Thoughts and a Video for a Rainy Sunday

I’d just read what commenter Richard Locicero wrote in the previous comment section about “A psychologically wounded country running on resentment…” I think that’s true, at least in part. Certainly the part about the deep, painful psychological wounds that are affecting the citizens of our nation, red and blue, right and left, wrought by eight years of secrecy, self-serving excess, divisiveness and, sometimes it has seemed, willful damage done, Or as the LA Times wrote of the failed Bush administration this morning when it endorsed Obama, “its blustering adventurism, its alienating stance toward other countries and its cavalier disregard for sacred American values such as individual liberty and due process of law.”

Then right after reading Richard’s post, and this morning’s paper, I went through my email and found another note from my Saratoga Springs friend Sally who enclosed in it a link the YouTube video you see below. Make of the juxtaposition what you will.

And while we’re on the subject of disenchantment, it is worth reading the cover article by Michael Oreskes, the editor of the International Herald Tribune, that appears in today’s Week in Review section of the New York Times. Oreskes writes persuasively about the mood that has overtaken the country, a mood that transcends partisanship and party.

“Across the political spectrum Americans say they feel that something is wrong. For many years, poll takers have been asking Americans the standard question of whether they think the country is going in the right or wrong direction. The numbers this winter are about as bad as they have ever been. Nearly 7 in 10 of those surveyed say the country is on the wrong track. Indeed, says the poll taker Peter D. Hart, the country has gone through Vietnam, Watergate and impeachment without a period of sustained negativity that equals this….

[SNIP]
These are the winds of disenchantment that have been lifting Senators Obama and McCain with their promise of a different kind of politics. But a groundswell for change, even a soaring promise of change, does not by itself produce change. The candidates still must triumph in the very political system they are criticizing.

“The real split, it seems to me,” said the historian and Thomas Dewey biographer Richard Norton Smith, “is between those Americans, a majority in my opinion, who at least say they want to see politicians trying to work across the aisle and the political system as it has actually evolved, with gerrymandered districts and talk radio and much of the media coverage reinforcing the tyranny of the base.”

Yet as Mr. Oreskes points out, a strategy that attempts to transcend partisanship is not at all what everyone wants, and many question if it can even work.

Indeed, you could look at Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Romney as the realists. They confront politics as it is, rather than engaging in flights of fancy about what it might be. They aren’t just pandering to the base because they need core party voters to win the nomination. They are fighting for principles that separate their side from the other.

There is a strong cadre around Mrs. Clinton who believe that this is the moment for Democrats to do what the Republicans did so well for nearly 30 years: seize the high ground of ideas, offer strong proposals and push them through. In other words, the goal, as Sidney Blumenthal, a Clinton adviser, put it in a recent interview with The New Yorker, is not transcending partisanship but “fulfilling it.”

That’s certainly what former United Nations Ambassador, John Bolton said when he appeared last March on the Daily Show, he of the non-matching hair and mustache, The president ought to have people philosophically attuned to his way of thinking.” And that anyone in say, the State Department or other areas of government who in any way challenged that way of thinking, should be tossed out. “And if you’ve got a problem with that, I would suggest you’ve got a problem with the democratic theory.”

Well, I’ve got a problem with that kind of Zero sum, With-Us-Against-Us approach, which is in fact the antithesis of democratic theory. I believe most Americans do to too. It’s not a Winner-Take-All game. The average person knows that. Unly pundits and politicians do not.