Non-pol Politicians Always Lose

Barack Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope” is well into its fourth month on the bestseller list, and even a professional sourpuss (not that I know any) can see why.“I am new enough on the national political scene,” he writes in the book’s prologue, “to serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”Never mind the mixed metaphor about striped people projecting on screens (a rare infelicity from such a graceful writer). The statement is the purest Obama, the kind of sentiment that people seldom get from a career politician: knowing, self- aware, candid, vivid in its expression, and — most amazing of all — true.“The Audacity of Hope,” in fact, can best be understood as an extended effort on the part of the first-term Illinois senator to keep that screen as blank as possible.He’s been so successful that already some of his would-be supporters are expressing frustration at their inability to pin Mr. Obama down on their favorite causes. The journalist Joe Klein wrote in Time magazine that he “counted no fewer than fifty instances of excruciatingly judicious on-the-one-hand-on-the-otherhandedness in ‘The Audacity of Hope.'”Mr. Klein has a point: There are times when reading Mr. Obama’s book that you wonder whether he’s capable of making a statement unadorned by caveats, hedges, qualifications, and rhetorical switchbacks. He devotes a chapter to “values,” for example. He’s strongly in favor of them, with reservations.It turns out he’s all for “self-reliance and independence,” unless these qualities “transform into selfishness and license.”He’s totally pro-patriotism, except when it “slides into jingoism.” And religious faith? He’s all for that, too — just don’t let it “calcify into self-righteousness.”Unsatisfying as this rhetorical oatmeal can be, it’s actually intrinsic to Mr. Obama’s diagnosis of the current condition of American politics.“As a country,” he says, “we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit.” More empathy can resolve our political stalemates, he believes, on issues ranging from affirmative action to globalization.“Black leaders need to appreciate the legitimate fears that may cause some whites to resist affirmative action. Union representatives can’t afford not to understand the competitive pressures their employers may be under. …“That’s what empathy does,” he writes. “We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our limited vision.”Sounds good. But then what? Let’s say we have all shed our un-empathic blinders. We are completely non-complacent. Where to now?Unfortunately, Mr. Obama doesn’t bother to point the way with any real specificity. He’s appalled at the budget deficit, for example, and he’s determined to fix it. But beyond that — well, let him explain the details.“We know what to do,” he writes. “We can cut and consolidate nonessential programs. We can rein in spending on health care costs. We can eliminate tax credits that have outlived their usefulness and close loopholes that let corporations get away with paying no taxes.”The book is filled with passages that follow the same pattern: belaboring the obvious on the assumption that no one has ever dared speak such bromides before, and then concluding the discussion with a rear-guard blast at those cynical politicians who “refuse to make the tough choices.”Rather than make his own tough choices, the 45-year-old Democrat prefers to float on a high level of abstraction. This, indeed, is how he is able to appeal to all segments of his party as well as large numbers of independents and even many conservatives and Republicans.He presents himself as the politician who will somehow transcend politics as it is and, as he says, create a “different kind of politics” that “reflects our lives as they are actually lived.” Details to follow.The non-political politician has a long pedigree in American history. The non-pol politician always feeds off the misapprehension that the real problem with self-government is politics — either politics as it’s currently practiced or politics per se.In 2000, Bill Bradley, a former senator, Rhodes Scholar, and basketball star, tried to claim the mantle of the non-pol politician by declaring, Obama-like, that “our politics is broken.”“Let America be the dream it used to be,” Mr. Bradley added poetically, if not helpfully.Before him, Ross Perot, billionaire businessman from Texas, announced that the problems of governance could be solved easily enough, but only if politics were dispensed with altogether. We just needed to “lift up the hood,” he said, consult the “country’s best minds,” and “get to work.”Of course, Mr. Obama has advantages over both Messrs. Bradley and Perot. His standing as the first plausible black presidential candidate brings with it vast amounts of public good will. He’s smarter than Mr. Bradley and a better writer to boot. He’s more articulate than Mr. Perot and gives off none of the Texan’s unsettling vibrations of eccentricity and worse.Still, history’s verdict about non-pol politicians is hard to ignore. They may indeed offer to “restore us to our best selves” and “give us back our government,” and they may try to raise us to heights undreamed of with their call for a new kind of politics.But they always lose.Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.

Non-pol Politicians Always Lose

Non-pol Politicians Always Lose

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