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Guest Commentary

Guest Commentaries by Lee Hamilton and Douglas Burns

Lincoln’s question at Gettysburg is still relevant

By Lee Hamilton

Maybe it’s the recession. Or the perilous state of the war in Afghanistan. Or the growing sense that other nations — China, India, Brazil — are rising at a clip we can’t match. Suddenly, though, doubts are surfacing about whether our political system can handle the challenges that confront the United States.

Just before Thanksgiving, same-day op-ed pieces by two leading news commentators — The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt and The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman — crystallized this concern by asking roughly the same question: Can our government still get things done, or will it allow us to be overwhelmed by the nation’s predicaments? “What I increasingly fear today,” Friedman wrote, “is that America is only able to produce ‘suboptimal’ responses to its biggest problems.”

It is not very far from that observation to the question Abraham Lincoln raised at Gettysburg as he wondered whether “a nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.”

Lincoln, of course, was consumed by the Civil War and the long-unresolved conflict over slavery. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when our form of government was first laid out and then put into practice, a political leader might wrestle with just a handful of such first-tier challenges during his lifetime. Today, your average member of Congress has to confront five or six major issues before lunchtime.

In this super-charged atmosphere, you have to wonder whether we can sustain effective governance, especially the ability to think long-term and to craft policy solutions that are not enfeebled by the need to appease a thousand different interests.

There are many reasons for alarm. As Hiatt points out, the sheer scope of unfinished business is breathtaking: a health-reform bill that may not address our most pressing difficulties; immigration reform; regulation of the financial industry; economic policy; Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and other challengers to our interests abroad… the list goes on. And as Friedman contends, no one has yet shown the political will to fix a range of developments that have paralyzed governance, from the tidal wave of money on which politicians now depend, to gerrymandered legislative districts that encourage the extremes in both parties, to the many groups lobbying for their own narrow interests as opposed to engaging policy-makers on behalf of the national interest.

Some degree of lethargy is built into our constitutional system, which was designed to cool passions and allow for reasoned debate. The rise of the 60-vote requirement in the Senate, however, has added a formidable roadblock that puts more power in the hands of those who wish to delay or block the search for a remedy.

These developments have been exacerbated by the political division of the country, not just along partisan lines, but into halves that on any given issue either believe we should tackle the problem head-on, or should leave well enough alone. Moreover, cable television and the Internet have empowered the loudest, most divisive voices, which makes consensus in Washington even harder to reach. It takes enormously skilled political leadership to overcome these obstacles, yet skilled politicians are rare.

It is hardly written in the stars that we will overcome these problems — or that, to borrow Lincoln’s phrase, we will “long endure.” The only thing I know for certain is that it is not up to politicians alone to make the system work; they may bear the principal responsibility, but we all share in it. The problems besetting us have lingered because we’ve allowed them to. We’ve countenanced the rise of extremism in our politics, sat by while politicians gerrymandered their districts, turned the other way as our lawmakers became obsessed with fundraising, abetted excessive partisanship, failed to insist on consensus-building in the national interest, and demanded a wealth of public services that we don’t want to pay for.

If our political system is to avoid crumbling in the face of the very real challenges we face, it will only be because citizens let their political leaders know that Americans are ready to support those who search for pragmatic solutions to our formidable challenges. CV

Lee Hamilton is Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.

PoliticalMercury
By Douglas Burns

Memo

to Tiger: Kick over the national Wheaties box
The one gnawing nugget in the Hiroshima-ing of the mendaciously crafted image of Tiger Woods is this bit about the pancake waitress. And it’s so troubling that this column is going to take a break from politics to delve into popular culture this week — although the intersection of the two is an increasingly busy one.
Lingerie models and snooty hostesses at trendy clubs and New York socialites who buy their dog food in bulk before roaching out from under the klieg lights are one thing. For just-folks guys in the workaday world, these creatures are like the television channel CW. We know they’re there. They exist. But it’s just not a place where we roll.
But a thirty-something waitress at a place like Perkins? Who lives in a trailer park?
Regular Guy has a shot here, which makes Woods’ choice of this alleged paramour inexcusable.
Dating Perkins waitresses is supposed to be for dudes who can’t break 80 on the golf course and haven’t been close to a 32-inch waistline since puberty.
Porn stars, fine. Woods could heat a home through an Iowa winter by burning hundred-dollar bills. We understand he’s going to have some access to, well, should we say, opportunities most mortal souls cannot fathom.
But when Woods starts going after waitresses at pancake houses, it’s a coast-to-coast spit-facing of the American male middle class. He’s swimming in our talent pool. It’s as if he showed up at your local municipal golf course and carried away the club championship, and all the Busch Light.
Woods should stay in his celebrity world of hot-panted high-hatters and leave the Perkins or IHOP waitresses to choose from whichever intoxicated guy from the sports bar across the Interstate is the least offensive when he makes passes at them after ordering a side of onion rings with his pancakes and sausage (“patties, not links”) at 2 a.m. after a Monday Night Football bender.
In other words, you don’t pull up to the Moose Lodge in a Jaguar. And you let your caddie be the one to score at the Perkins.
Of course, this waitress is but one in an alleged string of women with whom el Tigre has had sexual relations, or as he says, “transgressions.”
Infotainment organizations are now using charts with mug shots of the ladies that appear to be threat matrixes for STDs. Instead of dumping billions to stem the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, Bill and Melinda Gates should just pay bouncers at bars in New York and L.A. to throw Woods out on sight.
Now, of course, anyone who slept through Psych 101 in college is on air offering Tiger advice with how to proceed.
Should he cocoon himself in Sweden with wife and kids, live a shamed life?
Or give Oprah “Who Shot J.R.?” ratings with a tell-all on the couch, where the dieting grande dame of pop culture would alternate between the scolding she gave fake-facting author James Frey and her gaga-ing of the Obamas.
America, so the reasoning goes, wants a contrite Tiger. They want to see a Phoenix-like rise of the contrived family man.
He of the Great Sunday Red Shirt can and likely will go this route.
But there’s another path, Tiger.
Find the inner Vader. Embrace the dark side.
Millions of Americans will look at Tiger Woods Family Man 2011 as a fraud. We won’t buy the conversion, not even for our Xboxes and Playstation 3s.
What would be believable is if Woods shelved his masquerade-ball life.
Woods should start sporting dread locks like the club-swinging hipster on the Urban Golf Gear T-shirts, don some Vegas shades and tell Larry King and the viewing public that he’s not going to apologize, that he’s not going to change.
“I’m going to make more money than the bankers Obama bailed out, win golf tournaments hung over and sleep with a Salem’s Lot of women,” Woods should say. “I’m not a role model, but trust me, after your teenage sons see the way I live the rest of my 30s, they’re going to want to be like Tiger.”
I know such a kicking over of the national Wheaties box sounds repulsive, but somewhere along the way a teacher surely had to tell Tiger that “honesty is always the best policy.”
And if Woods said something along the lines of what’s suggested in the above paragraph, instead of going with an eye-rolling claim of sex addiction, I actually could root for the guy to win the Masters again.
As long as he promises not to go to Perkins to celebrate. CV