Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

Trust

A useful way to look at politicians is as bags of action and rhetoric that approximate some set of ideals. I’m talking about the big-box ideals, certainly — conservatism, liberalism, etc — but also the more specific ones, like commitment to transparency in government, or freedom of the press, or a reformed penal system. And then, once you’ve got them boiled down to their policy essence, judge them on how closely they hew to your ideals.

That’s kind of obvious, I suppose, but it’s remarkable how hard it is to do — for me, anyway, and I suspect for others as well. The only way you can possibly explain the eight-year purgatorium of the Bush presidency is as a triumph of personality over substance. This seems counterintuitive, given the vacuous what-me-worry personality we’re talking about here, but it’s inescapably true that, in 2000, a certain segment of the population saw in that amiable nullity a vessel for their own beliefs. I think that was Bush’s secret. Before he morphed into a monstrous purveyor of torture and low-grade fascism, he seemed to be, above all else, a slightly dimwitted outline of a man, a color-by-numbers figure who you could make your own. It’s not so much that politicians of this stripe flip-flop, or deceive, or morph to suit whatever constituency they’re trying to hoodwink today¹. They don’t have to. We do it for them.

Barrack Obama is a different phenomenon. Clearly a much smarter, more capable, more thoughtful man, he achieved his brand of mass appeal not by emptying himself of content but by filling himself with it. If you’d spent the last eight years suffering under the reign of zombie right wing ideology, then he represented, explicitly, everything you were longing for: some form of universal healthcare; a rejection of the pervasive culture of secrecy; an end to torture; an exit from Iraq; a recognition of, and an appreciation for, the rights of labor. You didn’t have to invent things for Obama to stand for: he came prepackaged with then, a Messiah of Particulars, with the ability to both convince and inspire.

But, really, all of this is just the beginning. I’d like to say that, in the last election, I just took a steely-eyed look at the agendas of both candidates, calibrated them against the evidence of their past deeds, cross-referenced everything with the matrix of my own convictions, and came to a purely empirical decision. But that would be bullshit. Not complete bullshit, because I clearly do line up better with Obama than McCain, ideologically, and if both candidates were reduced to a couple of anonymous policy papers, I’d certainly pick his. But, if I’m being honest, a lot of what I responded to was the man himself. I liked him, and, more importantly, I trusted him.

And really, there’s nothing wrong with that. The sad thing about being human is that it’s more or less impossible to get inside someone else’s head. You can take a long hard look at your candidates’ policy positions, temperament, eloquence, intellectual rigor, etc. But ultimately, what it comes down to — what it must come down to — is trust. Trust has to be earned, of course, and it should be based on deeds as much as it’s based on words. But, ultimately, it’s a leap of faith: Do I believe this guy will do the right thing? ²

So, yes, by all means, trust. Follow that trust to the ballot box, and let it guide your hand, and walk out of there with a clear conscience. But, as soon as the election is over, and your candidate is (joyfully, miraculously) in office, it’s time to put trust aside. Because he’s a very different animal now — he’s a president, and presidents can’t be trusted.

Which isn’t a very radical statement, especially in this country, whose government is founded on — and organized around — the principle that human beings are fallible and untrustworthy. We have three branches of government, and a constitutionally-protected free press, that are supposed to be keeping a close eye on each other. Lately, they’ve been doing a very poor job of that, but the point remains: the founders were clear-eyed about our limitations, and they enshrined their misgivings in an essentially confrontational system of government riddled with checks and balances.

Obama did himself — and the country — proud the other day, by releasing a bunch of memos, written by Bush administration lawyer/ghouls, that detail in legalistically gruesome detail the kinds of suffering we, as a country, have felt comfortable inflicting on our prisoners for the past decade or so. These memos represent a shameful blot on our history, one that needs to be acknowledged and atoned for. Obama started that process last week.

But he also seemed to stop it, by saying that no one in the CIA should be prosecuted for torturing people. Because the past is the past, we have to look to the future, blah blah blah. I’ve always found this particular line of reasoning (whether it’s applied to the millionaires who ruined our economy or the sadists who ruined our soul) profoundly ridiculous, and fundamentally incoherent, and I don’t know why Obama keeps using it. No doubt there are a lot of issues to consider here, and he had to take all of them into account in plotting the best way forward. Or this may be part of some giant Obama-esque master plan — built out of equal parts ambition, moderation, patience, and intelligence — that will eventually get us where we need to be. But, in the absence of better information, it’s dangerous to see this as anything other than a betrayal.

I like Barack Obama. A lot. I don’t think I’ve ever liked a public figure more. And, again, there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless, that is, I allow my appreciation of the man to distract me from my scrutiny of the president.

“The sad thing about being human is that it’s more or less impossible to get inside someone else’s head.” I’m not so sure the world wouldn’t be a lot sadder if we could get inside others’ heads.

Great post (& timely). Quoting the wisdom of one of the least trustworthy presidents ever, we’ve got to “Trust but verifty”. Meaning: Obama is good & we like him but don’t assume that he’ll always make the right call. This torture thing is case-in-point. Pre-emptively saying that nobody is going to be prosecuted basically means that all the “accountability” he has been going on about doesn’t add up to a hill of naked Iraqis. The fact that folks in government think its okay to morally decry something like torture, and then excuse the very people who do it undermines the whole idea of personal responsibility as established in international law at Nuremberg.

I like B.Obama, but I wished I’d voted for B.Adama.

All crimes are in the past…kind of hard to deal with crimes in the future. Can I use that argument in court? “Your honor, that murder I committed was in the past…come on, let it go…”. I don’t think so.