The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [30]
I OFTEN WONDER what makes it so difficult for politicians to talk about values in ways that don’t appear calculated or phony. Partly, I think, it’s because those of us in public life have become so scripted, and the gestures that candidates use to signify their values have become so standardized (a stop at a black church, the hunting trip, the visit to a NASCAR track, the reading in the kindergarten classroom) that it becomes harder and harder for the public to distinguish between honest sentiment and political stagecraft.
Then there’s the fact that the practice of modern politics itself seems to be value-free. Politics (and political commentary) not only allows but often rewards behavior that we would normally think of as scandalous: fabricating stories, distorting the obvious meaning of what other people say, insulting or generally questioning their motives, poking through their personal affairs in search of damaging information.
During my general election campaign for the U.S. Senate, for example, my Republican opponent assigned a young man to track all my public appearances with a handheld camera. This has become fairly routine operating procedure in many campaigns, but whether because the young man was overzealous or whether he had been instructed to try to provoke me, his tracking came to resemble stalking. From morning to night, he followed me everywhere, usually from a distance of no more than five or ten feet. He would film me riding down elevators. He would film me coming out of the restroom. He would film me on my cell phone, talking to my wife and children.
At first, I tried reasoning with him. I stopped to ask him his name, told him that I understood he had a job to do, and suggested that he keep enough of a distance to allow me to have a conversation without him listening in. In the face of my entreaties, he remained largely mute, other than to say his name was Justin. I suggested that he call his boss and find out whether this was in fact what the campaign intended for him to do. He told me that I was free to call myself and gave me the number. After two or three days of this, I decided I’d had enough. With Justin fast on my heels, I strolled into the press office of the state capitol building and asked some of the reporters who were having lunch to gather round.
“Hey, guys,” I said, “I want to introduce you to Justin. Justin here’s been assigned by the Ryan campaign to stalk me wherever I go.”
As I explained the situation, Justin stood there, continuing to film. The reporters turned to him and started peppering him with questions.
“You follow him into the bathroom?”
“Are you this close to him all the time?”
Soon several news crews arrived with their cameras to film Justin filming me. Like a prisoner of war, Justin kept repeating his name, his rank, and the telephone number of his candidate’s campaign headquarters. By six o’clock, the story of Justin was on most local broadcasts. The story ended up blanketing the state for a week—cartoons, editorials, and sports radio chatter. After several days of defiance, my opponent succumbed to the pressure, asked Justin to back up a few feet, and issued an apology. Still, the damage to his campaign was done. People might not have understood our contrasting views on Medicare or Middle East diplomacy. But they knew that my opponent’s campaign had violated a value—civil behavior—that they considered important.
The gap between what we deem appropriate behavior in everyday life and what it takes to win a campaign is just one of the ways in which a politician’s values are tested. In few other professions are you required, each and every day, to weigh so many competing claims—between different sets of constituents, between the interests of your state and the interests of the nation, between party loyalty and your own sense of independence, between the value of service and obligations to your family. There is a constant danger, in the cacophony of voices, that a politician loses his moral bearings and finds himself entirely steered by the winds of public