OBAMA AND McCAIN IDEAL ARE NOT OF THIS WORLD

THE JOURNAL OF WINSTON SMITH ^ | February 14, 2008 | Winston Smith

[thomasjefferson1215]

A few days ago, in searching for the full version of the famous Calvin Coolidge quote that "the business of America is business," I came across another line from the same Coolidge speech that is not as well known, but probably should be—especially in light of the result of this year's presidential primaries.

Coolidge's statement about business, by the way, is very good and provides a nice answer to John McCain's jibe, in one of the Republican debates, that he was motivated by patriotism instead of profit. As Coolidge points out,

"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing, and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life."

These certainly are the moving impulses of our lives, and nothing could be more American—that is, nothing better embodies the quintessentially American view that the purpose of the individual's life is the "pursuit of happiness."

But the speech is not entirely a defense of business, profit, and "prospering in the world." Coolidge goes on to balance his praise of business by appealing to a vague, semi-altruistic "idealism." In the process of making this muddled argument, he makes a very important observation. Echoing his line about business, he says,

"The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction."

That is a pretty good summation of the meaning of the Republican and Democratic primaries.

I don't think I'm too far ahead of the curve when I predict that Obama will win the Democratic nomination. The immediate reason is that we're in the middle of a month in which a series of newspaper headlines will all start with the phrase "Obama wins," as Obama wins one caucus and primary contest after another and builds up a bigger and bigger lead in the delegate count. Hillary Clinton is hoping that, after a month of nothing but headlines proclaiming her losses, she can rely on a "firewall" of established support in Ohio or Texas, states that vote in early March. Maybe so—but then again, that was Rudy Giuliani's strategy for Florida.

Voters only turn out for a candidate who is losing if they regard his campaign as a kind of moral crusade, so that his poor performance only intensifies their determination to rally behind their man. (Hence the wave of religious conservatives across the South who are continuing to vote for Mike Huckabee, even though he has already been mathematically eliminated from the Republican nomination battle.) But Hillary Clinton has never been able to inspire that kind of fanatical support.

This has been a bad political season for predictions, but it looks like one that I made a few weeks ago is holding up:

"Obama…stands for the kind of youthful "Camelot" idealism that the Democrats associate with their idealized memories of John F. Kennedy—a kind of idealism the Democrats haven't been able to sincerely muster up in the four decades after Kennedy's death…."

"Combine [Caroline Kennedy's endorsement] with Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Obama, which…was presented in a way that made it a pointed and public rebuke of the Clintons' cynicism."

This means that the Democrats are now beginning to see their party's primary as a test of their own moral self-image: jaded pragmatists for the Clintons, youthful idealists for Obama. On those terms, how many Democrats—hoping to recapture their party's youthful glory days—will be able to resist Obama?

In the case of McCain, the idealism comes in a more grizzled, almost curmudgeonly form. McCain does not present himself as a bright-eyed youthful idealist, but as something more appropriate for the right: he projects the image of a man of character driven by a personal sense of honor, the kind of man who stoically endured torture rather than betray his country by cooperating with his North Vietnamese captors.

No other candidate could match this appeal. Huckabee could do it—though only for the most committed members of the party's religious wing. But Mitt Romney could never overcome the voters' mistrust of his motives, their sense that many of his conservative views were shallow conversions made for political convenience—in short, that he was a more wholesome and benevolent version of Hillary Clinton.

The lesson is that American voters always look for some variant of idealism in their presidential candidates and have always been repulsed by any element of cynical calculation or realpolitik.

But note also that there is an ironic circularity to the phrase "the chief ideal of Americans is idealism." It's like the infatuated adolescent who is "in love with love," as they say. The actual person who is the object of that love doesn't really matter—just as most voters could probably not tell you much about the actual ideals of the idealists they just voted for in the primaries.

The American love of idealism as such captures something that is noble but frustrating about the American character. It's like President Eisenhower's famous declaration that American government depends on a strong religious belief, "and I don't care what it is." We love an idealist—but we're not always too concerned about exactly what ideal he is pursuing.

