Fred Sneesby - Observations on Culture, Faith and Politics

Change of Seasons

November 10, 2006

I live in an area that marks the seasons. The seasons mark us as well, pushing us through moods and events and observances. There are at least four seasons here in New England, the standard four. There are more, of course. There are the sports’ seasons, the only one that counts being the baseball season. There are “pastime seasons” like ski season and golf season. There are television seasons, shopping seasons, fishing seasons, and, uh, political seasons.

Supposedly we just finished a political season. Like buds on a tree, lawn signs appear sometime in July, and then, like bronzed leaves, they disappear after Election Day. President Bush acknowledged the change of seasons by saying that after a “thumpin’”, the “campaigning ends and the governing begins.”

How I wish he were correct. My own thought, however, among the many reactions I have to the Election, is slightly more jaundiced. The campaigning doesn’t end. The governing might never begin.

I think it was Bill Clinton and his crowd who became well-known for never stopping the campaign, that all initiatives and decisions were conceived with one eye on the next election, focus-group tested, and entirely motivated by retaining power. I suspect he did not invent this brand of “governing” even though it is tempting to blame him for this and the Great Flood.

Politics has become all about gaining and keeping power. Regrettably, it is not about sharing power. There are no statesmen (or stateswomen) in view. I don’t see true leaders who step away from their own power bases to call everyone to walk forward together. “Playing to their base supporters” is rule number one of successful campaigns and pleasing very powerful and narrowly focused political action groups is a first principle of electoral survival.

Politicians’ horizons have also become narrowed by ideology. American politics are more ideological today than is healthy. The strength of American politics is pragmatism not ideology; what will work, how can we get the job done are the fundamental political questions we have always been comfortable with in the United States, not the dogmatic categories and litmus tests that are generated by conservative and liberal camps. Sadly, the nature of political marketing and fundraising discourages nuance, compromise, or real bipartisanship.

That the Democrat and Republican parties have become smaller and more rigidly defined is no surprise. Rather than be the first watersheds in the great civic task of building alliances and working for the common good, the two major parties have become rallying places for interest groups to prepare for battle, preferring to slug it out rather than work it out. More and more average citizens shy away from them and join the growing ranks of the unaffiliated. This is a great failure on the part of both Democrats and Republicans: they have pushed many to the sidelines.

Nationally, the Republican Congress certainly deserved to be swept out of the majority. Wielding power, political bullying, and enriching themselves became more important than attending to the national interests. Major concerns were left unaddressed: immigration reform, health care, globalization, and energy, not to mention the war in Iraq and an effective foreign policy. Their inactivity and obsequiousness overshadowed accomplishments in tax reform and prescription coverage for the elderly – something that the Democrats always promised but never delivered.

For their part, the Democrats were reduced to whining and a total lack of imagination and substantial alternatives. Now, they control Congress and they will find themselves ill-prepared to govern. They are short on principles and plans and are as hostile to bipartisanship as the Republicans.

With such a recent history and with the Republicans fierce to regain power and the Democrats salivating over the White House in 2008, I don’t expect they’ll get past campaigning to do any actual governing. If my assessment bears out, they will fail us again.

So, yeah, I’m ready for a change in seasons. In New England, at least, this time of year pushes people away from public stuff back into their homes, and maybe that’s what we need. To move away from the “madding crowd”, the public wrangling, the worry over the big issues, and the frantic attention to nationwide, statewide, worldwide or otherwise wide and to move toward the home, that is, our relationships, our interior lives, our values, not so much as a retreat but as a refresher, a re-orientation to what we treasure so that our activity in the public arena can be better anchored.

If I might suggest one value to zero in on, it would be truth. It is the foundation of any shared life. Whether that life be a couple, a family, friends, a township, a political party, state or nation, there can be no productive life together unless we are seeking the truth, facing it, and speaking the truth to one another. It is the most basic task and the most difficult. As we have witnessed, it is the first casualty of political advertising.

Continued campaigning will mean an avoidance of the truth. Anxious to tell their side, eager to paint the opposition in the ugliest colors, and determined to promote their agenda, campaigners hide the truth, tell only part of it, or distort it completely. We don’t want more campaigning, we want politicians who are interested in governing, beginning with seeking and telling the truth. We want politicians who are courageous enough to leave behind gaining power in order to share it.