constrained—by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate—
to negotiate in good faith. If these conditions do not hold—if nobody outside
Washington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs of the
tax cut are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so—the
majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100 percent of what it wants,
go on to concede 10 percent, and then accuse any member of the minority party who
fails to support this “compromise” of being “obstructionist.” For the minority party in
such circumstances, “bipartisanship” comes to mean getting chronically steamrolled,
although individual senators may enjoy certain political rewards by consistently going
along with the majority and hence gaining a reputation for being “moderate” or
“centrist.”

Not surprisingly, there are activists who insist that Democratic senators stand fast
against any Republican initiative these days—even those initiatives that have some
merit—as a matter of principle. It’s fair to say that none of these individuals has ever
run for high public office as a Democrat in a predominantly Republican state, nor has
any been a target of several million dollars’ worth of negative TV ads. What every
senator understands is that while it’s easy to make a vote on a complicated piece of
legislation look evil and depraved in a thirty-second television commercial, it’s very


hard to explain the wisdom of that same vote in less than twenty minutes. What every
senator also knows is that during the course of a single term, he or she will have cast
several thousand votes. That’s a whole lot of potential explaining to do come election
time.

Perhaps my greatest bit of good fortune during my own Senate campaign was that no
candidate ran a negative TV ad about me. This had to do entirely with the odd
circumstances of my Senate race, and not an absence of material with which to work.
After all, I had been in the state legislature for seven years when I ran, had been in the
minority for six of those years, and had cast thousands of sometimes difficult votes. As
is standard practice these days, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had
prepared a fat binder of opposition research on me before I was even nominated, and my
own research team spent many hours combing through my record in an effort to
anticipate what negative ads the Republicans might have up their sleeves.

They didn’t find a lot, but they found enough to do the trick—a dozen or so votes that,
if described without context, could be made to sound pretty scary. When my media
consultant, David Axelrod, tested them in a poll, my approval rating immediately
dropped ten points. There was the criminal law bill that purported to crack down on
drug dealing in schools but had been so poorly drafted that I concluded it was both
ineffective and unconstitutional—“Obama voted to weaken penalties on gangbangers
who deal drugs in schools,” is how the poll described it. There was a bill sponsored by
antiabortion activists that on its face sounded reasonable enough—it mandated
lifesaving measures for premature babies (the bill didn’t mention that such measures
were already the law)—but also extended “personhood” to previable fetuses, thereby
effectively overturning Roe v. Wade; in the poll, I was said to have “voted to deny
lifesaving treatment to babies born alive.” Running down the list, I came across a claim
that while in the state legislature I had voted against a bill to “protect our children from
sex offenders.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, snatching the sheet from David’s hands. “I accidentally pressed
the wrong button on that bill. I meant to vote aye, and had it immediately corrected in
the official record.”

David smiled. “Somehow I don’t think that portion of the official record will make it
into a Republican ad.” He gently retrieved the poll from my hands. “Anyway, cheer up,”
he added, clapping me on the back. “I’m sure this will help you with the sex offender
vote.”



I WONDER SOMETIMES how things might have turned out had those ads actually
run. Not so much whether I would have won or lost—by the time the primaries were
over, I had a twenty-point lead over my Republican opponent—but rather how the
voters would have perceived me, how, entering into the Senate, I would have had a
much smaller cushion of goodwill. For that is how most of my colleagues, Republican
and Democrat, enter the Senate, their mistakes trumpeted, their words distorted, and
their motives questioned. They are baptized in that fire; it haunts them each and every
time they cast a vote, each and every time they issue a press release or make a
statement, the fear of losing not just a political race, but of losing favor in the eyes of


those who sent them to Washington—all those people who have said to them at one
time or another: “We have great hopes for you. Please don’t disappoint us.”

Of course, there are technical fixes to our democracy that might relieve some of this
pressure on politicians, structural changes that would strengthen the link between voters
and their representatives. Nonpartisan districting, same-day registration, and weekend
elections would all increase the competitiveness of races and might spur more
participation from the electorate—and the more the electorate is paying attention, the
more integrity is rewarded. Public financing of campaigns or free television and radio
time could drastically reduce the constant scrounging for money and the influence of
special interests. Changes in the rules in the House and the Senate might empower
legislators in the minority, increase transparency in the process, and encourage more
probing reporting.

But none of these changes can happen of their own accord. Each would require a change
in attitude among those in power. Each would demand that individual politicians
challenge the existing order; loosen their hold on incumbency; fight with their friends as
well as their enemies on behalf of abstract ideas in which the public appears to have
little interest. Each would require from men and women a willingness to risk what they
already have.

In the end, then, it still comes back to that quality that JFK sought to define early in his
career as he lay convalescing from surgery, mindful of his heroism in war but perhaps
pondering the more ambiguous challenges ahead—the quality of courage. In some
ways, the longer you are in politics, the easier it should be to muster such courage, for
there is a certain liberation that comes from realizing that no matter what you do,
someone will be angry at you, that political attacks will come no matter how cautiously
you vote, that judgment may be taken as cowardice and courage itself may be seen as
calculation. I find comfort in the fact that the longer I’m in politics the less nourishing
popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a
poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own
conscience.

And my constituents. After one town hall meeting in Godfrey, an older gentleman came
up and expressed outrage that despite my having opposed the Iraq War, I had not yet
called for a full withdrawal of troops. We had a brief and pleasant argument, in which I
explained my concern that too precipitous a withdrawal would lead to all-out civil war
in the country and the potential for widening conflict throughout the Middle East. At the
end of our conversation he shook my hand.

“I still think you’re wrong,” he said, “but at least it seems like you’ve thought about it.
Hell, you’d probably disappoint me if you agreed with me all the time.”

“Thanks,” I said. As he walked away, I was reminded of something Justice Louis
Brandeis once said: that in a democracy, the most important office is the office of
citizen.


Chapter Five

Opportunity

ONE THING ABOUT being a U.S. senator—you fly a lot. There are the flights back
and forth from Washington at least once a week. There are the trips to other states to
deliver a speech, raise money, or campaign for your colleagues. If you represent a big
state like Illinois, there are flights upstate or downstate, to attend town meetings or
ribbon cuttings and to make sure that the folks don’t think you’ve forgotten them.

Most of the time I fly commercial and sit in coach, hoping for an aisle or window seat
and crossing my fingers that the guy in front of me doesn’t want to recline.

But there are times when—because I’m making multiple stops on a West Coast swing,
say, or need to get to another city after the last commercial flight has left—I fly on a
private jet. I hadn’t been aware of this option at first, assuming the cost would be
prohibitive. But during the campaign, my staff explained that under Senate rules, a
senator or candidate could travel on someone else’s jet and just pay the equivalent of a
first-class airfare. After looking at my campaign schedule and thinking about all the
time I would save, I decided to give private jets a try.

It turns out that the flying experience is a good deal different on a private jet. Private
jets depart from privately owned and managed terminals, with lounges that feature big
soft couches and big-screen TVs and old aviation photographs on the walls. The
restrooms are generally empty and spotless, and have those mechanical shoe-shine
machines and mouthwash and mints in a bowl. There’s no sense of hurriedness at these
terminals; the plane is waiting for you if you’re late, ready for you if you’re early. A lot
of times you can bypass the lounge altogether and drive your car straight onto the
tarmac. Otherwise the pilots will greet you in the terminal, take your bags, and walk you
out to the plane.

And the planes, well, they’re nice. The first time I took such a flight, I was on a Citation
X, a sleek, compact, shiny machine with wood paneling and leather seats that you could
pull together to make a bed anytime you decided you wanted a nap. A shrimp salad and
cheese plate occupied the seat behind me; up front, the minibar was fully stocked. The
pilots hung up my coat, offered me my choice of newspapers, and asked me if I was
comfortable. I was.

Then the plane took off, its Rolls-Royce engines gripping the air the way a well-made
sports car grips the road. Shooting through the clouds, I turned on the small TV monitor
in front of my seat. A map of the United States appeared, with the image of our plane
tracking west, along with our speed, our altitude, our time to destination, and the
temperature outside. At forty thousand feet, the plane leveled off, and I looked down at
the curving horizon and the scattered clouds, the geography of the earth laid out before
me—first the flat, checkerboard fields of western Illinois, then the python curves of the
Mississippi, then more farmland and ranch land and eventually the jagged Rockies, still
snow-peaked, until the sun went down and the orange sky narrowed to a thin red line
that was finally consumed by night and stars and moon.


I could see how people might get used to this.

The purpose of that particular trip was fund-raising, mostly—in preparation for my
general election campaign, several friends and supporters had organized events for me
in L.A., San Diego, and San Francisco. But the most memorable part of the trip was a
visit that I paid to the town of Mountain View, California, a few miles south of Stanford
University and Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, where the search engine
company Google maintains its corporate headquarters.

Google had already achieved iconic status by mid-2004, a symbol not just of the
growing power of the Internet but of the global economy’s rapid transformation. On the
drive down from San Francisco, I reviewed the company’s history: how two Stanford
Ph.D. candidates in computer science, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had collaborated in
a dorm room to develop a better way to search the web; how in 1998, with a million
dollars raised from various contacts, they had formed Google, with three employees
operating out of a garage; how Google figured out an advertising model—based on text
ads that were nonintrusive and relevant to the user’s search—that made the company
profitable even as the dot-com boom went bust; and how, six years after the company’s
founding, Google was about to go public at stock prices that would make Mr. Page and
Mr. Brin two of the richest people on earth.

Mountain View looked like a typical suburban California community—quiet streets,
sparkling new office parks, unassuming homes that, because of the unique purchasing
power of Silicon Valley residents, probably ran a cool million or more. We pulled in
front of a set of modern, modular buildings and were met by Google’s general counsel,
David Drummond, an African American around my age who’d made the arrangements
for my visit.

“When Larry and Sergey came to me looking to incorporate, I figured they were just a
couple of really smart guys with another start-up idea,” David said. “I can’t say I
expected all this.”

He took me on a tour of the main building, which felt more like a college student center
than an office—a café on the ground floor, where the former chef of the Grateful Dead
supervised the preparation of gourmet meals for the entire staff; video games and a
Ping-Pong table and a fully equipped gym. (“People spend a lot of time here, so we
want to keep them happy.”) On the second floor, we passed clusters of men and women
in jeans and T-shirts, all of them in their twenties, working intently in front of their
computer screens, or sprawled on couches and big rubber exercise balls, engaged in
animated conversation.

Eventually we found Larry Page, talking to an engineer about a software problem. He
was dressed like his employees and, except for a few traces of early gray in his hair,
didn’t look any older. We spoke about Google’s mission—to organize all of the world’s
information into a universally accessible, unfiltered, and usable form—and the Google
site index, which already included more than six billion web pages. Recently the
company had launched a new web-based email system with a built-in search function;
they were working on technology that would allow you to initiate a voice search over
the telephone, and had already started the Book Project, the goal of which was to scan


every book ever published into a web-accessible format, creating a virtual library that
would store the entirety of human knowledge.

Toward the end of the tour, Larry led me to a room where a three-dimensional image of
the earth rotated on a large flat-panel monitor. Larry asked the young Indian American
engineer who was working nearby to explain what we were looking at.

“These lights represent all the searches that are going on right now,” the engineer said.
“Each color is a different language. If you move the toggle this way”—he caused the
screen to alter—“you can see the traffic patterns of the entire Internet system.”

The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the
early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries
between men—nationality, race, religion, wealth—were rendered invisible and
irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a
remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn
into a single, constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to a world
spun entirely of light. Then I noticed the broad swaths of darkness as the globe spun on
its axis—most of Africa, chunks of South Asia, even some portions of the United States,
where the thick cords of light dissolved into a few discrete strands.

My reverie was broken by the appearance of Sergey, a compact man perhaps a few
years younger than Larry. He suggested that I go with them to their TGIF assembly, a
tradition that they had maintained since the beginning of the company, when all of
Google’s employees got together over beer and food and discussed whatever they had
on their minds. As we entered a large hall, throngs of young people were already seated,
some drinking and laughing, others still typing into PDAs or laptops, a buzz of
excitement in the air. A group of fifty or so seemed more attentive than the rest, and
David explained that these were the new hires, fresh from graduate school; today was
their induction into the Google team. One by one, the new employees were introduced,
their faces flashing on a big screen alongside information about their degrees, hobbies,
and interests. At least half of the group looked Asian; a large percentage of the whites
had Eastern European names. As far as I could tell, not one was black or Latino. Later,
walking back to my car, I mentioned this to David and he nodded.

“We know it’s a problem,” he said, and mentioned efforts Google was making to
provide scholarships to expand the pool of minority and female math and science
students. In the meantime, Google needed to stay competitive, which meant hiring the
top graduates of the top math, engineering, and computer science programs in the
country—MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley. You could count on two hands, David told
me, the number of black and Latino kids in those programs.

In fact, according to David, just finding American-born engineers, whatever their race,
was getting harder—which was why every company in Silicon Valley had come to rely
heavily on foreign students. Lately, high-tech employers had a new set of worries: Since
9/11 a lot of foreign students were having second thoughts about studying in the States
due to the difficulties in obtaining visas. Top-notch engineers or software designers
didn’t need to come to Silicon Valley anymore to find work or get financing for a start-
up. High-tech firms were setting up operations in India and China at a rapid pace, and
venture funds were now global; they would just as readily invest in Mumbai or


Shanghai as in California. And over the long term, David explained, that could spell
trouble for the U.S. economy.

“We’ll be able to keep attracting talent,” he said, “because we’re so well branded. But
for the start-ups, some of the less established companies, the next Google, who knows?
I just hope somebody in Washington understands how competitive things have become.
Our dominance isn’t inevitable.”



AROUND THE SAME time that I visited Google, I took another trip that made me
think about what was happening with the economy. This one was by car, not jet, along
miles of empty highway, to a town called Galesburg, forty-five minutes or so from the
Iowa border in western Illinois.

