Respond to Political Attacks by Staying on Message

I'm writing this while watching Mark Warner's keynote. This line struck me as true: "This race is all about the future. That's why we must elect Barack Obama as our next president. Because the race for the future will be won when old partisanship gives way to new ideas. When we put solutions over stalemates, and when hope replaces fear."

Everyone has theories about why Obama hasn't pulled ahead in the polls. The question that I raised earlier, which still seems relevant, is whether Obama's "new politics" can survive in the world of "old politics," where we decidedly reside. Machiavelli said that you can't achieve a world "as it might be" until you succeed in the world "as it is" and one is reminded of this watching McCain's sleazy campaign, and noting that it's working. Obama once again seems stuck hoping for a future politics that hasn't come yet, deciding either to weather the personal attacks or undercut his own message of transcendence by responding. Democratic are calling for him to take the gloves off.

How does a call for a more civil politics fit in the world as it is? This is not just a question of political image; it goes to the heart of competing philosophies on the nature of politics. Hillary, on the one hand, ran her campaign on the premise that we will always be divided. She said that we needed a knife fighter.

Obama said that he didn't look at things that way. He said that the terms we have used to discuss our politics, the cultural divisions that we have been relying on since the 1960s -- the divisions that Nixon used to create a southern Republican coalition -- have outlasted their usefulness. He said that our old categories have lead us to the point of impasse and that we need a new politics to deal with a new and dangerous world.

Writing with the only authority I have, which is as a representative of a class of eighteen year old Americans who came to age intellectually during the eight years George Bush's president, it is clear to me that the nature of our politics is a direct symptom of the nature of a worldview that developed in the 1960s and came to a head with the racial gambits of Karl Rove and the neoconservatism of Dick Cheney. The governance and the politics are the same; when Obama says "change" he means not just from an the economics and foreign policies that have failed us, but also change from the destructive reductionism of our political demarcations. The fact that the two are bundled together and must be overcome at once is because the historical moment that we are at is real. We have a forty-seven year-old Obama and a seventy-two year-old McCain to illustrate that.

Every time Obama is smeared his campaign must make it clear that McCain's attacks are part of the great choice of this election. I'm not a "message person" but today even my prose is ringing with a patriotic zeal, and as I see it, here's what they might say.

The choice our country has is simple. We can continue what we are doing, continue to have a politics smaller than our problems, continue on the path that we are on at the risk of running headlong into disaster, or we can change.

The history of America shows that we have never been afraid or unwilling to stand up and fight for change. We have never been afraid or unwilling to measure ourselves against our own ideals. American history is a process. It is a process of creating a "more perfect union." It is a series of moments of standing up and looking at our future deciding that yes, we as a country can do better.

Now is one of those moments.

What we are doing is simply unsustainable. We are depleting our economic and political resources too rapidly. We are too insouciant towards the violations of our constitution and rule of law, the torturing of soldiers and the consolidation of executive power. We are failing too many Americans. Abroad, the world is shifting rapidly, China and Russia are re-emerging, and extra-national terrorist pose an undeminished (exacerbated?) threat. We continue to do nothing about an oil dependence which promises to siphen our wealth, fund our enemies and destroy the world.

One thing that what we have learned in the past eight years is that the old solutions are insufficient. The old free market economics, the old cold war dogmatism, the old political tricks -- these cannot solve the new problems presented to us at the turn of the century. America can do better. Obama, by virtue of his age, his temperament, his multiculturalism, his intelligence, is a product of this new era and the one fit to lead us there. McCain -- who is volatile, mawkish and reductionist, dangerously aggressive; who would be the oldest president in history; who, in an electronic information economy doesn't know how to use the internet -- typifies the limitations of old principles and outworn notions. His worldview -- his belief in a great existential struggle between Evil and Good -- is befitting of World War II, rather than a globalized twenty-first century when the Iranian economy might soon look more like ours than the German.

Every time McCain attacks Obama it is an opportunity to respond at the heart of the matter. This is the choice we face: more of the same, or a change -- change not just from the Republicans and the Bush Administration, but change from the culture that gave birth to a politics this small, the cultural divisions that no longer fit us and that we were always to limber for, the bifurcating of the world into good and evil when it was always more complex, the cowboy unilateralism so unfit for a globalized world, the total, blustering incompetence propped up and legitimized by this one's ideology or that one's morality -- a change not just from old policies, but from the entire cultural and intellectual milieu that has lead us to the catastrophe of the Bush Administration in the first place.