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| Home Front: Politix |
| Pre-election perspective |
| 2008-01-03 |
| Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal . . . Let me describe a pre-election moment of perspective this way: Later today some people who will start their evening with Iowa's caucus by watching angry Lou Dobbs--convincing themselves, again, that they and this country are getting shafted, and coming to this conclusion while watching a $700, 32-inch Samsung flat-panel, high-definition TV with Lou's sad song flowing through Monster digital coax cables to five Onkyo HT-SR800 home theater speakers. If the possibility of human progress strikes you as so much background noise to the higher calling of political street-fighting, turn immediately to today's installment of Mitt versus Mike. Don't get me wrong, it is great theater. The perfect last act to a year spent living out of suitcases in Iowa was the irrepressible Elizabeth Edwards's verbal poke Monday to the eye of Michelle Obama. The Democratic candidates are kind of boring compared to their spouses. None of this is to suggest that what is at stake in the election doesn't matter, or that those deeply invested in it are misallocating life's limited days. It matters. It is to suggest that the never-off eye of modern political media leaves the impression that nothing good is possible. If progress happens, as with the surge in Iraq or a new therapy for cancer, it must be diminished by "analysis," listing four things that could "go wrong." As a way to absorb the way the world works, this is depressing. Good things happen. Get over it. . . . The New Year demands an admission that some good has been achieved, not by the wave of a politician's magic wand but through many daily hands at work in the nation. A reader of this column, Richard A. Fazzone of Potomac, Md., recently got these matters as well focused as I could, so with the presidential trenches waiting, he gets the final speech: "There is no Great Depression, no WWII, no Cold War, no racism as it was in the 20th Century or before--no really big problem or solution. Unless something changes, voters want practically nothing from government, or more precisely, relatively few want the same thing, and without political consensus, a democracy does little or nothing new. In one respect, Mr. Henninger is correct to observe that 'in American politics, ambiguity is all you get,' but that may say enough. As another new year begins, we might consider ourselves fortunate for ambiguity, rather than the opposite and what would accompany it." |
| Posted by:Mike |