Founded in 1836, Galesburg had begun as a college town when a group of Presbyterian
and Congregational ministers in New York decided to bring their blend of social reform
and practical education to the Western frontier. The resulting school, Knox College,
became a hotbed of abolitionist activity before the Civil War—a branch of the
Underground Railroad had run through Galesburg, and Hiram Revels, the nation’s first
black U.S. senator, attended the college’s prep school before moving back to
Mississippi. In 1854, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroad line was completed
through Galesburg, causing a boom in the region’s commerce. And four years later,
some ten thousand people gathered to hear the fifth of the Lincoln-Douglas debates,
during which Lincoln first framed his opposition to slavery as a moral issue.

It wasn’t this rich history, though, that had taken me to Galesburg. Instead, I’d gone to
meet with a group of union leaders from the Maytag plant, for the company had
announced plans to lay off 1,600 employees and shift operations to Mexico. Like towns
all across central and western Illinois, Galesburg had been pounded by the shift of
manufacturing overseas. In the previous few years, the town had lost industrial parts
makers and a rubber-hose manufacturer; it was now in the process of seeing Butler
Manufacturing, a steelmaker recently bought by Australians, shutter its doors. Already,
Galesburg’s unemployment rate hovered near 8 percent. With the Maytag plant’s
closing, the town stood to lose another 5 to 10 percent of its entire employment base.

Inside the machinists’ union hall, seven or eight men and two or three women had
gathered on metal folding chairs, talking in muted voices, a few smoking cigarettes,
most of them in their late forties or early fifties, all of them dressed in jeans or khakis,
T-shirts or plaid work shirts. The union president, Dave Bevard, was a big, barrel-
chested man in his mid-fifties, with a dark beard, tinted glasses, and a fedora that made
him look like a member of the band ZZ Top. He explained that the union had tried
every possible tactic to get Maytag to change its mind—talking to the press, contacting
shareholders, soliciting support from local and state officials. The Maytag management
had been unmoved.

“It ain’t like these guys aren’t making a profit,” Dave told me. “And if you ask ’em,
they’ll tell you we’re one of the most productive plants in the company. Quality
workmanship. Low error rates. We’ve taken cuts in pay, cuts in benefits, layoffs. The
state and the city have given Maytag at least $10 million in tax breaks over the last eight


years, based on their promise to stay. But it’s never enough. Some CEO who’s already
making millions of dollars decides he needs to boost the company stock price so he can
cash in his options, and the easiest way to do that is to send the work to Mexico and pay
the workers there a sixth of what we make.”

I asked them what steps state or federal agencies had taken to retrain workers, and
almost in unison the room laughed derisively. “Retraining is a joke,” the union vice
president, Doug Dennison, said. “What are you going to retrain for when there aren’t
any jobs out there?” He talked about how an employment counselor had suggested that
he try becoming a nursing aide, with wages not much higher than what Wal-Mart paid
their floor clerks. One of the younger men in the group told me a particularly cruel
story: He had made up his mind to retrain as a computer technician, but a week into his
courses, Maytag called him back. The Maytag work was temporary, but according to the
rules, if this man refused to accept Maytag’s offer, he’d no longer be eligible for
retraining money. If, on the other hand, he did go back to Maytag and dropped out of
the courses he was already taking, then the federal agency would consider him to have
used up his one-time training opportunity and wouldn’t pay for any retraining in the
future.

I told the group that I’d tell their story during the campaign and offered a few proposals
that my staff had developed—amending the tax code to eliminate tax breaks for
companies who shifted operations offshore; revamping and better funding federal
retraining programs. As I was getting ready to go, a big, sturdy man in a baseball cap
spoke up. He said his name was Tim Wheeler, and he’d been the head of the union at
the nearby Butler steel plant. Workers had already received their pink slips there, and
Tim was collecting unemployment insurance, trying to figure out what to do next. His
big worry now was health-care coverage.

“My son Mark needs a liver transplant,” he said grimly. “We’re on the waiting list for a
donor, but with my health-care benefits used up, we’re trying to figure out if Medicaid
will cover the costs. Nobody can give me a clear answer, and you know, I’ll sell
everything I got for Mark, go into debt, but I still…” Tim’s voice cracked; his wife,
sitting beside him, buried her head in her hands. I tried to assure them that we would
find out exactly what Medicaid would cover. Tim nodded, putting his arm around his
wife’s shoulder.

On the drive back to Chicago, I tried to imagine Tim’s desperation: no job, an ailing
son, his savings running out.

Those were the stories you missed on a private jet at forty thousand feet.



YOU’LL GET LITTLE argument these days, from either the left or the right, with the
notion that we’re going through a fundamental economic transformation. Advances in
digital technology, fiber optics, the Internet, satellites, and transportation have
effectively leveled the economic barriers between countries and continents. Pools of
capital scour the earth in search of the best returns, with trillions of dollars moving
across borders with only a few keystrokes. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the
institution of market-based reforms in India and China, the lowering of trade barriers,


and the advent of big-box retailers like Wal-Mart have brought several billion people
into direct competition with American companies and American workers. Whether or
not the world is already flat, as columnist and author Thomas Friedman says, it is
certainly getting flatter every day.

There’s no doubt that globalization has brought significant benefits to American
consumers. It’s lowered prices on goods once considered luxuries, from big-screen TVs
to peaches in winter, and increased the purchasing power of low-income Americans. It’s
helped keep inflation in check, boosted returns for the millions of Americans now
invested in the stock market, provided new markets for U.S. goods and services, and
allowed countries like China and India to dramatically reduce poverty, which over the
long term makes for a more stable world.

But there’s also no denying that globalization has greatly increased economic instability
for millions of ordinary Americans. To stay competitive and keep investors happy in the
global marketplace, U.S.-based companies have automated, downsized, outsourced, and
offshored. They’ve held the line on wage increases, and replaced defined-benefit health
and retirement plans with 401(k)s and Health Savings Accounts that shift more cost and
risk onto workers.

The result has been the emergence of what some call a “winner-take-all” economy, in
which a rising tide doesn’t necessarily lift all boats. Over the past decade, we’ve seen
strong economic growth but anemic job growth; big leaps in productivity but flatlining
wages; hefty corporate profits, but a shrinking share of those profits going to workers.
For those like Larry Page and Sergey Brin, for those with unique skills and talents and
for the knowledge workers—the engineers, lawyers, consultants, and marketers—who
facilitate their work, the potential rewards of a global marketplace have never been
greater. But for those like the workers at Maytag, whose skills can be automated or
digitized or shifted to countries with cheaper wages, the effects can be dire—a future in
the ever-growing pool of low-wage service work, with few benefits, the risk of financial
ruin in the event of an illness, and the inability to save for either retirement or a child’s
college education.

The question is what we should do about all this. Since the early nineties, when these
trends first began to appear, one wing of the Democratic Party—led by Bill Clinton—
has embraced the new economy, promoting free trade, fiscal discipline, and reforms in
education and training that will help workers to compete for the high-value, high-wage
jobs of the future. But a sizable chunk of the Democratic base—particularly blue-collar
union workers like Dave Bevard—has resisted this agenda. As far as they’re concerned,
free trade has served the interests of Wall Street but has done little to stop the
hemorrhaging of good-paying American jobs.

The Republican Party isn’t immune from these tensions. With the recent uproar around
illegal immigration, for example, Pat Buchanan’s brand of “America first” conservatism
may see a resurgence within the GOP, and present a challenge to the Bush
Administration’s free trade policies. And in his 2000 campaign and early in his first
term, George W. Bush suggested a legitimate role for government, a “compassionate
conservatism” that, the White House argues, has expressed itself in the Medicare
prescription drug plan and the educational reform effort known as No Child Left
Behind—and that has given small-government conservatives heartburn.


For the most part, though, the Republican economic agenda under President Bush has
been devoted to tax cuts, reduced regulation, the privatization of government services—
and more tax cuts. Administration officials call this the Ownership Society, but most of
its central tenets have been staples of laissez-faire economics since at least the 1930s: a
belief that a sharp reduction—or in some cases, elimination—of taxes on incomes, large
estates, capital gains, and dividends will encourage capital formation, higher savings
rates, more business investment, and greater economic growth; a belief that government
regulation inhibits and distorts the efficient working of the market; and a belief that
government entitlement programs are inherently inefficient, breed dependency, and
reduce individual responsibility, initiative, and choice.

Or, as Ronald Reagan succinctly put it: “Government is not the solution to our problem;
government is the problem.”

So far, the Bush Administration has only achieved one-half of its equation; the
Republican-controlled Congress has pushed through successive rounds of tax cuts, but
has refused to make tough choices to control spending—special interest appropriations,
also known as earmarks, are up 64 percent since Bush took office. Meanwhile,
Democratic lawmakers (and the public) have resisted drastic cuts in vital investments—
and outright rejected the Administration’s proposal to privatize Social Security.
Whether the Administration actually believes that the resulting federal budget deficits
and ballooning national debt don’t matter is unclear. What is clear is that the sea of red
ink has made it more difficult for future administrations to initiate any new investments
to address the economic challenges of globalization or to strengthen America’s social
safety net.

I don’t want to exaggerate the consequences of this stalemate. A strategy of doing
nothing and letting globalization run its course won’t result in the imminent collapse of
the U.S. economy. America’s GDP remains larger than China’s and India’s combined.
For now, at least, U.S.-based companies continue to hold an edge in such knowledge-
based sectors as software design and pharmaceutical research, and our network of
universities and colleges remains the envy of the world.

But over the long term, doing nothing probably means an America very different from
the one most of us grew up in. It will mean a nation even more stratified economically
and socially than it currently is: one in which an increasingly prosperous knowledge
class, living in exclusive enclaves, will be able to purchase whatever they want on the
marketplace—private schools, private health care, private security, and private jets—
while a growing number of their fellow citizens are consigned to low-paying service
jobs, vulnerable to dislocation, pressed to work longer hours, dependent on an
underfunded, overburdened, and underperforming public sector for their health care,
their retirement, and their children’s educations.

It will mean an America in which we continue to mortgage our assets to foreign lenders
and expose ourselves to the whims of oil producers; an America in which we
underinvest in the basic scientific research and workforce training that will determine
our long-term economic prospects and neglect potential environmental crises. It will
mean an America that’s more politically polarized and more politically unstable, as
economic frustration boils over and leads people to turn on each other.


Worst of all, it will mean fewer opportunities for younger Americans, a decline in the
upward mobility that’s been at the heart of this country’s promise since its founding.

That’s not the America we want for ourselves or our children. And I’m confident that
we have the talent and the resources to create a better future, a future in which the
economy grows and prosperity is shared. What’s preventing us from shaping that future
isn’t the absence of good ideas. It’s the absence of a national commitment to take the
tough steps necessary to make America more competitive—and the absence of a new
consensus around the appropriate role of government in the marketplace.



TO BUILD THAT consensus, we need to take a look at how our market system has
evolved over time. Calvin Coolidge once said that “the chief business of the American
people is business,” and indeed, it would be hard to find a country on earth that’s been
more consistently hospitable to the logic of the marketplace. Our Constitution places the
ownership of private property at the very heart of our system of liberty. Our religious
traditions celebrate the value of hard work and express the conviction that a virtuous life
will result in material reward. Rather than vilify the rich, we hold them up as role
models, and our mythology is steeped in stories of men on the make—the immigrant
who comes to this country with nothing and strikes it big, the young man who heads
West in search of his fortune. As Ted Turner famously said, in America money is how
we keep score.

The result of this business culture has been a prosperity that’s unmatched in human
history. It takes a trip overseas to fully appreciate just how good Americans have it;
even our poor take for granted goods and services—electricity, clean water, indoor
plumbing, telephones, televisions, and household appliances—that are still unattainable
for most of the world. America may have been blessed with some of the planet’s best
real estate, but clearly it’s not just our natural resources that account for our economic
success. Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for
generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative, and the efficient
allocation of resources.

It should come as no surprise, then, that we have a tendency to take our free-market
system as a given, to assume that it flows naturally from the laws of supply and demand
and Adam Smith’s invisible hand. And from this assumption, it’s not much of a leap to
assume that any government intrusion into the magical workings of the market—
whether through taxation, regulation, lawsuits, tariffs, labor protections, or spending on
entitlements—necessarily undermines private enterprise and inhibits economic growth.
The bankruptcy of communism and socialism as alternative means of economic
organization has only reinforced this assumption. In our standard economics textbooks
and in our modern political debates, laissez-faire is the default rule; anyone who would
challenge it swims against the prevailing tide.

It’s useful to remind ourselves, then, that our free-market system is the result neither of
natural law nor of divine providence. Rather, it emerged through a painful process of
trial and error, a series of difficult choices between efficiency and fairness, stability and
change. And although the benefits of our free-market system have mostly derived from
the individual efforts of generations of men and women pursuing their own vision of


happiness, in each and every period of great economic upheaval and transition we’ve
depended on government action to open up opportunity, encourage competition, and
make the market work better.

In broad outline, government action has taken three forms. First, government has been
called upon throughout our history to build the infrastructure, train the workforce, and
otherwise lay the foundations necessary for economic growth. All the Founding Fathers
recognized the connection between private property and liberty, but it was Alexander
Hamilton who also recognized the vast potential of a national economy—one based not
on America’s agrarian past but on a commercial and industrial future. To realize this
potential, Hamilton argued, America needed a strong and active national government,
and as America’s first Treasury secretary he set about putting his ideas to work. He
nationalized the Revolutionary War debt, which not only stitched together the
economies of the individual states but helped spur a national system of credit and fluid
capital markets. He promoted policies—from strong patent laws to high tariffs—to
encourage American manufacturing, and proposed investment in roads and bridges
needed to move products to market.

