Race to the Bottom

The year 2010, the end of the first decade of this new century, may very well go down in American history as the year the varying political constituencies tried to see who could reach bottom first. It was not the incalculable amounts of money spent or the seemingly interminable campaigning, which were painful enough. It was not the polarizing rhetoric or the negative attacks politicians hurled at one another or even the persistent commitment to ridiculing one’s political opponent. It was, in the end, the fact that America’s politicians and their spin doctors completely disregarded the intelligence of the American electorate and the never-ending claims of anger driven by personal attacks that sullied this year’s political season.

We have been told by pundits, again and again how frustrated and angry we are, so instead of responding to that frustration and anger, politicians chose to stoke the fire, fueling the fears that are directly attributable to the current jobless rate, and in doing so, offered few solutions. I think I finally understand Mario Cuomo when he said that politicians campaign with poetry and govern with prose.

This of course is not the sole fault of the politicians. Something is very wrong when candidates are judged not by policy initiatives and creative ideas designed to resolve the frightening economic, social and international challenges, but instead are assessed by how effectively they perform on TV and who has the best sound bite.

It is of course critical for politicians to be skilled in reaching out to the American public so as to generate interest and support for their respective campaigns, but somehow we have sunk to the depths of indecency when our leaders invoke hatred, racism, sexism, fear of anyone different and what seems even more shameful is that we seem to encourage them in their pursuit of “take no prisoners” politics.

We all suffer when even before the votes are counted, the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate declares that it is his Party’s agenda between now and 2012 to make sure that Obama is a “one-term President.” I can understand that Senator McConnell of Kentucky wants a Republican to occupy the White House in 2012, but shouldn’t he be more committed to helping to govern in a way that will result in millions of Americans returning to the workplace? Shouldn’t he be more preoccupied with completing the drawdown in Iraq and ending the horrific war in Afghanistan? Shouldn’t he be more concerned with America’s crumbling infrastructure and failing public education system? Maybe it is just me, but I am more frightened by the words of Senator Jim DeMint, Republican from South Carolina who just months before the final vote on healthcare reform declared that he wanted the vote to be the President’s “Waterloo” thereby denying healthcare coverage for 30 million Americans than I am of the cost of providing access to healthcare for those Americans. Why is it right to spend billions on fighting two wars on the other side of the world, but it is wrong to help 30 million Americans right here have access to healthcare?

President Obama came into office immediately taking on the critical challenges of a failing economy, rising unemployment, and a desperately dysfunctional healthcare system, all within the first eighteen months of his new administration. Overly ambitious? Foolish? A formula for a mid-term election rout? Perhaps all of those things. The rise of the Tea Party was fueled in part by a small but raging opposition to the bank bailouts and the Troubled Assets Recovery Program (TARP) and let’s not forget the derisively put “Obamacare.” It is no small irony that the bailouts and TARP were on President Bush’s watch, something we seem to have forgotten due to some kind of national memory loss. Blamed for an anemic stimulus and unemployment at 10%, Democrats took what President Obama himself called a “shellacking” in this year’s mid-term election. Just two years after the President’s historic election, one of my favorite news magazines, The Economist, blared on its cover immediately following the mid-terms a picture of a posse: “The Republicans Ride In.”

Fighting between the left and the right will never be over. I don’t mean just the cable show battles, but the struggle between those who advocate government to play a major role in bettering society and those who consider such collective action as threats to individual liberties and freedoms; between those who are wary of unbridled and powerful economic interests and those who ally themselves with the forces of unrestrained capitalism, between those who champion tolerance and diversity and those who will fight to the death to protect and advance their version of American fundamentalism.

And yet, it is not always so black or white, us versus them or good against bad (take your pick on what is good or bad). Believe it or not, there are issues and even moments in American history that have transcended and defied the usual divides. Unless we somehow find our way and locate common ground we can all stand firmly on, compromises notwithstanding, then politics in American will devolve into one long, hideous war and on Election Day 2012, it could become even more hideous and last a lot longer.