The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [11]
A government that truly represents these Americans—that truly serves these Americans—will require a different kind of politics. That politics will need to reflect our lives as they are actually lived. It won’t be prepackaged, ready to pull off the shelf. It will have to be constructed from the best of our traditions and will have to account for the darker aspects of our past. We will need to understand just how we got to this place, this land of warring factions and tribal hatreds. And we will need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break.
ONE OF THE first things I noticed upon my arrival in Washington was the relative cordiality among the Senate’s older members: the unfailing courtesy that governed every interaction between John Warner and Robert Byrd, or the genuine bond of friendship between Republican Ted Stevens and Democrat Daniel Inouye. It is commonly said that these men represent the last of a dying breed, men who not only love the Senate but who embody a less sharply partisan brand of politics. And in fact it is one of the few things that conservative and liberal commentators agree on, this idea of a time before the fall, a golden age in Washington when, regardless of which party was in power, civility reigned and government worked.
At a reception one evening, I started a conversation with an old Washington hand who had served in and around the Capitol for close to fifty years. I asked him what he thought accounted for the difference in atmosphere between then and now.
“It’s generational,” he told me without hesitation. “Back then, almost everybody with any power in Washington had served in World War II. We might’ve fought like cats and dogs on issues. A lot of us came from different backgrounds, different neighborhoods, different political philosophies. But with the war, we all had something in common. That shared experience developed a certain trust and respect. It helped to work through our differences and get things done.”
As I listened to the old man reminisce, about Dwight Eisenhower and Sam Rayburn, Dean Acheson and Everett Dirksen, it was hard not to get swept up in the hazy portrait he painted, of a time before twenty-four-hour news cycles and nonstop fund-raising, a time of serious men doing serious work. I had to remind myself that his fondness for this bygone era involved a certain selective memory: He had airbrushed out of the picture the images of the Southern Caucus denouncing proposed civil rights legislation from the floor of the Senate; the insidious power of McCarthyism; the numbing poverty that Bobby Kennedy would help highlight before his death; the absence of women and minorities in the halls of power.
I realized, too, that a set of unique circumstances had underwritten the stability of the governing consensus of which he had been a part: not just the shared experiences of the war, but also the near unanimity forged by the Cold War and the Soviet threat, and perhaps more important, the unrivaled dominance of the American economy during the fifties and sixties, as Europe and Japan dug themselves out of the postwar rubble.
Still, there’s no denying that American politics in the post–World War II years was far less ideological—and the meaning of party affiliation far more amorphous—than it is today. The Democratic coalition that controlled Congress through most of those years was an amalgam of Northern liberals like Hubert Humphrey, conservative Southern Democrats like James Eastland, and whatever loyalists