To be fair, each of the major parties' leading candidates has some legitimate basis for his claim of being an idealist. McCain has been persistent and passionate in proclaiming his refusal to surrender to Islamic terrorism in Iraq. And Obama's genuine claim to idealism is the fact that he is running his campaign as if race were irrelevant. This is inspiring to many people of both parties who hope that we can finally live up to Martin Luther King's declaration that all men should be judged "not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character."

But if we try to look beyond the dazzling colorblindness of the Obama candidacy and actually penetrate into the content of the candidate's character, what we find is more disturbing. His fresh-faced "idealism" turns out to be a dedication to some very disreputable old ideas. There is his close affiliation with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, an "Afrocentric" preacher who makes the Reverend Al Sharpton look like a moderate. And there are the Obama volunteers caught hanging a flag of Communist thug Che Guevara in their campaign office.

This last is particularly ominous, because behind the general airiness of Obama's vague rhetoric about "change," there lurks the whole far-left agenda of socialism. But how is it possible to be an idealist while admiring a system that has inflicted oppression and poverty across the world, from Che's Cuba to Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, a nation that ought to be prospering from an oil boom but whose citizens are now reduced to waiting in lines for food?

Something similar applies to John McCain's sense of personal honor. I have no doubt that this sense is sincere—but that is not enough. A president also needs ideas and principles that define what the proper, and therefore honorable, tasks of government are. And what makes a lot of us on the right so uncomfortable about McCain is that he does not seem to have a sense of the moral limits on government.

Take his infamous advocacy of campaign finance controls that prevent independent advocacy groups from commenting on candidates within 60 days of an election—a violation of the freedom of political speech when that freedom is most needed. The motive for these regulations is precisely McCain's misguided sense of honor. After he was almost dragged into the Keating Five influence-peddling scandal, McCain concluded that it was the need to seek out campaign contributions that besmirched the honor of the nation's legislators—so he set out to save them from that temptation by driving filthy lucre out of politics.

Of course, that attempt failed, because the real source of corruption—and the real reason for most Americans' distrust of their political leaders—is the vast power of government, which creates an endless scramble for special favors. But McCain has been a backer of big government in a number of crucial areas.

Consider the vast morass of corruption under the carbon dioxide emissions controls that McCain has backed in the name of fighting global warming. There is already a pitched battle in Washington, DC, over whether such rules will be written to benefit automobile companies, or nuclear power plant builders, or whether enough subsidies will be offered to compensate the operators of coal power plants, and so on. The government is about to create whole new classes of winners and losers under a regime of global warming regulations, and lobbyists have already started the unseemly haggling to determine who will be at the table and who will be on the menu when this legislation is written.

Of course, in his campaign speeches lately, McCain has been saying a great deal about "freedom," but he has not explained how that rhetoric is consistent with limiting political speech during elections, or opposing tax cuts, or capping a whole nation's use of its cheapest, most abundant fuels. A sense of personal honor will not answer those questions—unless one chooses to recognize that it is a point of honor to resolve these contradictions and integrate one's political views into a consistent ideology.

But perhaps the two candidates are genuine idealists, in another sense of the word. In philosophy, the term "idealism" is used to describe the many variation of the philosophy of Plato, who taught that ideas are not derived from and do not apply to the real world, but only pertain to a realm of abstractions off in another dimension.

That's what we're getting in this race: the detachment of ideals from this world. The Democratic front-runner is offering to make socialism noble, while the Republican front-runner is offering to make big government honorable. Their "idealism" consists in offering impossible aspirations divorced from the evidence of the real world.

[thomasjefferson1215]

The conclusion hits the nail on the head:

"That's what we're getting in this race: the detachment of ideals from this world. The Democratic front-runner is offering to make socialism noble, while the Republican front-runner is offering to make big government honorable. Their "idealism" consists in offering impossible aspirations divorced from the evidence of the real world."