The Grass is Always More Constitutional on the Minority Side

I was walking in Jackson Hole this past summer, and as I came down the trail I passed by a pair of healthy middle-aged ladies, hiking buddies, who were discussing some recent political development.  The only definite phrase I remember catching was along the lines of, "so it's not actually Obama's fault", or perhaps it was "so Obama's actually doing a really good job on [blank]".  Even though I was soon out of earshot, I feel it would not be a misrepresentation to say that this was part of a larger apologetic defense of our current President - using apologetic here in the more formal sense.  Her companion seemed sympathetic, so I imagine that the discourse was probably more affirmative than plaintive.

The moment must seem ordinary to most folks - I imagine that thousands of such conversations are occurring all over the country, particularly among Democrats who are preparing to rally around President Obama this November.  In conversations like these, supporters step back from the imperfections of a human presidency and remind themselves of what has gone right under the current executive's leadership.  Faithful Democratic supporters need to remind themselves that whatever the shortcomings of the President, real or imagined, he is infinitely preferable to an alternative from across the political aisle - that when he errs, he errs perhaps only in magnitude, and not in direction.  Yes, it is a very ordinary moment - but, despite the everyday quality of it, it struck me as a revelation.

The content of that revelation was simple.  I realized, for the first time, that these conversations happened among Democrats.  You see, I had come of age politically around the time of the Bush re-election campaign, and I had been surrounded by similar conversations among Republicans.  The economy was struggling, yes, but it showed signs of turning around.  Even if it was struggling, it was more the fault of 9/11 than of the President.  The Iraq war seemed to be going poorly, true, but it also seemed unwise to swap out a commander in chief in the middle of an unresolved conflict.  George might have invented a few words here and there, but he got the heart of the message right even if he muddled the phrasing.  And, simple as I was, I thought that these kinds of apologetics were somehow uniquely Republican.  On the other side of the aisle, I could imagine the uncompromising Democrats laughing at these attempts to powder out the blemishes of our chosen favorite.  Wherever my friends and family added a "but", I could see them mercilessly shredding the rest of the sentence.  "Yes, the economy has struggled, but-" "But nothing!  It's struggled!  It's Bush's fault!  Throw him out!"  Or something like that.

But of course, once your own fellow is in the driver's seat, you realize he's human, and that he has to work with an often-gridlocked congress, and that whatever he might have promised you in his election speeches, he can't do any more than his best - and sometimes it seems he doesn't even do that.  So now it is the Democrat's turn to say "Yes, unemployment is high, but it's stopped growing recently and is even starting to shrink a little," and "Yes, Afghanistan's a mess, but we'll get out of it soon," and "Yes, the health-care reform is a compromise, but it's certainly better than what we had before."  And I'm certain that most of these are reasonable, well-founded observations.  I'm certain that they have as much merit as the ones from the Republican side in 2004 - maybe more.  But my revelation wasn't that the arguments are strong or weak - it's that they are there at all.  Growing up in the deeply conservative land of Utah, I often wondered if perhaps the Republicans lived only by feeding themselves justifications, and that Democrats were folks who bravely abandoned compromise to live on the side of true ideals.  Since there are on average no Democrats elected to public office in Utah, it was hard to find a counter-example to those stereotypes.  Utah Democrats are unfortunate in that they are almost completely disenfranchised - to win as a Democrat in Utah means overcoming the fact that about a third of the electorate is probably going to ignore the campaign and vote straight Republican (an exaggeration, I hope, but that's the feeling you sometimes get).  But Utah Democrats are fortunate in that, as the defeated-but-nevertheless-voting minority, they get to look at all the ugliness of state politics and say "we told you so!" with palpable superiority and ironclad hindsight.  So I just assumed that we picked Republicans because we were used to it, then apologized for them in the light of Democratic evangelism, holding onto them more out of habit than out of principle.

But now it's the Republicans turn to cut off the end of sentences: "Food stamps are at record distribution levels, but-" "But nothing! Throw the bums out!"  And after I'd observed that little incident, I suddenly became aware of a whole bunch of new examples of how the knife cuts both ways.  A few of them follow:

The Supreme Court: I always assumed that disrespect for the supreme court, and suspicion of its unelected justices laying down sweeping edicts on the borders of the law, was the territory of conservatives only.  More than thirty years later, a lot of conservatives are still mad about Roe v. Wade, and by extension Griswold v. Connecticut.  But, thanks to my new-found hobby of watching the Colbert report, I've found out that Democrats hate the Supreme Court too, for things like Citizens United!  I've actually heard the words "five unelected Justices" from a liberal source now, a characterization of the court that I thought came only from deep in the conservative camp.  Turns out that, yes, the Constitution is a living document, and it can live in ways that upset both sides of the political divide.

Civil Liberties: I assumed that it was a uniquely Republican flaw to value safety so much that you would sacrifice sacred civil rights on the altar of the Patriot Act.  But even though the Republicans are still staunchly on the side of giving the terrorists our freedoms to keep them from taking our lives, I've found out from the quirky Ron Paul campaign that even our former constitutional-law-professor President will happily sign noxious little bills like the National Defense Authorization Act into law.  This one goes beyond the Patriot Act - which is saying something - to allow the military to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial and without charges.  With vision like that from both sides of the aisle, I'm sure the war on terrorism will be over in a few months.  And our Attorney General just explained recently how a President can kill American citizens without trial as long as the President happens to be a nice, reasonable chap like our current fearless leader.  One Barack is easily worth a dozen jurors, wouldn't you agree?

Fighting Other People's Wars: In his second presidential debate against Al Gore back in 2000, George Bush said, "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building".  He then proceeded to try and build at least two after 9/11 changed his mind.  Of course, the Democrats' record here is spotless - unless you count Libya.  Whoops.  A vastly different order of magnitude, but the same basic thesis.

Raising the National Debt: President Bush set records with the sheer number of dollars we raised the debt by under his term.  But our current President, despite a campaign promise to cut the deficit in half ... well, you know the rest.

Now, I hope I'm not coming off as overly critical here.  I'm not trying to say that Obama is the Democratic reincarnation of George Bush - far from it.   What I'm trying to express is the realization - shocking to me in its simplicity - that no politicians are perfect, and that no party exactly matches what I personally believe is morally right; and the further realization that party platforms and party candidates are always compromises - that people are always more or less dissatisfied with the final result.  The difference between voting for an incumbent and voting for a challenger is not the difference between being completely content with what your incumbent's done or being blindly confident that the challenger will do all he promises to do; the difference is simply whether you think you'll be less disappointed with what you think the challenger can actually do than you are with what the incumbent's actually done, or vice versa.  Certainly not the stirring anthem that moves people to political fervor, but, I think, true nonetheless.  Compromise is sometimes a cynical and depressing thing, but I don't know how democracy can work without it, and so I'm grateful to it.  And it's humbling, and a little liberating, to know that both sides are human enough to need it.  As Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time". And I agree.