Hamilton encountered fierce resistance from Thomas Jefferson, who feared that a strong
national government tied to wealthy commercial interests would undermine his vision
of an egalitarian democracy tied to the land. But Hamilton understood that only through
the liberation of capital from local landed interests could America tap into its most
powerful resource—namely the energy and enterprise of the American people. This idea
of social mobility constituted one of the great early bargains of American capitalism;
industrial and commercial capitalism might lead to greater instability, but it would be a
dynamic system in which anyone with enough energy and talent could rise to the top.
And on this point, at least, Jefferson agreed—it was based on his belief in a
meritocracy, rather than a hereditary aristocracy, that Jefferson would champion the
creation of a national, government-financed university that could educate and train
talent across the new nation, and that he considered the founding of the University of
Virginia to be one of his greatest achievements.

This tradition, of government investment in America’s physical infrastructure and in its
people, was thoroughly embraced by Abraham Lincoln and the early Republican Party.
For Lincoln, the essence of America was opportunity, the ability of “free labor” to
advance in life. Lincoln considered capitalism the best means of creating such
opportunity, but he also saw how the transition from an agricultural to an industrial
society was disrupting lives and destroying communities.

So in the midst of civil war, Lincoln embarked on a series of policies that not only laid
the groundwork for a fully integrated national economy but extended the ladders of
opportunity downward to reach more and more people. He pushed for the construction
of the first transcontinental railroad. He incorporated the National Academy of
Sciences, to spur basic research and scientific discovery that could lead to new
technology and commercial applications. He passed the landmark Homestead Act of
1862, which turned over vast amounts of public land across the western United States to
settlers from the East and immigrants from around the world, so that they, too, could
claim a stake in the nation’s growing economy. And then, rather than leave these
homesteaders to fend for themselves, he created a system of land grant colleges to


instruct farmers on the latest agricultural techniques, and to provide them the liberal
education that would allow them to dream beyond the confines of life on the farm.

Hamilton’s and Lincoln’s basic insight—that the resources and power of the national
government can facilitate, rather than supplant, a vibrant free market—has continued to
be one of the cornerstones of both Republican and Democratic policies at every stage of
America’s development. The Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the
interstate highway system, the Internet, the Human Genome Project—time and again,
government investment has helped pave the way for an explosion of private economic
activity. And through the creation of a system of public schools and institutions of
higher education, as well as programs like the GI Bill that made a college education
available to millions, government has helped provide individuals the tools to adapt and
innovate in a climate of constant technological change.

Aside from making needed investments that private enterprise can’t or won’t make on
its own, an active national government has also been indispensable in dealing with
market failures—those recurring snags in any capitalist system that either inhibit the
efficient workings of the market or result in harm to the public. Teddy Roosevelt
recognized that monopoly power could restrict competition, and made “trust busting” a
centerpiece of his administration. Woodrow Wilson instituted the Federal Reserve
Bank, to manage the money supply and curb periodic panics in the financial markets.
Federal and state governments established the first consumer laws—the Pure Food and
Drug Act, the Meat Inspection Act—to protect Americans from harmful products.

But it was during the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression that the
government’s vital role in regulating the marketplace became fully apparent. With
investor confidence shattered, bank runs threatening the collapse of the financial
system, and a downward spiral in consumer demand and business investment, FDR
engineered a series of government interventions that arrested further economic
contraction. For the next eight years, the New Deal administration experimented with
policies to restart the economy, and although not all of these interventions produced
their intended results, they did leave behind a regulatory structure that helps limit the
risk of economic crisis: a Securities and Exchange Commission to ensure transparency
in the financial markets and protect smaller investors from fraud and insider
manipulation; FDIC insurance to provide confidence to bank depositors; and
countercyclical fiscal and monetary policies, whether in the form of tax cuts, increased
liquidity, or direct government spending, to stimulate demand when business and
consumers have pulled back from the market.

Finally—and most controversially—government has helped structure the social
compact between business and the American worker. During America’s first 150 years,
as capital became more concentrated in trusts and limited liability corporations, workers
were prevented by law and by violence from forming unions that would increase their
own leverage. Workers had almost no protections from unsafe or inhumane working
conditions, whether in sweatshops or meatpacking plants. Nor did American culture
have much sympathy for workers left impoverished by capitalism’s periodic gales of
“creative destruction”—the recipe for individual success was greater toil, not pampering
from the state. What safety net did exist came from the uneven and meager resources of
private charity.


Again, it took the shock of the Great Depression, with a third of all people finding
themselves out of work, ill housed, ill clothed, and ill fed, for government to correct this
imbalance. Two years into office, FDR was able to push through Congress the Social
Security Act of 1935, the centerpiece of the new welfare state, a safety net that would
lift almost half of all senior citizens out of poverty, provide unemployment insurance
for those who had lost their jobs, and provide modest welfare payments to the disabled
and the elderly poor. FDR also initiated laws that fundamentally changed the
relationship between capital and labor: the forty-hour workweek, child labor laws, and
minimum wage laws; and the National Labor Relations Act, which made it possible to
organize broad-based industrial unions and forced employers to bargain in good faith.

Part of FDR’s rationale in passing these laws came straight out of Keynesian
economics: One cure for economic depression was putting more disposable income in
the pockets of American workers. But FDR also understood that capitalism in a
democracy required the consent of the people, and that by giving workers a larger share
of the economic pie, his reforms would undercut the potential appeal of government-
managed, command-and-control systems—whether fascist, socialist, or communist—
that were gaining support all across Europe. As he would explain in 1944, “People who
are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

For a while this seemed to be where the story would end—with FDR saving capitalism
from itself through an activist federal government that invests in its people and
infrastructure, regulates the marketplace, and protects labor from chronic deprivation.
And in fact, for the next twenty-five years, through Republican and Democratic
administrations, this model of the American welfare state enjoyed a broad consensus.
There were those on the right who complained of creeping socialism, and those on the
left who believed FDR had not gone far enough. But the enormous growth of America’s
mass production economy, and the enormous gap in productive capacity between the
United States and the war-torn economies of Europe and Asia, muted most ideological
battles. Without any serious rivals, U.S. companies could routinely pass on higher labor
and regulatory costs to their customers. Full employment allowed unionized factory
workers to move into the middle class, support a family on a single income, and enjoy
the stability of health and retirement security. And in such an environment of steady
corporate profits and rising wages, policy makers found only modest political resistance
to higher taxes and more regulation to tackle pressing social problems—hence the
creation of the Great Society programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and welfare,
under Johnson; and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and
Occupational Health and Safety Administration under Nixon.

There was only one problem with this liberal triumph—capitalism would not stand still.
By the seventies, U.S. productivity growth, the engine of the postwar economy, began
to lag. The increased assertiveness of OPEC allowed foreign oil producers to lop off a
much bigger share of the global economy, exposing America’s vulnerability to
disruptions in energy supplies. U.S. companies began to experience competition from
low-cost producers in Asia, and by the eighties a flood of cheap imports—in textiles,
shoes, electronics, and even automobiles—had started grabbing big chunks of the
domestic market. Meanwhile, U.S.-based multinational corporations began locating
some of their production facilities overseas—partly to access these foreign markets, but
also to take advantage of cheap labor.


In this more competitive global environment, the old corporate formula of steady profits
and stodgy management no longer worked. With less ability to pass on higher costs or
shoddy products to consumers, corporate profits and market share shrank, and corporate
shareholders began demanding more value. Some corporations found ways to improve
productivity through innovation and automation. Others relied primarily on brutal
layoffs, resistance to unionization, and a further shift of production overseas. Those
corporate managers who didn’t adapt were vulnerable to corporate raiders and leveraged
buyout artists, who would make the changes for them, without any regard for the
employees whose lives might be upended or the communities that might be torn apart.
One way or another, American companies became leaner and meaner—with old-line
manufacturing workers and towns like Galesburg bearing the brunt of this
transformation.

It wasn’t just the private sector that had to adapt to this new environment. As Ronald
Reagan’s election made clear, the people wanted the government to change as well.

In his rhetoric, Reagan tended to exaggerate the degree to which the welfare state had
grown over the previous twenty-five years. At its peak, the federal budget as a total
share of the U.S. economy remained far below the comparable figures in Western
Europe, even when you factored in the enormous U.S. defense budget. Still, the
conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan’s
central insight—that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly
bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic
pie than with growing the pie—contained a good deal of truth. Just as too many
corporate managers, shielded from competition, had stopped delivering value, too many
government bureaucracies had stopped asking whether their shareholders (the American
taxpayer) and their consumers (the users of government services) were getting their
money’s worth.

Not every government program worked the way it was advertised. Some functions
could be better carried out by the private sector, just as in some cases market-based
incentives could achieve the same results as command-and-control-style regulations, at
a lower cost and with greater flexibility. The high marginal tax rates that existed when
Reagan took office may not have curbed incentives to work or invest, but they did
distort investment decisions—and did lead to a wasteful industry of setting up tax
shelters. And while welfare certainly provided relief for many impoverished Americans,
it did create some perverse incentives when it came to the work ethic and family
stability.

Forced to compromise with a Democrat-controlled Congress, Reagan would never
achieve many of his most ambitious plans for reducing government. But he
fundamentally changed the terms of the political debate. The middle-class tax revolt
became a permanent fixture in national politics and placed a ceiling on how much
government could expand. For many Republicans, noninterference with the marketplace
became an article of faith.

Of course, many voters continued to look to the government during economic
downturns, and Bill Clinton’s call for more aggressive government action on the
economy helped lift him to the White House. After the politically disastrous defeat of
his health-care plan and the election of a Republican Congress in 1994, Clinton had to


trim his ambitions but was able to put a progressive slant on some of Reagan’s goals.
Declaring the era of big government over, Clinton signed welfare reform into law,
pushed tax cuts for the middle class and working poor, and worked to reduce
bureaucracy and red tape. And it was Clinton who would accomplish what Reagan
never did, putting the nation’s fiscal house in order even while lessening poverty and
making modest new investments in education and job training. By the time Clinton left
office, it appeared as if some equilibrium had been achieved—a smaller government,
but one that retained the social safety net FDR had first put into place.

Except capitalism is still not standing still. The policies of Reagan and Clinton may
have trimmed some of the fat of the liberal welfare state, but they couldn’t change the
underlying realities of global competition and technological revolution. Jobs are still
moving overseas—not just manufacturing work, but increasingly work in the service
sector that can be digitally transmitted, like basic computer programming. Businesses
continue to struggle with high health-care costs. America continues to import far more
than it exports, to borrow far more than it lends.

Without any clear governing philosophy, the Bush Administration and its congressional
allies have responded by pushing the conservative revolution to its logical conclusion—
even lower taxes, even fewer regulations, and an even smaller safety net. But in taking
this approach, Republicans are fighting the last war, the war they waged and won in the
eighties, while Democrats are forced to fight a rearguard action, defending the New
Deal programs of the thirties.

Neither strategy will work anymore. America can’t compete with China and India
simply by cutting costs and shrinking government—unless we’re willing to tolerate a
drastic decline in American living standards, with smog-choked cities and beggars
lining the streets. Nor can America compete simply by erecting trade barriers and
raising the minimum wage—unless we’re willing to confiscate all the world’s
computers.

But our history should give us confidence that we don’t have to choose between an
oppressive, government-run economy and a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism. It tells
us that we can emerge from great economic upheavals stronger, not weaker. Like those
who came before us, we should be asking ourselves what mix of policies will lead to a
dynamic free market and widespread economic security, entrepreneurial innovation and
upward mobility. And we can be guided throughout by Lincoln’s simple maxim: that
we will do collectively, through our government, only those things that we cannot do as
well or at all individually and privately.

In other words, we should be guided by what works.



WHAT MIGHT SUCH a new economic consensus look like? I won’t pretend to have
all the answers, and a detailed discussion of U.S. economic policy would fill up several
volumes. But I can offer a few examples of where we can break free of our current
political stalemate; places where, in the tradition of Hamilton and Lincoln, we can
invest in our infrastructure and our people; ways that we can begin to modernize and


rebuild the social contract that FDR first stitched together in the middle of the last
century.

Let’s start with those investments that can make America more competitive in the
global economy: investments in education, science and technology, and energy
independence.

Throughout our history, education has been at the heart of a bargain this nation makes
with its citizens: If you work hard and take responsibility, you’ll have a chance for a
better life. And in a world where knowledge determines value in the job market, where
a child in Los Angeles has to compete not just with a child in Boston but also with
millions of children in Bangalore and Beijing, too many of America’s schools are not
holding up their end of the bargain.

In 2005 I paid a visit to Thornton Township High School, a predominantly black high
school in Chicago’s southern suburbs. My staff had worked with teachers there to
organize a youth town hall meeting—representatives of each class spent weeks
conducting surveys to find out what issues their fellow students were concerned about
and then presented the results in a series of questions to me. At the meeting they talked
about violence in the neighborhoods and a shortage of computers in their classrooms.
But their number one issue was this: Because the school district couldn’t afford to keep
teachers for a full school day, Thornton let out every day at 1:30 in the afternoon. With
the abbreviated schedule, there was no time for students to take science lab or foreign
language classes.

How come we’re getting shortchanged? they asked me. Seems like nobody even expects
us to go to college, they said.

They wanted more school.

We’ve become accustomed to such stories, of poor black and Latino children
languishing in schools that can’t prepare them for the old industrial economy, much less
the information age. But the problems with our educational system aren’t restricted to
the inner city. America now has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the
industrialized world. By their senior year, American high school students score lower
on math and science tests than most of their foreign peers. Half of all teenagers can’t
understand basic fractions, half of all nine-year-olds can’t perform basic multiplication
or division, and although more American students than ever are taking college entrance
exams, only 22 percent are prepared to take college-level classes in English, math, and
science.

I don’t believe government alone can turn these statistics around. Parents have the
primary responsibility for instilling an ethic of hard work and educational achievement
in their children. But parents rightly expect their government, through the public
schools, to serve as full partners in the educational process—just as it has for earlier
generations of Americans.

Unfortunately, instead of innovation and bold reform of our schools—the reforms that
would allow the kids at Thornton to compete for the jobs at Google—what we’ve seen
from government for close to two decades has been tinkering around the edges and a


tolerance for mediocrity. Partly this is a result of ideological battles that are as outdated
as they are predictable. Many conservatives argue that money doesn’t matter in raising
educational achievement; that the problems in public schools are caused by hapless
bureaucracies and intransigent teachers’ unions; and that the only solution is to break up
the government’s education monopoly by handing out vouchers. Meanwhile, those on
the left often find themselves defending an indefensible status quo, insisting that more
spending alone will improve educational outcomes.

