Baoke's Place

I’ve been gone for a while. I’m going to work to fix that on a number of levels. First, I plan to:

• Return to producing more creative output, both for larger projects and simply for this blog.
• Blog about media that interests me. I might review a television show (largely at random), a book, an album or an artist, etc. People making things is sort of my jam, so I’d like to explore that.
• Write a series of posts about public policy. Thrilling, I know! The goal of these posts won’t be to talk about politics (largely), but about the policies we’re entrusting politicians to create and steward. Each individual post will focus on a different area to create a comprehensive and well-sourced argument for what I believe in and why. Hopefully, they’ll live on to be useful repositories of information for readers to leverage in their own future thinking and discussions on these subjects. See? The longer you think about it, the sexier it gets, right?

For now, I wanted to call attention to the video above. It’s newly reelected President Obama addressing his main campaign office in the Second City. It’s a brief look at who the President really is, and I think it has something to say about how his personal beliefs inform his governing philosophies.

Aside from showing a deeply humane man expressing some beautiful sentiments, this video is further evidence that President Obama takes the long view when it comes to not just his administration, but the American Project. He speaks convincingly about his genuine belief that the next generation can build on what his has accomplished. Underlying his words I sense a conviction that more than anything, he simply has to ensure that this place is still recognizable as America, to ensure that American stories (upward mobility, inspiring moments of disparate cultures coming together in solidarity, etc.) are still probable, and the next generation will take care of the rest. It would be possible to spin that view as callow, I suppose, except that it’s obvious that the President isn’t letting himself off the hook, but simply investing great faith in the future.

Here’s where I think this dovetails with policy: Like a lot of liberals, I have occasionally felt like the President is willing to give away a great deal, too much, in return for getting very little from his cynical, obstructionist political opponents. At worst, we have felt that he may be willing to mortgage the future to secure the present. The main motivation behind that potent liberal angst is the idea, well sourced, that conservatives are deeply committed to a version of America that’s anathema to most progressives (and proudly so). Furthermore, much of the last two decades has felt like a slow retreat in the face of a motivated, driven force. And so, a President willing to compromise - where compromise can be credibly defined as losing a dollar to gain a quarter - feels like another step back down the hill of our inexorable decline. This video gives us a glimpse of the motivations behind the man who is our standard bearer, and shows us that the President may share a different view than many of us.

I don’t believe the President believes that tactical revisions - or even tactical retreats - are automatically imbued with a sense of historical inevitability. I have no doubt that this man shares bedrock liberal principals. He has been too consistent, to obviously human, for too long for prevarication on that score. And where liberals have been motivated by fear of incipient failure for so long, I now fully see a man truly motivated by hope for the future.

Even buoyed by Tuesday’s victories, the next couple of years will bring some disappointments. Some compromise and sacrifice will be required. Whether it should have come to this is another debate. We can and should still hold our political representatives to the fire, and drive them to serve the peoples’ interests, and not the will of the moneyed few. But entitlement reform is going to happen. If we have our druthers, we can stop these assholes from raising the qualifying age for Social Security. But I’ve been won over to the President’s view: Decline isn’t inevitable. Concessions aren’t failure, and giving up something now doesn’t mean giving up something forever. Demographics really are changing, and the concessions and realignments that have happened within the Democratic party over the last two decades, along with the ever increasing ideological rigidity of the Republican party, have led to sixty percent of voters under thirty seeing the liberal wing of their country as what it is (or has, at the least, become): The calm, kind, and competent steward of the country’s safety net. The modern Democratic party genuinely isn’t politically ideological in the way we used to refer to these things, but has instead begun to pair a social egalitarianism with a basic economic competency (Why are we in favor of a strong safety net? Because it leads to better outcomes for people. Why do we prefer drug treatment to incarceration? Because it leads to less recidivism. Why do we want to invest in a strong public education system? Because it’s investing in our future intellectual and economic capital. And on and on.) that the Republican’s fervor simply won’t allow them to perform. Younger voters see that, and despite many people’s claims to the contrary, we’re not going anywhere.

So we’ll end up giving up some things over the next few years. We’ll also entrench universal health care, and we’ll bring down spending (over time, the debt does need to be addressed, even if it isn’t critical right now), and we’ll work to settle some of these Entitlement questions, possibly in the way that Clinton dealt with Welfare: Not in a way that’s ultimately best, perhaps, but in a way that takes the issue off the table for decades while retaining the bulk of the program. And as time goes on, an ever-smarter and more informed electorate will take the place of some of these dried up relics, and we’ll hand the baton off to them, and they’ll build on what we’ve left them. The President is right: It will get better.

Well, maybe except for climate change. We could be pretty screwed there.

9 November 2012 ·

• Tags
• Hope
• Politics
• Policy