Assorted – the Presidency

I’m having some trouble writing professionally, which is always a good sign that it’s time for a blog break to observe my natural register.

When I was filling my ballot out the other night, I connected the arrow next to Barack Obama’s name. This was the end of a long and agonizing process, and I was one among many that swelled with pride when it was announced that Obama would be our next president. I thought his acceptance speech was excellent and suitably inspirational. Like others, I thought John McCain’s concession was graceful and finally – after a very long stretch since just before Labor Day – I heard the *real* John McCain.

Part of what made my decision to vote for Obama so difficult is the fact that I really like McCain. He has an excellent sense of humor, and as a guest on the Daily Show is one of the few regular guests who Jon Stewart takes to task but doesn’t belittle. I always appreciated McCain as someone who spoke his mind and took the alternative route, symbolized by the McCain-Feingold act. I know McCain-Feingold isn’t perfect, but as a promise of what John McCain was about, I think it stands pretty clearly. I only occasionally bought into the rousing rhetoric and – what I perceived as – total hype surrounding Obama, and while I was moved at the content of his speech during the DNC, I was not sold. The disjunction was still unresolved – even after the convention I saw it as a clear either/or choice, with little guidance to decide one way or another.

When McCain announced his running mate, it seemed to me so out of step with the McCain I had observed and grown very much to like. At that moment, John McCain stopped being a maverick and began being someone who bent to the party demands. I feel like my faith and some of my values were hijacked by faux folksiness and a power-play to get the girls and the God types. Even worse, what might have been an interesting and exciting campaign became a cannon for slinging the shit. The phrases “reform” and “maverick” seem hollow when the way the McCain campaign was prosecuted looked quite a lot like business-as-usual.

What frustrates me to no end is that the John McCain of the 2000 campaign, the McCain we like in our house could never win in a Presidential race. This sad fact was part of the long road to my voting the way I did.

It’s not that I don’t think Obama isn’t capable – in fact, there are several things he said through the course of the campaign that resonate pretty deeply with my own points of view. I agree with him that the abortion question isn’t one that can – or should – be settled by our continued arguing from entrenched positions. I don’t understand why his view that we ought to work to reduce the number of and need for abortion is so outrageous. This seems like a necessary position if the goal of our government is problem-solving. I also agree that our present energy crisis is one that must be solved by innovation and not necessarily drilling, especially if that innovation benefits Americans by way of job creation and economic growth in unusual centers.

Whether Barack Obama can deliver on the promises he’s made may end up being one of the greatest gambles made in American politics. I willingly went in with him, though, and I must say he’s inspired me to recover my inner policy wonk, dormant since college.

Oh dear.

So I’m going to write about politics here, and I won’t make a habit of it. Until recently I’ve occupied a corner of the fashionable apathetic tent. I do want to comment, though on what I find to be puzzling, and that’s all this vitriol directed at John McCain.

It’s baffling to me that McCain, whose recent political career contains instances of *gasp!* working with democrats, can’t be trusted precisely on those grounds. This is crazy talk. One of the things that has moved me to stand outside of the apathetic tent is the possibility that there will be a candidate on the ballot in November who is thinking in terms of progress, and not entirely ideology. Politics in this country has to be pragmatic to a degree, and that’s the lesson of the last sixteen years. Dynastic politics comes with divisive philosophical commitments, cronyism, and other skull-and-bones BS. That thinking has gotten us nowhere – people are still poor, our schools are still suffering, kids can’t get the health care they need because costs too much (!), our soldiers can’t get the care they need when returning from war, we’re still arguing about abortion instead of dealing with the issues at the root of the problem, and so on, and so on.

Here’s the thing. No Joe American wins when ideology is driving political choices, either by the administration or party in power or by the factions of people in this country who are similarly motivated. It seems like it’s time to start solving problems – from what I can tell, John McCain and Barack Obama (or “Oback Arama” as one reader of this blog mistakenly mentioned one night) are the only candidates who have the sense and credibility to make progress. And it’s high time politics in America focuses on some pragmatic mix of philosophy and progress.