Both assumptions are wrong. Money does matter in education—otherwise why would
parents pay so much to live in well-funded suburban school districts?—and many urban
and rural schools still suffer from overcrowded classrooms, outdated books, inadequate
equipment, and teachers who are forced to pay out of pocket for basic supplies. But
there’s no denying that the way many public schools are managed poses at least as big a
problem as how well they’re funded.

Our task, then, is to identify those reforms that have the highest impact on student
achievement, fund them adequately, and eliminate those programs that don’t produce
results. And in fact we already have hard evidence of reforms that work: a more
challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math, science, and literacy skills;
longer hours and more days to give children the time and sustained attention they need
to learn; early childhood education for every child, so they’re not already behind on
their first day of school; meaningful, performance-based assessments that can provide a
fuller picture of how a student is doing; and the recruitment and training of
transformative principals and more effective teachers.

This last point—the need for good teachers—deserves emphasis. Recent studies show
that the single most important factor in determining a student’s achievement isn’t the
color of his skin or where he comes from, but who the child’s teacher is. Unfortunately,
too many of our schools depend on inexperienced teachers with little training in the
subjects they’re teaching, and too often those teachers are concentrated in already
struggling schools. Moreover, the situation is getting worse, not better: Each year,
school districts are hemorrhaging experienced teachers as the Baby Boomers reach
retirement, and two million teachers must be recruited in the next decade just to meet
the needs of rising enrollment.

The problem isn’t that there’s no interest in teaching; I constantly meet young people
who’ve graduated from top colleges and have signed up, through programs like Teach
for America, for two-year stints in some of the country’s toughest public schools. They
find the work extraordinarily rewarding; the kids they teach benefit from their creativity
and enthusiasm. But by the end of two years, most have either changed careers or
moved to suburban schools—a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the
educational bureaucracy, and a pervasive feeling of isolation.

If we’re serious about building a twenty-first-century school system, we’re going to
have to take the teaching profession seriously. This means changing the certification
process to allow a chemistry major who wants to teach to avoid expensive additional
course work; pairing up new recruits with master teachers to break their isolation; and
giving proven teachers more control over what goes on in their classrooms.


It also means paying teachers what they’re worth. There’s no reason why an
experienced, highly qualified, and effective teacher shouldn’t earn $100,000 annually at
the peak of his or her career. Highly skilled teachers in such critical fields as math and
science—as well as those willing to teach in the toughest urban schools—should be paid
even more.

There’s just one catch. In exchange for more money, teachers need to become more
accountable for their performance—and school districts need to have greater ability to
get rid of ineffective teachers.

So far, teacher’s unions have resisted the idea of pay for performance, in part because it
could be disbursed at the whim of a principal. The unions also argue—rightly, I think—
that most school districts rely solely on test scores to measure teacher performance, and
that test scores may be highly dependent on factors beyond any teacher’s control, like
the number of low-income or special-needs students in their classroom.

But these aren’t insoluble problems. Working with teacher’s unions, states and school
districts can develop better measures of performance, ones that combine test data with a
system of peer review (most teachers can tell you with amazing consistency which
teachers in their schools are really good, and which are really bad). And we can make
sure that nonperforming teachers no longer handicap children who want to learn.

Indeed, if we’re to make the investments required to revamp our schools, then we will
need to rediscover our faith that every child can learn. Recently, I had the chance to
visit Dodge Elementary School, on the West Side of Chicago, a school that had once
been near the bottom on every measure but that is in the midst of a turnaround. While I
was talking to some of the teachers about the challenges they faced, one young teacher
mentioned what she called the “These Kids Syndrome”—the willingness of society to
find a million excuses for why “these kids” can’t learn; how “these kids come from
tough backgrounds” or “these kids are too far behind.”

“When I hear that term, it drives me nuts,” the teacher told me. “They’re not ‘these
kids.’ They’re our kids.”

How America’s economy performs in the years to come may depend largely on how
well we take such wisdom to heart.



OUR INVESTMENT IN education can’t end with an improved elementary and
secondary school system. In a knowledge-based economy where eight of the nine
fastest-growing occupations this decade require scientific or technological skills, most
workers are going to need some form of higher education to fill the jobs of the future.
And just as our government instituted free and mandatory public high schools at the
dawn of the twentieth century to provide workers the skills needed for the industrial
age, our government has to help today’s workforce adjust to twenty-first-century
realities.

In many ways, our task should be easier than it was for policy makers a hundred years
ago. For one thing, our network of universities and community colleges already exists


and is well equipped to take on more students. And Americans certainly don’t need to
be convinced of the value of a higher education—the percentage of young adults getting
bachelor’s degrees has risen steadily each decade, from around 16 percent in 1980 to
almost 33 percent today.

Where Americans do need help, immediately, is in managing the rising cost of
college—something with which Michelle and I are all too familiar (for the first ten years
of our marriage, our combined monthly payments on our undergraduate and law school
debt exceeded our mortgage by a healthy margin). Over the last five years, the average
tuition and fees at four-year public colleges, adjusted for inflation, have risen 40
percent. To absorb these costs, students have been taking on ever-increasing debt levels,
which discourages many undergraduates from pursuing careers in less lucrative fields
like teaching. And an estimated two hundred thousand college-qualified students each
year choose to forgo college altogether because they can’t figure out how to pay the
bills.

There are a number of steps we can take to control costs and improve access to higher
education. States can limit annual tuition increases at public universities. For many
nontraditional students, technical schools and online courses may provide a cost-
effective option for retooling in a constantly changing economy. And students can insist
that their institutions focus their fund-raising efforts more on improving the quality of
instruction than on building new football stadiums.

But no matter how well we do in controlling the spiraling cost of education, we will still
need to provide many students and parents with more direct help in meeting college
expenses, whether through grants, low-interest loans, tax-free educational savings
accounts, or full tax deductibility of tuition and fees. So far, Congress has been moving
in the opposite direction, by raising interest rates on federally guaranteed student loans
and failing to increase the size of grants for low-income students to keep pace with
inflation. There’s no justification for such policies—not if we want to maintain
opportunity and upward mobility as the hallmark of the U.S. economy.

There’s one other aspect of our educational system that merits attention—one that
speaks to the heart of America’s competitiveness. Since Lincoln signed the Morrill Act
and created the system of land grant colleges, institutions of higher learning have served
as the nation’s primary research and development laboratories. It’s through these
institutions that we’ve trained the innovators of the future, with the federal government
providing critical support for the infrastructure—everything from chemistry labs to
particle accelerators—and the dollars for research that may not have an immediate
commercial application but that can ultimately lead to major scientific breakthroughs.

Here, too, our policies have been moving in the wrong direction. At the 2006
Northwestern University commencement, I fell into a conversation with Dr. Robert
Langer, an Institute Professor of chemical engineering at MIT and one of the nation’s
foremost scientists. Langer isn’t just an ivory tower academic—he holds more than five
hundred patents, and his research has led to everything from the development of the
nicotine patch to brain cancer treatments. As we waited for the procession to begin, I
asked him about his current work, and he mentioned his research in tissue engineering,
research that promised new, more effective methods of delivering drugs to the body.
Remembering the recent controversies surrounding stem cell research, I asked him


whether the Bush Administration’s limitation on the number of stem cell lines was the
biggest impediment to advances in his field. He shook his head.

“Having more stem cell lines would definitely be useful,” Langer told me, “but the real
problem we’re seeing is significant cutbacks in federal grants.” He explained that fifteen
years ago, 20 to 30 percent of all research proposals received significant federal support.
That level is now closer to 10 percent. For scientists and researchers, this means more
time spent raising money and less time spent on research. It also means that each year,
more and more promising avenues of research are cut off—especially the high-risk
research that may ultimately yield the biggest rewards.

Dr. Langer’s observation isn’t unique. Each month, it seems, scientists and engineers
visit my office to discuss the federal government’s diminished commitment to funding
basic scientific research. Over the last three decades federal funding for the physical,
mathematical, and engineering sciences has declined as a percentage of GDP—just at
the time when other countries are substantially increasing their own R & D budgets.
And as Dr. Langer points out, our declining support for basic research has a direct
impact on the number of young people going into math, science, and engineering—
which helps explain why China is graduating eight times as many engineers as the
United States every year.

If we want an innovation economy, one that generates more Googles each year, then we
have to invest in our future innovators—by doubling federal funding of basic research
over the next five years, training one hundred thousand more engineers and scientists
over the next four years, or providing new research grants to the most outstanding early-
career researchers in the country. The total price tag for maintaining our scientific and
technological edge comes out to approximately $42 billion over five years—real
money, to be sure, but just 15 percent of the most recent federal highway bill.

In other words, we can afford to do what needs to be done. What’s missing is not
money, but a national sense of urgency.



THE LAST CRITICAL investment we need to make America more competitive is in an
energy infrastructure that can move us toward energy independence. In the past, war or
a direct threat to national security has shaken America out of its complacency and led to
bigger investments in education and science, all with an eye toward minimizing our
vulnerabilities. That’s what happened at the height of the Cold War, when the launching
of the satellite Sputnik led to fears that the Soviets were slipping ahead of us
technologically. In response, President Eisenhower doubled federal aid to education and
provided an entire generation of scientists and engineers the training they needed to lead
revolutionary advances. That same year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, or DARPA, was formed, providing billions of dollars to basic research that
would eventually help create the Internet, bar codes, and computer-aided design. And in
1961, President Kennedy would launch the Apollo space program, further inspiring
young people across the country to enter the New Frontier of science.

Our current situation demands that we take the same approach with energy. It’s hard to
overstate the degree to which our addiction to oil undermines our future. According to


the National Commission on Energy Policy, without any changes to our energy policy
U.S. demand for oil will jump 40 percent over the next twenty years. Over the same
period, worldwide demand is expected to jump at least 30 percent, as rapidly developing
countries like China and India expand industrial capacity and add 140 million cars to
their roads.

Our dependence on oil doesn’t just affect our economy. It undermines our national
security. A large portion of the $800 million we spend on foreign oil every day goes to
some of the world’s most volatile regimes—Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela, and,
indirectly at least, Iran. It doesn’t matter whether they are despotic regimes with nuclear
intentions or havens for madrassas that plant the seeds of terror in young minds—they
get our money because we need their oil.

What’s worse, the potential for supply disruption is severe. In the Persian Gulf, Al
Qaeda has been attempting attacks on poorly defended oil refineries for years; a
successful attack on just one of the Saudis’ major oil complexes could send the U.S.
economy into a tailspin. Osama bin Laden himself advises his followers to “focus your
operations on [oil], especially in Iraq and the Gulf area, since this will cause them to die
off.”

And then there are the environmental consequences of our fossil fuel–based economy.
Just about every scientist outside the White House believes climate change is real, is
serious, and is accelerated by the continued release of carbon dioxide. If the prospect of
melting ice caps, rising sea levels, changing weather patterns, more frequent hurricanes,
more violent tornadoes, endless dust storms, decaying forests, dying coral reefs, and
increases in respiratory illness and insect-borne diseases—if all that doesn’t constitute a
serious threat, I don’t know what does.

So far, the Bush Administration’s energy policy has been focused on subsidies to big oil
companies and expanded drilling—coupled with token investments in the development
of alternative fuels. This approach might make economic sense if America harbored
plentiful and untapped oil supplies that could meet its needs (and if oil companies
weren’t experiencing record profits). But such supplies don’t exist. The United States
has 3 percent of the world’s oil reserves. We use 25 percent of the world’s oil. We can’t
drill our way out of the problem.

What we can do is create renewable, cleaner energy sources for the twenty-first century.
Instead of subsidizing the oil industry, we should end every single tax break the industry
currently receives and demand that 1 percent of the revenues from oil companies with
over $1 billion in quarterly profits go toward financing alternative energy research and
the necessary infrastructure. Not only would such a project pay huge economic, foreign
policy, and environmental dividends—it could be the vehicle by which we train an
entire new generation of American scientists and engineers and a source of new export
industries and high-wage jobs.

Countries like Brazil have already done this. Over the last thirty years, Brazil has used a
mix of regulation and direct government investment to develop a highly efficient
biofuel industry; 70 percent of its new vehicles now run on sugar-based ethanol instead
of gasoline. Without the same governmental attention, the U.S. ethanol industry is just
now catching up. Free-market proponents argue that the heavy-handed approach of the


Brazilian government has no place in the more market-oriented U.S. economy. But
regulation, if applied with flexibility and sensitivity to market forces, can actually spur
private sector innovation and investment in the energy sector.

Take the issue of fuel-efficiency standards. Had we steadily raised those standards over
the past two decades, when gas was cheap, U.S. automakers might have invested in
new, fuel-efficient models instead of gas-guzzling SUVs—making them more
competitive as gas prices rose. Instead, we’re seeing Japanese competitors run circles
around Detroit. Toyota plans to sell one hundred thousand of their popular Priuses in
2006, while GM’s hybrid won’t even hit the market until 2007. And we can expect
companies like Toyota to outcompete U.S automakers in the burgeoning Chinese
market since China already has higher fuel-efficiency standards than we do.

The bottom line is that fuel-efficient cars and alternative fuels like E85, a fuel
formulated with 85 percent ethanol, represent the future of the auto industry. It is a
future American car companies can attain if we start making some tough choices now.
For years U.S. automakers and the UAW have resisted higher fuel-efficiency standards
because retooling costs money, and Detroit is already struggling under huge retiree
health-care costs and stiff competition. So during my first year in the Senate I proposed
legislation I called “Health Care for Hybrids.” The bill makes a deal with U.S.
automakers: In exchange for federal financial assistance in meeting the health-care costs
of retired autoworkers, the Big Three would reinvest these savings into developing more
fuel-efficient vehicles.

