No Shades of Grey

Election rhetoric consistently forces the same thought upon me: why does everyone seem to be targeting the obvious villain? With so many journalists, commentators, interest groups, and legislators all vying for national attention, how come none of them seem to provide a different tale of American political failures to set themselves apart? It’s like we’re standing in the mass-market paperback aisle of a grocery store staring at Dean Koontz novels--all the same story with different covers--when Jonathan Franzen is just around the corner and no one is bothering to look.

Take the right-wing push against “election fraud.” In a New York Times profile of conservative voter registration watchdog groups like True the Vote, activists continually point to the ‘Democrats’ as the ones organizing massive fraud campaigns. Ignoring the fact that the claim has been repeatedly proven baseless, it’s still startling to me that these activists never think to blame particular organizations or local bodies: it’s always the big bad Democrats and that pesky Obama. The Glenn Beck fervor attacking George Soros has even fallen out of the spotlight now, yet even that campaign had to find an arch-villain to target. (And it must be said, when Glenn Beck is the most creative and subtle in his criticisms, we have run into a gigantic problem.)

But of course the Democrats have their own version. It was all too easy for George Bush to become the sole focal point of criticism as the bumbling, evil war criminal that ran America into the ground--never mind those little details like Bill Clinton’s gifts to neo-conservatives. And now that Daily Kos has taken on the Fox News theory of journalism, the response to Mitt Romney has ceased painting him as a stiff, successful executive who took advantage of an unfortunately lax regulatory culture and has begun the effort to turn him into a hardened criminal. Recent speculation that Mitt Romney “should be in a federal prison” shows, whether the claims have any grounds or not, that we, as the electorate, have a psychological need for villains that outshines any subtlety in understanding social, political, or historical developments.

The issues that can’t be so easily pared down into black and white are then ignored. Given Romney’s critique of Obama as an apologist for American greatness, and Obama’s ever-hawkish actions in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the entire debate over our use of drone strikes has become too complicated for public discussion, as James Joyner ably argued in an article for The New Republic. Without a plot structure that fits our expected story arc, neither we nor our representatives know what to do.

To be honest, the problem is more infuriating from the Democrats. Republican ideals have always centered around individualism, the power of a person’s ingenuity, and so on. By nature such a rhetoric plays to discrete points as the cause of great change--it’s a theory that boils the Industrial Revolution down to a list of inventors. But the Democrats are (supposedly) the party of systemic issues. As Obama said, “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive,” right? What is that but a recognition of the nature of social systems--a nature that relies not on individual villains, but a complex organization that creates issues which can’t be boiled down to one person and an evil deed? And yet the Democrats still fall back on the good vs. evil rhetoric of those awful Republicans willfully ruining the country.

If we as a nation cannot understand ourselves in more complex terms than this, we’ve lost the thread in a big way. Even those who wish to criticize American drone strikes and other issues ignored by the major parties do so in terms of evil American imperialism--still one singular villain. Everywhere this structure reigns--especially in the fringe groups who merely lump the “Two Party System” together as the cause. We don’t need a new villain--we need to recognize the fact that there may not be a villain. Our systemic problems are just that: systemic. They exist beyond individual wrongs and personal motivations. It’s time we admit some ambivalences, and it’s time we realize that the story of American politics is something worthy of serious literature, not pulp.

In Defense of Obama's Convention Address

I wasn’t in Charlotte last Thursday. I can’t comment on the crowd’s supposedly dulled response to Obama’s convention address. But I can say that I was moved as I watched the live stream in my kitchen. I can say that my reaction wasn’t sedated--in fact, I was more excited by this speech than I was at any time during the 2008 campaign. Yes, I was one of those doe-eyed collegiate voters who believed in the kind of Change the Republican Party has tried to mock Obama for, and I chose to cast a ballot for Ralph Nader to avoid the disappointment of another party-line president. But on Thursday, President Obama gave voice to an important development in voters like myself, a development the political commenters overlooked in their less-than-stellar reviews of the speech.

Contrary to most pundits’ opinions, the speech wasn’t flat or boring or unenthused--it was pointed toward a new need in people like me. In Obama’s words: “we're getting back to basics and doing what America's always done best.”

The political lives of voters like myself have been determined by the kind of lofty rhetoric always known to be more about image than policy: family values and American patriotism from the right, a naïve version of “we care about the little guys” and bipartisanship for the Democrats, and a notion of “true democracy” found in the most ambitious of the Occupy movement’s chants. Obama’s speech was the evolution of that rhetoric, tying it down into concrete, tangible goods. We’ve had fervor and ideals, but now we want real, substantial change in laws and policies.

Many will claim here that even the best received convention speech is still nothing but a speech to win an election, not an attempt to govern. Politico rightly points out important positions that were missing from Obama’s speech, deflating somewhat the idea that Obama is revealing any dedication to concrete change in the lives of Americans. This is, in fact, just an updated version of the same criticism Obama has long received with different shading from both the right and the far-left (those Nader voters like me): he is more image and orator than man dedicated to social justice.

In that sense, perhaps the convention address merely signals a more shrewd version of Obama the campaigner who has found a way to tap into the very segments he couldn’t coax in 2008 to shore up his base and ride the wave to reelection. The Democrats would then have found an answer to Karl Rove’s politicking and nothing more.

But in either case--whether Obama has truly become a hardened politician set on crafting groundbreaking legislation for the good of the nation or simply found a new framing for his campaign ads--this speech plays an important role in transforming the grounds of the election. Discussions will now focus on changing voters’ experiences--easing unemployment, bearing some of the financial burden for struggling families, avoiding healthcare woes for the elderly. Romney has already taken the cue, telling Meet the Press that he would keep Obamacare’s mandates on pre-existing conditions and the ability for young people to stay on their parents’ insurance plans.

Bill Clinton’s presence in Charlotte only increases the importance of Obama’s new stated direction. White House senior adviser David Plouffe stated that the Obama campaign viewed the Convention as unified package, rather than discrete speeches. In that light, Clinton’s remarkable detailing of facts and figures (with high marks for veracity in comparison) not only focused on what has actually been done by the President and his opponents, but it relied on the charisma of a known politicker and a man both respected and decried for his willingness to deal in Washington.

As such, the Right cannot claim that Obama is merely an orator--in reaching out to Clinton (and around him in that already infamous hug), Obama showed a commitment to governing in a way he hasn’t before. Taken as a whole, the convention disclosed Obama’s willingness to politick if it will take the basic steps necessary to ensure the programs needed by so many Americans. Obama’s speech was the encapsulation of that aim; it was a speech that seemed modest only because it showed that his sights shifted to attainable, tangible goals.

But that is no modest task for a speech. It was the clearing of the political land, an attempt to wipe clean the distortion of existing rhetoric to focus on policies. And though I--and voters like me--will worry that this Obama will cave to Republican pressures, will become a new Clinton and pass a new NAFTA, will be shown to be be nothing more than a clever new iteration of political machinations, the speech still effectively spoke to the segments of the population that want to believe that our options are greater than a disappointing Occupy movement, that “[y]es, our path is harder, but it leads to a better place.” If it is a lie, it is a resounding lie; and if not, it is precisely what I want and what we need.