The Washington Post headline of August 15 played it straight: “Obama
Says He Can Unite U.S. More Effectively than Clinton.”
Staff writer Dan Balz pinned the tail on that donkey by giving
WaPo readership a taste of the paragraph from which it
came:
“I think it is fair to say that I believe I can bring
the country together more effectively than [Hillary Clinton] can,”
Obama said. “I will add, by the way, that is not entirely a problem
of her making. Some of those battles in the '90s that she went
through were the result of some pretty unfair attacks on the
Clintons. But that history exists, and so, yes, I believe I can
bring the country together in a way she cannot do. If I didn’t
believe that, I wouldn’t be running.”
The photo accompanying the story was more of the same, as the AP
saw fit to caption a grip-and-grin moment of the candidate in
shirtsleeves as “Barack Obama campaigns in Nashua, N.H. He said he
would be better able to unite the nation than his top rival.”
Please understand that Dan Balz is not half the hack that Helen
Thomas is. Reading this piece, however, one gets the impression
that his interviewing technique amounts to thumbing his tape
recorder on and saying “whenever you’re ready, sir.” That’s an easy
charge to substantiate against a profile that stoops to actual
analysis in exactly one sentence: “Obama never used the term
‘polarizing’ to describe Clinton but made it clear he has studied
polls that show that many people have an unfavorable opinion of
her.”
What are we, in turn, to make of the race for the Democratic
nomination between senators from Illinois and New York? That it
will be competitive.
Here are a few questions that I wish Dan Balz had asked Barack
Obama about the presumption on which both men hung this story. All
of them have to do with unity, and so far as I can tell, none of
them has yet been addressed by the press, or by politicians in the
run-up to this election cycle.
First, where is it written that the U.S. president must be a
uniter, rather than a divider?
Did Abe Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Andrew Jackson, Thomas
Jefferson, John Adams, and sundry other chief executives not get
that memo? Would anyone care to hear what Jefferson Davis thought
his job description was?
If unifying the country to one degree or another is a
presidential duty, then why has the U.S. Supreme Court been
brazenly trying to usurp that duty since approximately 1973?
Is unity the most important benchmark against which prospective
policy should be measured? If so, does foreign policy get an
exception?
Does unified mediocrity contribute more to domestic tranquility
than fractious brilliance?
ANY CANDIDATE WHO WANTS to answer that last question should first
promise to read up on the Constitutional Convention responsible for
the most important of our founding documents, and the script for
The Third Man. Cinephiles will remember that Orson Welles
as Harry Lime intones that “In Italy for thirty years under the
Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — but they
produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In
Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of
democracy and what did that produce? — the cuckoo clock!”
Harry is not being entirely fair, because the Swiss infantry was
once the best in Europe, which is why Swiss Guards attend the pope
to this day — but he makes a point that would-be presidents tend
to overlook.
Moreover, the venality of Harry Lime, war profiteer, segues
naturally into another series of questions about unity:
Does a president’s unifying capacity, whether real or alleged,
not push him or her perilously close to that “one ring to rule them
all” territory of which J.R.R. Tolkien warned us about, back in the
pre-Rowling day when the wizard fraternity had only two famous
members, Merlin and Gandalf?
If, as totalitarian regimes have taught us, political unity is
made manifest by outside threat, does that dynamic not imply an
ongoing need for a crisis around which to rally?
If unity is the fruit of shared attention to borders, language,
and culture, will any candidate of either major party credit talk
show host Michael Savage with having been ahead of the game?
RONALD REAGAN, ARGUABLY the greatest president of my lifetime, put
a higher premium on integrity, freedom, and vision than he did on
unity, which is why he was able to talk tough with Gorbachev, fire
striking air traffic controllers, and kill the misnamed “Fairness
Doctrine” before it strangled conservative radio in a fibrous
embrace right out of Little Shop of Horrors.
You see where I’m going with this. I’d like to hear more pointed
rhetoric from professional journalists. If we can’t have pointed,
then thoughtful would be a welcome respite from the usual round of
“softball with Caesar” right after the AccuWeather forecast and the
announcement of winning lottery numbers.
Sadly, people like John “Mr. Contrarian” Stossel and Mika “Paris
Hilton is not my lead story” Brzezinski have long been outnumbered
by cheerleaders, stenographers, and moonlighting publicists who
insist on educating the rest of us through their oft-expressed
desire to “make a difference.” Here’s a slogan they seem to have
forgotten, even though it’s less obscure than “Frodo Lives!” and
pithier than “War is not healthy for children and other living
things”: Question authority.