Aggressively investing in alternative fuel sources can also lead to the creation of
thousands of new jobs. Ten or twenty years down the road, that old Maytag plant in
Galesburg could reopen its doors as a cellulosic ethanol refinery. Down the street,
scientists might be busy in a research lab working on a new hydrogen cell. And across
the way, a new auto company could be busy churning out hybrid cars. The new jobs
created could be filled by American workers trained with new skills and a world-class
education, from elementary school to college.

But we can’t afford to hesitate much longer. I got a glimpse of what a nation’s
dependence on foreign energy can do in the summer of 2005, when Senator Dick Lugar
and I visited Ukraine and met with the country’s newly elected president, Viktor
Yushchenko. The story of Yushchenko’s election had made headlines around the world:
Running against a ruling party that for years had catered to the wishes of neighboring
Russia, Yushchenko survived an assassination attempt, a stolen election, and threats
from Moscow, before the Ukrainian people finally rose up in an “Orange Revolution”—
a series of peaceful mass demonstrations that ultimately led to Yushchenko’s
installation as president.

It should have been a heady time in the former Soviet state, and indeed, everywhere we
went there was talk of democratic liberalization and economic reform. But in our
conversations with Yushchenko and his cabinet, we soon discovered that Ukraine had a
major problem—it continued to be entirely dependent on Russia for all its oil and
natural gas. Already, Russia had indicated that it would end Ukraine’s ability to
purchase this energy at below-world-market prices, a move that would lead to a tripling
of home heating oil prices during the winter months leading up to parliamentary
elections. Pro-Russian forces inside the country were biding their time, aware that for


all the soaring rhetoric, the orange banners, the demonstrations, and Yushchenko’s
courage, Ukraine still found itself at the mercy of its former patron.

A nation that can’t control its energy sources can’t control its future. Ukraine may have
little choice in the matter, but the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth surely
does.



EDUCATION. SCIENCE AND technology. Energy. Investments in these three key
areas would go a long way in making America more competitive. Of course, none of
these investments will yield results overnight. All will be subject to controversy.
Investment in R & D and education will cost money at a time when our federal budget
is already stretched. Increasing the fuel efficiency of American cars or instituting
performance pay for public-school teachers will involve overcoming the suspicions of
workers who already feel embattled. And arguments over the wisdom of school
vouchers or the viability of hydrogen fuel cells won’t go away anytime soon.

But while the means we use to accomplish these ends should be subject to vigorous and
open debate, the ends themselves shouldn’t be in dispute. If we fail to act, our
competitive position in the world will decline. If we act boldly, then our economy will
be less vulnerable to economic disruption, our trade balance will improve, the pace of
U.S. technological innovation will accelerate, and the American worker will be in a
stronger position to adapt to the global economy.

Still, will that be enough? Assuming we’re able to bridge some of our ideological
differences and keep the U.S. economy growing, will I be able to look squarely in the
eyes of those workers in Galesburg and tell them that globalization can work for them
and their children?

That was the question on my mind during the 2005 debate on the Central American Free
Trade Agreement, or CAFTA. Viewed in isolation, the agreement posed little threat to
American workers—the combined economies of the Central American countries
involved were roughly the same as that of New Haven, Connecticut. It opened up new
markets for U.S. agricultural producers, and promised much-needed foreign investment
in poor countries like Honduras and the Dominican Republic. There were some
problems with the agreement, but overall, CAFTA was probably a net plus for the U.S.
economy.

When I met with representatives from organized labor, though, they were having none
of it. As far as they were concerned, NAFTA had been a disaster for U.S. workers, and
CAFTA just promised more of the same. What was needed, they said, was not just free
trade but fair trade: stronger labor protections in countries that trade with the United
States, including rights to unionize and bans on child labor; improved environmental
standards in these same countries; an end to unfair government subsidies to foreign
exporters and nontariff barriers on U.S. exports; stronger protections for U.S.
intellectual property; and—in the case of China in particular—an end to an artificially
devalued currency that put U.S. companies at a perpetual disadvantage.


Like most Democrats, I strongly support all these things. And yet, I felt obliged to say
to the union reps that none of these measures would change the underlying realities of
globalization. Stronger labor or environmental provisions in a trade bill can help put
pressure on countries to keep improving worker conditions, as can efforts to obtain
agreements from U.S. retailers to sell goods produced at a fair wage. But they won’t
eliminate the enormous gap in hourly wages between U.S. workers and workers in
Honduras, Indonesia, Mozambique, or Bangladesh, countries where work in a dirty
factory or overheated sweatshop is often considered a step up on the economic ladder.

Likewise, China’s willingness to let its currency rise might modestly raise the price on
goods manufactured there, thereby making U.S. goods somewhat more competitive. But
when all is said and done, China will still have more surplus labor in its countryside
than half the entire population of the United States—which means Wal-Mart will be
keeping suppliers there busy for a very, very long time.

We need a new approach to the trade question, I would say, one that acknowledges
these realities.

And my union brothers and sisters would nod and say that they were interested in
talking to me about my ideas—but in the meantime, could they mark me as a “no” vote
on CAFTA?

In fact, the basic debate surrounding free trade has hardly changed since the early
1980s, with labor and its allies generally losing the fight. The conventional wisdom
among policy makers, the press, and the business community these days is that free
trade makes everyone better off. At any given time, so the argument goes, some U.S.
jobs may be lost to trade and cause localized pain and hardship—but for every one
thousand manufacturing jobs lost due to a plant closure, the same or an even greater
number of jobs will be created in the new and expanding service sectors of the
economy.

As the pace of globalization has picked up, though, it’s not just unions that are worrying
about the long-term prospects for U.S. workers. Economists have noted that throughout
the world—including China and India—it seems to take more economic growth each
year to produce the same number of jobs, a consequence of ever-increasing automation
and higher productivity. Some analysts question whether a U.S. economy more
dominated by services can expect to see the same productivity growth, and hence rising
living standards, as we’ve seen in the past. In fact, over the past five years, statistics
consistently show that the wages of American jobs being lost are higher than the wages
of American jobs being created.

And while upgrading the education levels of American workers will improve their
ability to adapt to the global economy, a better education alone won’t necessarily
protect them from growing competition. Even if the United States produced twice as
many computer programmers per capita as China, India, or any Eastern European
country, the sheer number of new entrants into the global marketplace means a lot more
programmers overseas than there are in the United States—all of them available at one-
fifth the salary to any business with a broadband link.


In other words, free trade may well grow the worldwide economic pie—but there’s no
law that says workers in the United States will continue to get a bigger and bigger slice.

Given these realities, it’s easy to understand why some might want to put a stop to
globalization—to freeze the status quo and insulate ourselves from economic disruption.
On a stop to New York during the CAFTA debate, I mentioned some of the studies I’d
been reading to Robert Rubin, the former U.S. Treasury secretary under Clinton whom I
had gotten to know during my campaign. It would be hard to find a Democrat more
closely identified with globalization than Rubin—not only had he been one of Wall
Street’s most influential bankers for decades, but for much of the nineties he had helped
chart the course of world finance. He also happens to be one of the more thoughtful and
unassuming people I know. So I asked him whether at least some of the fears I’d heard
from the Maytag workers in Galesburg were well founded—that there was no way to
avoid a long-term decline in U.S. living standards if we opened ourselves up entirely to
competition with much cheaper labor around the world.

“That’s a complicated question,” Rubin said. “Most economists will tell you that there’s
no inherent limit to the number of good new jobs that the U.S. economy can generate,
because there’s no limit to human ingenuity. People invent new industries, new needs
and wants. I think the economists are probably right. Historically, it’s been the case. Of
course, there’s no guarantee that the pattern holds this time. With the pace of
technological change, the size of the countries we’re competing against, and the cost
differentials with those countries, we may see a different dynamic emerge. So I suppose
it’s possible that even if we do everything right, we could still face some challenges.”

I suggested that the folks in Galesburg might not find his answer reassuring.

“I said it’s possible, not probable,” he said. “I tend to be cautiously optimistic that if we
get our fiscal house in order and improve our educational system, their children will do
just fine. Anyway, there’s one thing that I would tell the people in Galesburg is certain.
Any efforts at protectionism will be counterproductive—and it will make their children
worse off in the bargain.”

I appreciated Rubin’s acknowledgment that American workers might have legitimate
cause for concern when it came to globalization; in my experience, most labor leaders
have thought deeply about the issue and can’t be dismissed as kneejerk protectionists.

Still, it was hard to deny Rubin’s basic insight: We can try to slow globalization, but we
can’t stop it. The U.S. economy is now so integrated with the rest of the world, and
digital commerce so widespread, that it’s hard to even imagine, much less enforce, an
effective regime of protectionism. A tariff on imported steel may give temporary relief
to U.S. steel producers, but it will make every U.S. manufacturer that uses steel in its
products less competitive on the world market. It’s tough to “buy American” when a
video game sold by a U.S. company has been developed by Japanese software engineers
and packaged in Mexico. U.S. Border Patrol agents can’t interdict the services of a call
center in India, or stop an electrical engineer in Prague from sending his work via email
to a company in Dubuque. When it comes to trade, there are few borders left.

This doesn’t mean, however, that we should just throw up our hands and tell workers to
fend for themselves. I would make this point to President Bush toward the end of the


CAFTA debate, when I and a group of other senators were invited to the White House
for discussions. I told the President that I believed in the benefits of trade, and that I had
no doubt the White House could squeeze out the votes for this particular agreement. But
I said that resistance to CAFTA had less to do with the specifics of the agreement and
more to do with the growing insecurities of the American worker. Unless we found
strategies to allay those fears, and sent a strong signal to American workers that the
federal government was on their side, protectionist sentiment would only grow.

The President listened politely and said that he’d be interested in hearing my ideas. In
the meantime, he said, he hoped he could count on my vote.

He couldn’t. I ended up voting against CAFTA, which passed the Senate by a vote of 55
to 45. My vote gave me no satisfaction, but I felt it was the only way to register a
protest against what I considered to be the White House’s inattention to the losers from
free trade. Like Bob Rubin, I am optimistic about the long-term prospects for the U.S.
economy and the ability of U.S. workers to compete in a free trade environment—but
only if we distribute the costs and benefits of globalization more fairly across the
population.



THE LAST TIME we faced an economic transformation as disruptive as the one we
face today, FDR led the nation to a new social compact—a bargain between
government, business, and workers that resulted in widespread prosperity and economic
security for more than fifty years. For the average American worker, that security rested
on three pillars: the ability to find a job that paid enough to support a family and save
for emergencies; a package of health and retirement benefits from his employer; and a
government safety net—Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, unemployment
insurance, and to a lesser extent federal bankruptcy and pension protections—that could
cushion the fall of those who suffered setbacks in their lives.

Certainly the impulse behind this New Deal compact involved a sense of social
solidarity: the idea that employers should do right by their workers, and that if fate or
miscalculation caused any one of us to stumble, the larger American community would
be there to lift us up.

But this compact also rested on an understanding that a system of sharing risks and
rewards can actually improve the workings of the market. FDR understood that decent
wages and benefits for workers could create the middle-class base of consumers that
would stabilize the U.S. economy and drive its expansion. And FDR recognized that we
would all be more likely to take risks in our lives—to change jobs or start new
businesses or welcome competition from other countries—if we knew that we would
have some measure of protection should we fail.

That’s what Social Security, the centerpiece of New Deal legislation, has provided—a
form of social insurance that protects us from risk. We buy private insurance for
ourselves in the marketplace all the time, because as self-reliant as we may be, we
recognize that things don’t always work out as planned—a child gets sick, the company
we work for shuts its doors, a parent contracts Alzheimer’s, the stock market portfolio
turns south. The bigger the pool of insured, the more risk is spread, the more coverage


provided, and the lower the cost. Sometimes, though, we can’t buy insurance for certain
risks on the marketplace—usually because companies find it unprofitable. Sometimes
the insurance we get through our job isn’t enough, and we can’t afford to buy more on
our own. Sometimes an unexpected tragedy strikes and it turns out we didn’t have
enough insurance. For all these reasons, we ask the government to step in and create an
insurance pool for us—a pool that includes all of the American people.

Today the social compact FDR helped construct is beginning to crumble. In response to
increased foreign competition and pressure from a stock market that insists on quarterly
boosts in profitability, employers are automating, downsizing, and offshoring, all of
which makes workers more vulnerable to job loss and gives them less leverage to
demand increased pay or benefits. Although the federal government offers a generous
tax break for companies that provide health insurance, companies have shifted the
skyrocketing costs onto employees in the form of higher premiums, copayments, and
deductibles; meanwhile, half of small businesses, where millions of Americans work,
can’t afford to offer their employees any insurance at all. In similar fashion, companies
are shifting from the traditional defined-benefit pension plan to 401(k)s, and in some
cases using bankruptcy court to shed existing pension obligations.

The cumulative impact on families is severe. The wages of the average American
worker have barely kept pace with inflation over the past two decades. Since 1988, the
average family’s health insurance costs have quadrupled. Personal savings rates have
never been lower. And levels of personal debt have never been higher.

Rather than use the government to lessen the impact of these trends, the Bush
Administration’s response has been to encourage them. That’s the basic idea behind the
Ownership Society: If we free employers of any obligations to their workers and
dismantle what’s left of New Deal, government-run social insurance programs, then the
magic of the marketplace will take care of the rest. If the guiding philosophy behind the
traditional system of social insurance could be described as “We’re all in it together,”
the philosophy behind the Ownership Society seems to be “You’re on your own.”

It’s a tempting idea, one that’s elegant in its simplicity and that frees us of any
obligations we have toward one another. There’s only one problem with it. It won’t
work—at least not for those who are already falling behind in the global economy.

