Let’s review what is wrong:
- An endless war, fatally mismanaged, is siphoning money from vastly more deserving pursuits.
- Underfunded education.
- A gas crisis.
- A mortgage crisis.
- An economy that is reeling.
- Shamefully lowered ethical standards.
- A world that hates us.
Look for a second only at the economic side of that picture: In the last seven years the economy has shed more than 2 million jobs. To put that in perspective: in the United States in the last seven years, out of every sixty-seven adults who want to bother holding a job, one of them lost theirs. Basically one person every two blocks or so, across the country. Even worse, we’re losing better-paying jobs for worse-paying ones: the average job gained over the past three years pays just over $35k per year, while the average job lost paid $43k. This is the “Wal-Martization” of America: at this rate, we’re all greeters sooner or later. Don’t listen to anyone telling you the economy is okay. It’s not. It’s pretty bad, truth be told.
This is the short list of problems. I’m embarrassed. Now we face an election that could begin to change all that.
I think it should be noted, to begin with, that this election is perhaps not our greatest weapon for change. The United States, on its best day, is what it always was: a nation irreverent toward power in government, and mistrustful of anyone who attempts to maintain that power. Our founding document was about revolution, and created a government that is supposed to derive its powers from the consent of the governed.
This nation has effected change, not by slow degrees and not by marginal differences at the top, but quickly and bottom-up. Always bottom-up, until those in Washington and elsewhere catch on and join us. David Sirota’s new book, “The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington,” chronicles just how deeply disaffected Americans are right now, and how close we are to a genuine populist uprising of the kind we saw with the slave rebellions, with the railroad uprising of 1877, or (we should note on almost exactly the 40th anniversary of his assassination) with the highly successful populist movement of Dr. Martin Luther King. We are fed up with the rule of greed, with the way that ordinary Americans have been systematically disenfranchised and sold out by an obviously corrupt system. Change occurs in this country because people rise up, not because politicians build monuments to their power.
Don’t fall for this faux bipartisanship that is all the rage, either. We’ll build more roads that way, and make Washington a pleasanter place, but heads will not be turning toward solving your problems and mine.
Still. There is this election thing. And what I’m asking myself is, “which of these people can spawn (and will perhaps allow) a movement for change?” I think it’s a given that change is necessary, so I have to ask that, don’t I?
Senator McCain seems an honorable sort and all, and one has to respect his service to the country. But he’s not about changing much of anything. And I’ve gotten increasingly bothered by the smirk that’s creeping onto his face with respect to Senator Obama. He clearly thinks that you have to have been a military man to understand anything at all about Iraq, and he’s wrong. That smirk has a different genesis, but it’s the same kind of arrogance that we’ve seen from the Bush administration, and it frightens me.
Senator Clinton is selling the least attractive brew of all: competence. As though our problems can be solved if we’re just studious enough. But leadership and management are second cousins, not twins. To be sure, this administration has shown us what can happen if a President’s management skills are poor. But we will not find our way out of the litany of problems above through mere competence.
Senator Obama has been excoriated by his challengers primarily for two things: 1) He is not experienced enough; and 2) He’s all talk. Let’s look at those:
Experience: Senator Obama served many years in the Illinois legislature before winning a U.S. Senate seat nearly seven years ago. Many people discount those years in Illinois in looking at the senator’s experience, as though only experience in Washington can matter. This is analogous to me saying to a potential employee: “I know that you worked for twenty years in tech for smaller companies in Seattle before moving to the Bay Area to put in your seven years with Cisco. I’d feel better about your experience if it had been with nothing but big companies in Silicon Valley.” That’s a little nuts, isn’t it? The variety of experience matters, and experience outside of Washington may in fact matter a lot.
Time Magazine pointed out, by the way, the President with the most similar experience to Senator Obama’s: Abraham Lincoln.
All talk: I’m not afraid of this criticism at all. We need talk right now. As I noted above, the kind of change we need will happen when people at a grassroots level are inspired. I am inspired by Senator Obama. I want things to change, and he makes me believe that maybe that can happen.
So keep turning a phrase, Senator. Let me see that you’re smart by how you speak to me. I want that in a President. Make me feel that you’re hearing what the country is saying. Lord knows, I want that, too.
Maybe in November I can be a proud American again.
