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Click here to return to Bill Wood's Blog Pages.Seismic ShockIt was, after all, only a few months ago that the junior senator from New York was, at least for party insiders, the anointed Democratic heir to her presidential husband. A self-sealing logic of inevitability had enveloped Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign that went something like this: Because Mrs. Clinton leads in Democratic fundraising and inside party support, it is inevitable that she will win her party’s nomination. Into this legacy of entitlement walked the junior Senator from Illinois. Then a funny thing happened. Democrats of various stripes started to listen to what the man from Illinois was saying and how he was saying it. And they did more: they sent him money and they pledged their support. Even the estimable Bill Clinton, who remains hugely charismatic among most Democrats, couldn’t staunch the hemorrhaging of support for his wife’s campaign. In what seemed like hours, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign of inevitability had morphed into the principled fight of the underdog. But the new pugilistic metaphor of the Clinton campaign is woefully inadequate because it fails to tap into the seminal energy that Obama has harnessed in his stark departure from the political playbook honed by the likes of James Carville and Karl Rove. Obama has rediscovered and reanimated the politics of hope. A belief in the future is intrinsic to the American experience. It is deeply rooted in our national psyche; it has been refreshed and renewed with each succeeding immigrant wave which has enriched our national culture and character over the last 400 years. It has historically, at least through the last century, usually fallen to the Democrats to embrace that vision of what we are yet to be, of what we can still become. It is an idyllic vision, sometimes insufficiently tethered to hard reality. It is the vision that extended universal suffrage to women, it is the vision that made Social Security a reality, it is the vision that spawned the Marshall Plan, it is the vision that animated the civil rights movement, it is the vision that has awakened us to the growing destruction of our natural environment, it is the vision that made America the first country to put a man on the moon. It is captured in the words of Bernard Shaw which Senator Ted Kennedy paraphrased in the funeral eulogy for his slain brother in 1968: “Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not.” Obama’s campaign has re-ignited the politics of hope in a way that has not happened since Bobby Kennedy’s tragic campaign of almost 40 years ago. Unlike so many of the candidates in recent years, Democrat and Republican alike, the man from Illinois is calling on us, and not just Democrats, but all of us, to imagine and believe in an America that is more just and more compassionate and more unified. He is preaching the message of America itself. Much of the current thinking in politics was forged by our fortieth President, Ronald Reagan. His message emphasized the individual over society. He deeply reinforced a distrust in the power of government to do good. The essence of his message was essentially that the greatest social good would be achieved by each individual maximizing his own personal, and in particular, economic well being. Each person was freed from society to pursue his own ends. The essence of this philosophy is based upon a simple and simultaneously radical premise: Greed is good for society. Innumerable changes to law and policy have been wrought over the last quarter century which have insured that the rich and privileged have continued to profit from this philosophical view, usually at the expense of the poor and disadvantaged. This was especially true during the period of Republican hegemony that characterized the first six years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Ironically, Reagan and his successors— indeed none more so than our current president— have cloaked this ideology of greed with the mantle of Christianity, often to the exclusion of other differently situated believers whose faith is less rooted in a certainty of their own righteousness or assured redemption. If the age of Reagan is finally coming to a close in the disastrous rubble of the second Bush presidency, it is time for Barack Obama to take the next step and to make this declaration one of the cornerstones of his candidacy: Greed is bad. This is not to say that we should lose sight of the more nuanced argument that greed remains a necessary evil for efficient markets to function. Nor should we forget that without capitalism and efficient -- albeit, regulated -- markets, it would be impossible to create the wealth necessary to pursue the Democratic goals of social and economic justice. These are facts Democrats sometimes stumble over. But they are also part of a more nuanced reality. The absolute moral standard remains in tact: Greed is bad. Accepting that greed is bad would be a tremendous paradigm shift. But isn’t it about time? |