Take the Administration’s attempt to privatize Social Security. The Administration
argues that the stock market can provide individuals a better return on investment, and
in the aggregate at least they are right; historically, the market outperforms Social
Security’s cost-of-living adjustments. But individual investment decisions will always
produce winners and losers—those who bought Microsoft early and those who bought
Enron late. What would the Ownership Society do with the losers? Unless we’re willing
to see seniors starve on the street, we’re going to have to cover their retirement expenses
one way or another—and since we don’t know in advance which of us will be losers, it
makes sense for all of us to chip in to a pool that gives us at least some guaranteed
income in our golden years. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t encourage individuals to
pursue higher-risk, higher-return investment strategies. They should. It just means that
they should do so with savings other than those put into Social Security.


The same principles are at work when it comes to the Administration’s efforts to
encourage a shift from employer- or government-based health-care plans to individual
Health Savings Accounts. The idea might make sense if the lump sum each individual
received were enough to buy a decent health-care plan through his employer, and if that
lump sum kept pace with inflation of health-care costs. But what if you work for an
employer who doesn’t offer a health-care plan? Or what if the Administration’s theory
on health-care inflation turns out to be wrong—if it turns out that health-care costs
aren’t due to people’s cavalier attitude toward their health or an irrational desire to
purchase more than they need? Then “freedom to choose” will mean that employees
bear the brunt of future increases in health care, and the amount of money in their
Health Savings Accounts will buy less and less coverage each year.

In other words, the Ownership Society doesn’t even try to spread the risks and rewards
of the new economy among all Americans. Instead, it simply magnifies the uneven risks
and rewards of today’s winner-take-all economy. If you are healthy or wealthy or just
plain lucky, then you will become more so. If you are poor or sick or catch a bad break,
you will have nobody to look to for help. That’s not a recipe for sustained economic
growth or the maintenance of a strong American middle class. It’s certainly not a recipe
for social cohesion. It runs counter to those values that say we have a stake in each
other’s success.

It’s not who we are as a people.



FORTUNATELY, THERE’S AN alternative approach, one that recasts FDR’s social
compact to meet the needs of a new century. In each area where workers are
vulnerable—wages, job loss, retirement, and health care—there are good ideas, some
old and some new, that would go a long way toward making Americans more secure.

Let’s start with wages. Americans believe in work—not just as a means of supporting
themselves but as a means of giving their lives purpose and direction, order and dignity.
The old welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, too often failed to
honor this core value, which helps explain not only its unpopularity with the public but
also why it often isolated the very people it was supposed to help.

On the other hand, Americans also believe that if we work full-time, we should be able
to support ourselves and our kids. For many people on the bottom rungs of the
economy—mainly low-skilled workers in the rapidly growing service sector—this basic
promise isn’t being fulfilled.

Government policies can help these workers, with little impact on market efficiency.
For starters, we can raise the minimum wage. It may be true—as some economists
argue—that any big jumps in the minimum wage discourage employers from hiring
more workers. But when the minimum wage hasn’t been changed in nine years and has
less purchasing power in real dollars than it did in 1955, so that someone working full-
time today in a minimum-wage job doesn’t earn enough to rise out of poverty, such
arguments carry less force. The Earned Income Tax Credit, a program championed by
Ronald Reagan that provides low-wage workers with supplemental income through the


tax code, should also be expanded and streamlined so more families can take advantage
of it.

To help all workers adapt to a rapidly changing economy, it’s also time to update the
existing system of unemployment insurance and trade adjustment assistance. In fact,
there are a slew of good ideas out there on how to create a more comprehensive system
of adjustment assistance. We could extend such assistance to service industries, create
flexible education accounts that workers could use to retrain, or provide retraining
assistance for workers in sectors of the economy vulnerable to dislocation before they
lose their jobs. And in an economy where the job you lose often paid more than the new
job you gain, we could also try the concept of wage insurance, which provides 50
percent of the difference between a worker’s old wage and his new wage for anywhere
from one to two years.

Finally, to help workers gain higher wages and better benefits, we need once again to
level the playing field between organized labor and employers. Since the early 1980s,
unions have been steadily losing ground, not just because of changes in the economy
but also because today’s labor laws—and the make-up of the National Labor Relations
Board—have provided workers with very little protection. Each year, more than twenty
thousand workers are fired or lose wages simply for trying to organize and join unions.
That needs to change. We should have tougher penalties to prevent employers from
firing or discriminating against workers involved in organizing efforts. Employers
should have to recognize a union if a majority of employees sign authorization cards
choosing the union to represent them. And federal mediation should be available to help
an employer and a new union reach agreement on a contract within a reasonable amount
of time.

Business groups may argue that a more unionized workforce will rob the U.S. economy
of flexibility and its competitive edge. But it’s precisely because of a more competitive
global environment that we can expect unionized workers to want to cooperate with
employers—so long as they are getting their fair share of higher productivity.

Just as government policies can boost workers’ wages without hurting the
competitiveness of U.S. firms, so can we strengthen their ability to retire with dignity.
We should start with a commitment to preserve Social Security’s essential character and
shore up its solvency. The problems with the Social Security trust fund are real but
manageable. In 1983, when facing a similar problem, Ronald Reagan and House
Speaker Tip O’Neill got together and shaped a bipartisan plan that stabilized the system
for the next sixty years. There’s no reason we can’t do the same today.

With respect to the private retirement system, we should acknowledge that defined-
benefit pension plans have been declining, but insist that companies fulfill any
outstanding promises to their workers and retirees. Bankruptcy laws should be amended
to move pension beneficiaries to the front of the creditor line so that companies can’t
just file for Chapter 11 to stiff workers. Moreover, new rules should force companies to
properly fund their pension funds, in part so taxpayers don’t end up footing the bill.

And if Americans are going to depend on defined-contribution plans like 401(k)s to
supplement Social Security, then the government should step in to make them more
broadly available to all Americans and more effective in encouraging savings. Former


Clinton economic adviser Gene Sperling has suggested the creation of a universal
401(k), in which the government would match contributions made into a new retirement
account by low-and moderate-income families. Other experts have suggested the simple
(and cost-free) step of having employers automatically enroll their employees in their
401(k) plans at the maximum allowable level; people could still choose to contribute
less than the maximum or not participate at all, but evidence shows that by changing the
default rule, employee participation rates go up dramatically. As a complement to Social
Security, we should take the best and most affordable of these ideas and begin moving
toward a beefed-up, universally available pension system that not only promotes
savings but gives all Americans a bigger stake in the fruits of globalization.

As vital as it may be to raise the wages of American workers and improve their
retirement security, perhaps our most pressing task is to fix our broken health-care
system. Unlike Social Security, the two main government-funded health-care
programs—Medicare and Medicaid—really are broken; without any changes, by 2050
these two entitlements, along with Social Security, could grow to consume as large a
share of our national economy as the entire federal budget does today. The addition of a
hugely expensive prescription drug benefit that provides limited coverage and does
nothing to control the cost of drugs has only made the problem worse. And the private
system has evolved into a patchwork of inefficient bureaucracies, endless paperwork,
overburdened providers, and dissatisfied patients.

In 1993, President Clinton took a stab at creating a system of universal coverage, but
was stymied. Since then, the public debate has been deadlocked, with some on the right
arguing for a strong dose of market discipline through Health Savings Accounts, others
on the left arguing for a single-payer national health-care plan similar to those that exist
in Europe and Canada, and experts across the political spectrum recommending a series
of sensible but incremental reforms to the existing system.

It’s time we broke this impasse by acknowledging a few simple truths.

Given the amount of money we spend on health care (more per capita than any other
nation), we should be able to provide basic coverage to every single American. But we
can’t sustain current rates of health-care inflation every year; we have to contain costs
for the entire system, including Medicare and Medicaid.

With Americans changing jobs more frequently, more likely to go through spells of
unemployment, and more likely to work part-time or to be self-employed, health
insurance can’t just run through employers anymore. It needs to be portable.

The market alone can’t solve our health-care woes—in part because the market has
proven incapable of creating large enough insurance pools to keep costs to individuals
affordable, in part because health care is not like other products or services (when your
child gets sick, you don’t go shopping for the best bargain).

And finally, whatever reforms we implement should provide strong incentives for
improved quality, prevention, and more efficient delivery of care.

With these principles in mind, let me offer just one example of what a serious health-
care reform plan might look like. We could start by having a nonpartisan group like the


National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM) determine what a basic,
high-quality health-care plan should look like and how much it should cost. In
designing this model plan, the IOM would examine which existing health-care
programs deliver the best care in the most cost-effective manner. In particular, the
model plan would emphasize coverage of primary care, prevention, catastrophic care,
and the management of chronic conditions like asthma and diabetes. Overall, 20 percent
of all patients account for 80 percent of the care, and if we can prevent diseases from
occurring or manage their effects through simple interventions like making sure patients
control their diets or take their medicines regularly, we can dramatically improve patient
outcomes and save the system a great deal of money.

Next, we would allow anyone to purchase this model health-care plan either through an
existing insurance pool like the one set up for federal employees, or through a series of
new pools set up in every state. Private insurers like Blue Cross Blue Shield and Aetna
would compete to provide coverage to participants in these pools, but whatever plan
they offered would have to meet the criteria for high quality and cost controls set forth
by IOM.

To further drive down costs, we would require that insurers and providers who
participate in Medicare, Medicaid, or the new health plans have electronic claims,
electronic records, and up-to-date patient error reporting systems—all of which would
dramatically cut down on administrative costs, and the number of medical errors and
adverse events (which in turn would reduce costly medical malpractice lawsuits). This
simple step alone could cut overall health-care costs by up to 10 percent, with some
experts pointing to even greater savings.

With the money we save through increased preventive care and lower administrative
and malpractice costs, we would provide a subsidy to low-income families who wanted
to purchase the model plan through their state pool, and immediately mandate coverage
for all uninsured children. If necessary, we could also help pay for these subsidies by
restructuring the tax break that employers use to provide health care to their employees:
They would continue to get a tax break for the plans typically offered to workers, but
we could examine a tax break for fancy, gold-plated executive health-care plans that fail
to provide any additional health benefits.

The point of this exercise is not to suggest that there’s an easy formula for fixing our
health-care system—there isn’t. Many details would have to be addressed before we
moved forward on a plan like the one outlined above; in particular, we would have to
make sure that the creation of a new state pool does not cause employers to drop the
health-care plans that they are already providing their employees. And, there may be
other more cost-effective and elegant ways to improve the health-care system.

The point is that if we commit ourselves to making sure everybody has decent health
care, there are ways to accomplish it without breaking the federal treasury or resorting
to rationing.

If we want Americans to accept the rigors of globalization, then we will need to make
that commitment. One night five years ago, Michelle and I were awakened by the sound
of our younger daughter, Sasha, crying in her room. Sasha was only three months old at
the time, so it wasn’t unusual for her to wake up in the middle of the night. But there


was something about the way she was crying, and her refusal to be comforted, that
concerned us. Eventually we called our pediatrician, who agreed to meet us at his office
at the crack of dawn. After examining her, he told us that she might have meningitis and
sent us immediately to the emergency room.

It turned out that Sasha did have meningitis, although a form that responded to
intravenous antibiotics. Had she not been diagnosed in time, she could have lost her
hearing or possibly even died. As it was, Michelle and I spent three days with our baby
in the hospital, watching nurses hold her down while a doctor performed a spinal tap,
listening to her scream, praying she didn’t take a turn for the worse.

Sasha is fine now, as healthy and happy as a five-year-old should be. But I still shudder
when I think of those three days; how my world narrowed to a single point, and how I
was not interested in anything or anybody outside the four walls of that hospital room—
not my work, not my schedule, not my future. And I am reminded that unlike Tim
Wheeler, the steelworker I met in Galesburg whose son needed a liver transplant, unlike
millions of Americans who’ve gone through a similar ordeal, I had a job and insurance
at the time.

Americans are willing to compete with the world. We work harder than the people of
any other wealthy nation. We are willing to tolerate more economic instability and are
willing to take more personal risks to get ahead. But we can only compete if our
government makes the investments that give us a fighting chance—and if we know that
our families have some net beneath which they cannot fall.

That’s a bargain with the American people worth making.



INVESTMENTS TO MAKE America more competitive, and a new American social
compact—if pursued in concert, these broad concepts point the way to a better future
for our children and grandchildren. But there’s one last piece to the puzzle, a lingering
question that presents itself in every single policy debate in Washington.

How do we pay for it?

At the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, we had an answer. For the first time in almost
thirty years, we enjoyed big budget surpluses and a rapidly declining national debt. In
fact, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan expressed concern that the debt might
get paid down too fast, thereby limiting the Reserve System’s ability to manage
monetary policy. Even after the dot-com bubble burst and the economy was forced to
absorb the shock of 9/11, we had the chance to make a down payment on sustained
economic growth and broader opportunity for all Americans.

But that’s not the path we chose. Instead, we were told by our President that we could
fight two wars, increase our military budget by 74 percent, protect the homeland, spend
more on education, initiate a new prescription drug plan for seniors, and initiate
successive rounds of massive tax cuts, all at the same time. We were told by our
congressional leaders that they could make up for lost revenue by cutting out


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.


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.



IF I HAVE any insight into this movement toward a deepening religious commitment,
perhaps it’s because it’s a road I have traveled.

I was not raised in a religious household. My maternal grandparents, who hailed from
Kansas, had been steeped in religion as children: My grandfather had been raised by
devout Baptist grandparents after his father had gone AWOL and his mother committed
suicide, while my grandmother’s parents—who occupied a slightly higher station in the
hierarchy of small-town, Great Depression society (her father worked for an oil refinery,
her mother was a schoolteacher)—were practicing Methodists.

But for perhaps the same reasons that my grandparents would end up leaving Kansas
and migrating to Hawaii, religious faith never really took root in their hearts. My
grandmother was always too rational and too stubborn to accept anything she couldn’t
see, feel, touch, or count. My grandfather, the dreamer in our family, possessed the sort
of restless soul that might have found refuge in religious belief had it not been for those
other characteristics—an innate rebelliousness, a complete inability to discipline his
appetites, and a broad tolerance of other people’s weaknesses—that precluded him from
getting too serious about anything.

This combination of traits—my grandmother’s flinty rationalism, my grandfather’s
joviality and incapacity to judge others or himself too strictly—got passed on to my
mother. Her own experiences as a bookish, sensitive child growing up in small towns in
Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories
of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones. Occasionally, for my
benefit, she would recall the sanctimonious preachers who would dismiss three-quarters
of the world’s people as ignorant heathens doomed to spend the afterlife in eternal


damnation—and who in the same breath would insist that the earth and the heavens had
been created in seven days, all geologic and astrophysical evidence to the contrary. She
remembered the respectable church ladies who were always so quick to shun those
unable to meet their standards of propriety, even as they desperately concealed their
own dirty little secrets; the church fathers who uttered racial epithets and chiseled their
workers out of any nickel that they could.

For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb
of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.

This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, a
working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-
rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on
the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or
Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the
Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient
Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings
required no sustained commitment on my part—no introspective exertion or self-
flagellation. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its
wellspring, just one of the many ways—and not necessarily the best way—that man
attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.

In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist that she
would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect, but with a
suitable detachment as well. Moreover, as a child I rarely came in contact with those
who might offer a substantially different view of faith. My father was almost entirely
absent from my childhood, having been divorced from my mother when I was two years
old; in any event, although my father had been raised a Muslim, by the time he met my
mother he was a confirmed atheist, thinking religion to be so much superstition, like the
mumbo-jumbo of witch doctors that he had witnessed in the Kenyan villages of his
youth.

When my mother remarried, it was to an Indonesian with an equally skeptical bent, a
man who saw religion as not particularly useful in the practical business of making
one’s way in the world, and who had grown up in a country that easily blended its
Islamic faith with remnants of Hinduism, Buddhism, and ancient animist traditions.
During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first
to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominantly Muslim school; in both
cases, my mother was less concerned with me learning the catechism or puzzling out the
meaning of the muezzin’s call to evening prayer than she was with whether I was
properly learning my multiplication tables.

And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most
spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known. She had an unswerving instinct for
kindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on that instinct, sometimes
to her detriment. Without the help of religious texts or outside authorities, she worked
mightily to instill in me the values that many Americans learn in Sunday school:
honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed gratification, and hard work. She raged at poverty
and injustice, and scorned those who were indifferent to both.


Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life and its
precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as devotional. During the
course of the day, she might come across a painting, read a line of poetry, or hear a
piece of music, and I would see tears well up in her eyes. Sometimes, as I was growing
up, she would wake me up in the middle of the night to have me gaze at a particularly
spectacular moon, or she would have me close my eyes as we walked together at
twilight to listen to the rustle of leaves. She loved to take children—any child—and sit
them in her lap and tickle them or play games with them or examine their hands, tracing
out the miracle of bone and tendon and skin and delighting at the truths to be found
there. She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer strangeness of life.

It is only in retrospect, of course, that I fully understand how deeply this spirit of hers
influenced me—how it sustained me despite the absence of a father in the house, how it
buoyed me through the rocky shoals of my adolescence, and how it invisibly guided the
path I would ultimately take. My fierce ambitions might have been fueled by my
father—by my knowledge of his achievements and failures, by my unspoken desire to
somehow earn his love, and by my resentments and anger toward him. But it was my
mother’s fundamental faith—in the goodness of people and in the ultimate value of this
brief life we’ve each been given—that channeled those ambitions. It was in search of
confirmation of her values that I studied political philosophy, looking for both a
language and systems of action that could help build community and make justice real.
And it was in search of some practical application of those values that I accepted work
after college as a community organizer for a group of churches in Chicago that were
trying to cope with joblessness, drugs, and hopelessness in their midst.

I have recorded in a previous book the ways in which my early work in Chicago helped
me grow into my manhood—how my work with the pastors and laypeople there
deepened my resolve to lead a public life, how they fortified my racial identity and
confirmed my belief in the capacity of ordinary people to do extraordinary things. But
my experiences in Chicago also forced me to confront a dilemma that my mother never
fully resolved in her own life: the fact that I had no community or shared traditions in
which to ground my most deeply held beliefs. The Christians with whom I worked
recognized themselves in me; they saw that I knew their Book and shared their values
and sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me remained removed, detached, an
observer among them. I came to realize that without a vessel for my beliefs, without an
unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at
some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also
alone in the same ways she was ultimately alone.

There are worse things than such freedom. My mother would live happily as a citizen of
the world, stitching together a community of friends wherever she found herself,
satisfying her need for meaning in her work and in her children. In such a life I, too,
might have contented myself had it not been for the particular attributes of the
historically black church, attributes that helped me shed some of my skepticism and
embrace the Christian faith.

For one thing, I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to
spur social change. Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole
person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual
salvation from collective salvation. It had to serve as the center of the community’s


political, economic, and social as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate way
the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and
principalities. In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a
comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in
the world. In the day-to-day work of the men and women I met in church each day, in
their ability to “make a way out of no way” and maintain hope and dignity in the direst
of circumstances, I could see the Word made manifest.

And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship, the grounding of faith in
struggle, that the historically black church offered me a second insight: that faith
doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts, or that you relinquish your hold on this world.
Long before it became fashionable among television evangelists, the typical black
sermon freely acknowledged that all Christians (including the pastors) could expect to
still experience the same greed, resentment, lust, and anger that everyone else
experienced. The gospel songs, the happy feet, and the tears and shouts all spoke of a
release, an acknowledgment, and finally a channeling of those emotions. In the black
community, the lines between sinner and saved were more fluid; the sins of those who
came to church were not so different from the sins of those who didn’t, and so were as
likely to be talked about with humor as with condemnation. You needed to come to
church precisely because you were of this world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner,
saved, you needed to embrace Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away—
because you were human and needed an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaks
and valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight.

It was because of these newfound understandings—that religious commitment did not
require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and
social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved—that I was
finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be
baptized. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not
magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I
felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to
discovering His truth.



DISCUSSIONS OF FAITH are rarely heavy-handed within the confines of the Senate.
No one is quizzed on his or her religious affiliation; I have rarely heard God’s name
invoked during debate on the floor. The Senate chaplain, Barry Black, is a wise and
worldly man, former chief of navy chaplains, an African American who grew up in one
of the toughest neighborhoods in Baltimore and carries out his limited duties—offering
the morning prayer, hosting voluntary Bible study sessions, providing spiritual
counseling to those who seek it—with a constant spirit of warmth and inclusiveness.
The Wednesday-morning prayer breakfast is entirely optional, bipartisan, and
ecumenical (Senator Norm Coleman, who is Jewish, is currently chief organizer on the
Republican side); those who choose to attend take turns selecting a passage from
Scripture and leading group discussion. Hearing the sincerity, openness, humility, and
good humor with which even the most overtly religious senators—men like Rick
Santorum, Sam Brownback, or Tom Coburn—share their personal faith journeys during
these breakfasts, one is tempted to assume that the impact of faith on politics is largely


salutary, a check on personal ambition, a ballast against the buffeting winds of today’s
headlines and political expediency.

Beyond the Senate’s genteel confines, though, any discussion of religion and its role in
politics can turn a bit less civil. Take my Republican opponent in 2004, Ambassador
Alan Keyes, who deployed a novel argument for attracting voters in the waning days of
the campaign.

“Christ would not vote for Barack Obama,” Mr. Keyes proclaimed, “because Barack
Obama has voted to behave in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ to have
behaved.”

This wasn’t the first time that Mr. Keyes had made such pronouncements. After my
original Republican opponent had been forced to withdraw in the wake of some
awkward disclosures from his divorce file, the Illinois Republican Party, unable to settle
on a local candidate, had decided to recruit Mr. Keyes for the task. The fact that Mr.
Keyes hailed from Maryland, had never lived in Illinois, had never won an election, and
was regarded by many in the national Republican Party as insufferable didn’t deter the
Illinois GOP leadership. One Republican colleague of mine in the state senate provided
me with a blunt explanation of their strategy: “We got our own Harvard-educated
conservative black guy to go up against the Harvard-educated liberal black guy. He may
not win, but at least he can knock that halo off your head.”

Mr. Keyes himself was not lacking in confidence. A Ph.D. from Harvard, a protégé of
Jeane Kirkpatrick, and U.S. ambassador to the UN Economic and Social Council under
Ronald Reagan, he had burst into the public eye first as a two-time candidate for a U.S.
Senate seat from Maryland and then as a two-time candidate for the GOP presidential
nomination. He had been clobbered in all four races, but those losses had done nothing
to diminish Mr. Keyes’s reputation in the eyes of his supporters; for them, electoral
failure seemed only to confirm his uncompromising devotion to conservative principles.

There was no doubt that the man could talk. At the drop of a hat Mr. Keyes could
deliver a grammatically flawless disquisition on virtually any topic. On the stump, he
could wind himself up into a fiery intensity, his body rocking, his brow running with
sweat, his fingers jabbing the air, his high-pitched voice trembling with emotion as he
called the faithful to do battle against the forces of evil.

Unfortunately for him, neither his intellect nor his eloquence could overcome certain
defects as a candidate. Unlike most politicians, for example, Mr. Keyes made no effort
to conceal what he clearly considered to be his moral and intellectual superiority. With
his erect bearing, almost theatrically formal manner, and a hooded gaze that made him
appear perpetually bored, he came off as a cross between a Pentecostal preacher and
William F. Buckley.

Moreover, that self-assuredness disabled in him the instincts for self-censorship that
allow most people to navigate the world without getting into constant fistfights. Mr.
Keyes said whatever popped into his mind, and with dogged logic would follow over a
cliff just about any idea that came to him. Already disadvantaged by a late start, a lack
of funds, and his status as a carpetbagger, he proceeded during the course of a mere
three months to offend just about everybody. He labeled all homosexuals—including


Dick Cheney’s daughter—“selfish hedonists,” and insisted that adoption by gay couples
inevitably resulted in incest. He called the Illinois press corps a tool of the “anti-
marriage, anti-life agenda.” He accused me of taking a “slaveholder’s position” in my
defense of abortion rights and called me a “hard-core, academic Marxist” for my
support of universal health care and other social programs—and then added for good
measure that because I was not the descendant of slaves I was not really African
American. At one point he even managed to alienate the conservative Republicans who
recruited him to Illinois by recommending—perhaps in a play for black votes—
reparations in the form of a complete abolition of the income tax for all blacks with
slave ancestry. (“This is a disaster!” sputtered one comment posted on the discussion
board of Illinois’s hard-right website, the Illinois Leader. “WHAT ABOUT THE
WHITE GUYS!!!”)

In other words, Alan Keyes was an ideal opponent; all I had to do was keep my mouth
shut and start planning my swearing-in ceremony. And yet, as the campaign progressed,
I found him getting under my skin in a way that few people ever have. When our paths
crossed during the campaign, I often had to suppress the rather uncharitable urge to
either taunt him or wring his neck. Once, when we bumped into each other at an Indian
Independence Day parade, I poked him in the chest while making a point, a bit of alpha-
male behavior that I hadn’t engaged in since high school and which an observant news
crew gamely captured; the moment was replayed in slow motion on TV that evening. In
the three debates that were held before the election, I was frequently tongue-tied,
irritable, and uncharacteristically tense—a fact that the public (having by that point
written Mr. Keyes off) largely missed, but one that caused no small bit of distress to
some of my supporters. “Why are you letting this guy give you fits?” they would ask
me. For them, Mr. Keyes was a kook, an extremist, his arguments not even worth
entertaining.

What they didn’t understand was that I could not help but take Mr. Keyes seriously. For
he claimed to speak for my religion—and although I might not like what came out of
his mouth, I had to admit that some of his views had many adherents within the
Christian church.

His argument went something like this: America was founded on the twin principles of
God-given liberty and Christian faith. Successive liberal administrations had hijacked
the federal government to serve a godless materialism and had thereby steadily chipped
away—through regulation, socialistic welfare programs, gun laws, compulsory
attendance at public schools, and the income tax (“the slave tax,” as Mr. Keyes called
it)—at individual liberty and traditional values. Liberal judges had further contributed to
this moral decay by perverting the First Amendment to mean the separation of church
and state, and by validating all sorts of aberrant behavior—particularly abortion and
homosexuality—that threatened to destroy the nuclear family. The answer to American
renewal, then, was simple: Restore religion generally—and Christianity in particular—
to its rightful place at the center of our public and private lives, align the law with
religious precepts, and drastically restrict the power of federal government to legislate
in areas prescribed neither by the Constitution nor by God’s commandments.

In other words, Alan Keyes presented the essential vision of the religious right in this
country, shorn of all caveat, compromise, or apology. Within its own terms, it was
entirely coherent, and provided Mr. Keyes with the certainty and fluency of an Old


Testament prophet. And while I found it simple enough to dispose of his constitutional
and policy arguments, his readings of Scripture put me on the defensive.

Mr. Obama says he’s a Christian, Mr. Keyes would say, and yet he supports a lifestyle
that the Bible calls an abomination.

Mr. Obama says he’s a Christian, but he supports the destruction of innocent and sacred
life.

What could I say? That a literal reading of the Bible was folly? That Mr. Keyes, a
Roman Catholic, should disregard the Pope’s teachings? Unwilling to go there, I
answered with the usual liberal response in such debates—that we live in a pluralistic
society, that I can’t impose my religious views on another, that I was running to be a
U.S. senator from Illinois and not the minister of Illinois. But even as I answered, I was
mindful of Mr. Keyes’s implicit accusation—that I remained steeped in doubt, that my
faith was adulterated, that I was not a true Christian.







IN A SENSE, my dilemma with Mr. Keyes mirrors the broader dilemma that liberalism
has faced in answering the religious right. Liberalism teaches us to be tolerant of other
people’s religious beliefs, so long as those beliefs don’t cause anyone harm or impinge
on another’s right to believe differently. To the extent that religious communities are
content to keep to themselves and faith is neatly confined as a matter of individual
conscience, such tolerance is not tested.

But religion is rarely practiced in isolation; organized religion, at least, is a very public
affair. The faithful may feel compelled by their religion to actively evangelize wherever
they can. They may feel that a secular state promotes values that directly offend their
beliefs. They may want the larger society to validate and reinforce their views.

And when the religiously motivated assert themselves politically to achieve these aims,
liberals get nervous. Those of us in public office may try to avoid the conversation
about religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that—
regardless of our personal beliefs—constitutional principles tie our hands on issues like
abortion or school prayer. (Catholic politicians of a certain generation seem particularly
cautious, perhaps because they came of age when large segments of America still
questioned whether John F. Kennedy would end up taking orders from the Pope.) Some
on the left (although not those in public office) go further, dismissing religion in the
public square as inherently irrational, intolerant, and therefore dangerous—and noting
that, with its emphasis on personal salvation and the policing of private morality,
religious talk has given conservatives cover to ignore questions of public morality, like
poverty or corporate malfeasance.

Such strategies of avoidance may work for progressives when the opponent is Alan
Keyes. But over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge


the power of faith in the lives of the American people, and so avoid joining a serious
debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.

To begin with, it’s bad politics. There are a whole lot of religious people in America,
including the majority of Democrats. When we abandon the field of religious
discourse—when we ignore the debate about what it means to be a good Christian or
Muslim or Jew; when we discuss religion only in the negative sense of where or how it
should not be practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our
obligations toward one another; when we shy away from religious venues and religious
broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome—others will fill the vacuum.
And those who do are likely to be those with the most insular views of faith, or who
cynically use religion to justify partisan ends.

More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religiosity
has often inhibited us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the
problem is rhetorical: Scrub language of all religious content and we forfeit the imagery
and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal
morality and social justice. Imagine Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address without
reference to “the judgments of the Lord,” or King’s “I Have a Dream” speech without
reference to “all of God’s children.” Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire
what had seemed impossible and move the nation to embrace a common destiny. Of
course organized religion doesn’t have a monopoly on virtue, and one not need be
religious to make moral claims or appeal to a common good. But we should not avoid
making such claims or appeals—or abandon any reference to our rich religious
traditions—in order to avoid giving offense.

Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just
rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting “preachy” may also lead us to discount the role
that values and culture play in addressing some of our most urgent social problems.

After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are
not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten-point plan. They are also
rooted in societal indifference and individual callousness—the desire among those at the
top of the social ladder to maintain their wealth and status whatever the cost, as well as
the despair and self-destructiveness among those at the bottom of the social ladder.

Solving these problems will require changes in government policy; it will also require
changes in hearts and minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our inner cities, and that
our leaders must say so in the face of the gun manufacturers’ lobby. But I also believe
that when a gangbanger shoots indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels
somebody disrespected him, we have a problem of morality. Not only do we need to
punish that man for his crime, but we need to acknowledge that there’s a hole in his
heart, one that government programs alone may not be able to repair. I believe in
vigorous enforcement of our nondiscrimination laws; I also believe that a
transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part of the
nation’s CEOs could bring quicker results than a battalion of lawyers. I think we should
put more of our tax dollars into educating poor girls and boys, and give them the
information about contraception that can prevent unwanted pregnancies, lower abortion
rates, and help ensure that every child is loved and cherished. But I also think faith can


fortify a young woman’s sense of self, a young man’s sense of responsibility, and the
sense of reverence all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.

I am not suggesting that every progressive suddenly latch on to religious terminology or
that we abandon the fight for institutional change in favor of “a thousand points of
light.” I recognize how often appeals to private virtue become excuses for inaction.
Moreover, nothing is more transparent than inauthentic expressions of faith—such as
the politician who shows up at a black church around election time and claps (off
rhythm) to the gospel choir or sprinkles in a few biblical citations to spice up a
thoroughly dry policy speech.

I am suggesting that if we progressives shed some of our own biases, we might
recognize the values that both religious and secular people share when it comes to the
moral and material direction of our country. We might recognize that the call to
sacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think in terms of “thou” and not
just “I,” resonates in religious congregations across the country. We need to take faith
seriously not simply to block the religious right but to engage all persons of faith in the
larger project of American renewal.

Some of this is already beginning to happen. Megachurch pastors like Rick Warren and
T. D. Jakes are wielding their enormous influence to confront AIDS, Third World debt
relief, and the genocide in Darfur. Self-described “progressive evangelicals” like Jim
Wallis and Tony Campolo are lifting up the biblical injunction to help the poor as a
means of mobilizing Christians against budget cuts to social programs and growing
inequality. And across the country, individual churches like my own are sponsoring
day-care programs, building senior centers, and helping ex-offenders reclaim their lives.

But to build on these still tentative partnerships between the religious and secular
worlds, more work will need to be done. The tensions and suspicions on each side of the
religious divide will have to be squarely addressed, and each side will need to accept
some ground rules for collaboration.

The first and most difficult step for some evangelical Christians is to acknowledge the
critical role that the establishment clause has played not only in the development of our
democracy but also in the robustness of our religious practice. Contrary to the claims of
many on the Christian right who rail against the separation of church and state, their
argument is not with a handful of liberal sixties judges. It is with the drafters of the Bill
of Rights and the forebears of today’s evangelical church.

Many of the leading lights of the Revolution, most notably Franklin and Jefferson, were
deists who—while believing in an Almighty God—questioned not only the dogmas of
the Christian church but the central tenets of Christianity itself (including Christ’s
divinity). Jefferson and Madison in particular argued for what Jefferson called a “wall
of separation” between church and state, as a means of protecting individual liberty in
religious belief and practice, guarding the state against sectarian strife, and defending
organized religion against the state’s encroachment or undue influence.

Of course, not all the Founding Fathers agreed; men like Patrick Henry and John Adams
forwarded a variety of proposals to use the arm of the state to promote religion. But
while it was Jefferson and Madison who pushed through the Virginia statute of religious


freedom that would become the model for the First Amendment’s religion clauses, it
wasn’t these students of the Enlightenment who proved to be the most effective
champions of a separation between church and state.

Rather, it was Baptists like Reverend John Leland and other evangelicals who provided
the popular support needed to get these provisions ratified. They did so because they
were outsiders; because their style of exuberant worship appealed to the lower classes;
because their evangelization of all comers—including slaves—threatened the
established order; because they were no respecters of rank and privilege; and because
they were consistently persecuted and disdained by the dominant Anglican Church in
the South and the Congregationalist orders of the North. Not only did they rightly fear
that any state-sponsored religion might encroach on their ability, as religious minorities,
to practice their faith; they also believed that religious vitality inevitably withers when
compelled or supported by the state. In the words of the Reverend Leland, “It is error
alone, that stands in need of government to support it; truth can and will do better
without…it.”

Jefferson and Leland’s formula for religious freedom worked. Not only has America
avoided the sorts of religious strife that continue to plague the globe, but religious
institutions have continued to thrive—a phenomenon that some observers attribute
directly to the absence of a state-sponsored church, and hence a premium on religious
experimentation and volunteerism. Moreover, given the increasing diversity of
America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever
we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a
Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.

But let’s even assume that we only had Christians within our borders. Whose
Christianity would we teach in the schools? James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s? Which
passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus,
which suggests that slavery is all right and eating shellfish is an abomination? How
about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or
should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount—a passage so radical that it’s doubtful
that our Defense Department would survive its application?

This brings us to a different point—the manner in which religious views should inform
public debate and guide elected officials. Surely, secularists are wrong when they ask
believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square; Frederick
Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther
King, Jr.—indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history—not only were
motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue their causes. To say
that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public-policy
debates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, much
of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously
motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It
requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I
am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the
practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God’s will and
expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to


explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths,
including those with no faith at all.

For those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do, such rules
of engagement may seem just one more example of the tyranny of the secular and
material worlds over the sacred and eternal. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no
choice. Almost by definition, faith and reason operate in different domains and involve
different paths to discerning truth. Reason—and science—involves the accumulation of
knowledge based on realities that we can all apprehend. Religion, by contrast, is based
on truths that are not provable through ordinary human understanding—the “belief in
things not seen.” When science teachers insist on keeping creationism or intelligent
design out of their classrooms, they are not asserting that scientific knowledge is
superior to religious insight. They are simply insisting that each path to knowledge
involves different rules and that those rules are not interchangeable.

Politics is hardly a science, and it too infrequently depends on reason. But in a
pluralistic democracy, the same distinctions apply. Politics, like science, depends on our
ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. Moreover,
politics (unlike science) involves compromise, the art of the possible. At some
fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It insists on the impossible.
If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of
the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be
sublime; to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

The story of Abraham and Isaac offers a simple but powerful example. According to the
Bible, Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his “only son, Isaac, whom you love,” as
a burnt offering. Without argument, Abraham takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him
to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded.

Of course, we know the happy ending—God sends down an angel to intercede at the
very last minute. Abraham has passed God’s test of devotion. He becomes a model of
fidelity to God, and his great faith is rewarded through future generations. And yet it is
fair to say that if any of us saw a twenty-first-century Abraham raising the knife on the
roof of his apartment building, we would call the police; we would wrestle him down;
even if we saw him lower the knife at the last minute, we would expect the Department
of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away and charge Abraham with child
abuse. We would do so because God doesn’t reveal Himself or His angels to all of us in
a single moment. We do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees,
true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those
things that are possible for all of us to know, understanding that a part of what we know
to be true—as individuals or communities of faith—will be true for us alone.

Finally, any reconciliation between faith and democratic pluralism requires some sense
of proportion. This is not entirely foreign to religious doctrine; even those who claim
the Bible’s inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, based on a sense that
some passages—the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ’s divinity—are
central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified
to accommodate modern life. The American people intuitively understand this, which is
why the majority of Catholics practice birth control and some of those opposed to gay
marriage nevertheless are opposed to a constitutional amendment banning it. Religious


leadership need not accept such wisdom in counseling their flocks, but they should
recognize this wisdom in their politics.

If a sense of proportion should guide Christian activism, then it must also guide those
who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in
public is a breach in the wall of separation; as the Supreme Court has properly
recognized, context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance
feel oppressed as a consequence of muttering the phrase “under God”; I didn’t.
Allowing the use of school property for meetings by voluntary student prayer groups
should not be a threat, any more than its use by the high school Republican Club should
threaten Democrats. And one can envision certain faith-based programs—targeting ex-
offenders or substance abusers—that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems
and hence merit carefully tailored support.



THESE BROAD PRINCIPLES for discussing faith within a democracy are not all-
inclusive. It would be helpful, for example, if in debates about matters touching on
religion—as in all of democratic discourse—we could resist the temptation to impute
bad faith to those who disagree with us. In judging the persuasiveness of various moral
claims, we should be on the lookout for inconsistency in how such claims are applied:
As a general rule, I am more prone to listen to those who are as outraged by the
indecency of homelessness as they are by the indecency of music videos. And we need
to recognize that sometimes our argument is less about what is right than about who
makes the final determination—whether we need the coercive arm of the state to
enforce our values, or whether the subject is one best left to individual conscience and
evolving norms.

Of course, even steadfast application of these principles won’t resolve every conflict.
The willingness of many who oppose abortion to make an exception for rape and incest
indicates a willingness to bend principle for the sake of practical considerations; the
willingness of even the most ardent prochoice advocates to accept some restrictions on
late-term abortion marks a recognition that a fetus is more than a body part and that
society has some interest in its development. Still, between those who believe that life
begins at conception and those who consider the fetus an extension of the woman’s
body until birth, a point is rapidly reached at which compromise is not possible. At that
point, the best we can do is ensure that persuasion rather than violence or intimidation
determines the political outcome—and that we refocus at least some of our energies on
reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies through education (including about
abstinence), contraception, adoption, or any other strategies that have broad support and
have been proven to work.

For many practicing Christians, the same inability to compromise may apply to gay
marriage. I find such a position troublesome, particularly in a society in which Christian
men and women have been known to engage in adultery or other violations of their faith
without civil penalty. All too often I have sat in a church and heard a pastor use gay
bashing as a cheap parlor trick—“It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” he will
shout, usually when the sermon is not going so well. I believe that American society can
choose to carve out a special place for the union of a man and a woman as the unit of
child rearing most common to every culture. I am not willing to have the state deny


American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights on such basic matters as
hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love are
of the same sex—nor am I willing to accept a reading of the Bible that considers an
obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the
Mount.

Perhaps I am sensitive on this issue because I have seen the pain my own carelessness
has caused. Before my election, in the middle of my debates with Mr. Keyes, I received
a phone message from one of my strongest supporters. She was a small-business owner,
a mother, and a thoughtful, generous person. She was also a lesbian who had lived in a
monogamous relationship with her partner for the last decade.

She knew when she decided to support me that I was opposed to same-sex marriage,
and she had heard me argue that, in the absence of any meaningful consensus, the
heightened focus on marriage was a distraction from other, attainable measures to
prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians. Her phone message in this instance
had been prompted by a radio interview she had heard in which I had referenced my
religious traditions in explaining my position on the issue. She told me that she had
been hurt by my remarks; she felt that by bringing religion into the equation, I was
suggesting that she, and others like her, were somehow bad people.

I felt bad, and told her so in a return call. As I spoke to her I was reminded that no
matter how much Christians who oppose homosexuality may claim that they hate the
sin but love the sinner, such a judgment inflicts pain on good people—people who are
made in the image of God, and who are often truer to Christ’s message than those who
condemn them. And I was reminded that it is my obligation, not only as an elected
official in a pluralistic society but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility
that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided, just as I cannot claim
infallibility in my support of abortion rights. I must admit that I may have been infected
with society’s prejudices and predilections and attributed them to God; that Jesus’ call
to love one another might demand a different conclusion; and that in years hence I may
be seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history. I don’t believe such doubts
make me a bad Christian. I believe they make me human, limited in my understandings
of God’s purpose and therefore prone to sin. When I read the Bible, I do so with the
belief that it is not a static text but the Living Word and that I must be continually open
to new revelations—whether they come from a lesbian friend or a doctor opposed to
abortion.