Huffington Post
Whose Flag Is This, Anyway?
Posted June 16, 2008 | 01:32 PM (EST)
Gary Hart
Starting about the time of early Ronald Reagan, the Republican Right played capture-the-flag with Old Glory. If you were a true patriot, you gave all your speeches before massed American flags and wore the symbol of one in your lapel. And, of course, to be a true patriot meant also that you were a member of the Republican Right. No other Americans admitted to the brotherhood and sisterhood of patriotism.
Predictably, this would come to an accusation -- what substitutes for serious debate these days -- that Senator Barack Obama was not wearing a flag pin and therefore, ipso facto, was no patriot.
So, here's a modest proposal. All of us who support Barack Obama for president should now wear flag pins. This will signal that we are all just as patriotic as anyone on the right. And it will signal that we are all for Obama. If we all do this, then when we see a flag pin we will know we are seeing another Obama supporter.
Go right out now and buy a pocketful of flag pins. Give them to all your friends. Show your support for America and for Obama. I've got mine on. It's our flag too!
But, you might ask, what about those flag wavers on the right? That's their problem.
The Pererverance of Idealism
Posted June 1, 2008 | 05:22 PM (EST)
As many people seem to be born either liberal or conservative, so many also seem naturally inclined toward either idealism or pragmatism. Overly simplified, the pragmatist says "tell me how the system works and I'll do my best within it," and the idealist says, "let's change the system."
Though this dichotomy doesn't seem to work very well in Republican party politics (where those claiming idealism invade foreign countries), it plays a striking role in the Democratic party. In modern times Democrats find themselves choosing between an idealistic candidate, usually younger, and a pragmatic candidate, usually more seasoned in Washington politics.
This year this pattern is compounded by the idealist being African-American and the pragmatist being a woman. This startling dual breakthrough has blurred the idealist-pragmatist choice to a large degree. But it is a powerful choice none the less.
Pragmatists rarely campaign as pragmatists because who can get excited about someone who says, "I know what the deal is and I am prepared to work within the deal"? Rather, a pragmatist candidate campaigns on themes of experience, toughness, and scars of battle. Idealistic candidates have a different, some would say dreamy or unrealistic, view. The idealist says, "we've tried the old ways and they are not working." The idealist campaigns on themes of new voices, new ideas, and new leadership, that is to say a break with the past, with tradition, with conventional wisdom, and with an old and often corrupted system.
There is a strong strain of idealism even in a 220 year-old nation. It is based on hope and longing for something better. But it is also based on practical (possibly pragmatic) reasons. Power corrupts. Those accustomed to working within a system soon find it increasingly easy to game the system, to favor friends, to place personal interest above the national interest. Hence, Jefferson's radical notion of generational revolution: saddling a person with the practices and policies of the past, he argued, is like asking a man to wear the coat he wore as a boy.
Though most people who start out as young idealists become more pragmatic with the weight of years, some of us do not. Some of us cling to the hope that America can do better, that public service can be noble, that equality and justice are achievable. We don't want to settle for past policy frameworks or for half measures. We would prefer to set a higher standard and to challenge the political and social systems to struggle upward. These feelings are not voluntary. They are part of one's very character.
I hope to live to see the first woman president. But I also hope she will be an idealist, not only a gender pioneer but a bold, brave, and innovative leader who is not part of a flawed Washington system. I want America to send a powerful signal to a watching world that we have now taken a giant step into the global culture by electing an African-American. But my hope and dream also is, and has been since the days of John and Robert Kennedy, that this president will call us to a nobler mission and a higher goal, that he will remind us always of our Constitutional principles and ideals, that he will place us back on our historic path to the establishment of a more perfect union and a principled republic.
Ever an idealist, I therefore place my hope in Barack Obama. It is time for the idealists, even the aging ones, to raise the flag again.
The New Security
Posted April 29, 2008 | 03:27 PM (EST)
Though national security will be front and center in the 2008 presidential election, few if any candidates or analysts will take the trouble to define it. Instead, we'll be treated to another round of charges and counter-charges, more spending versus less spending, flag pins and symbolic patriotism. Almost two decades after the end of the Cold War, we are long overdue for a new understanding of national security, what it means, and how to achieve it.
This Thursday, May 1st, the American Security Project will release A New American Arsenal, a groundbreaking bi-partisan proposal for understanding security and what must be done to achieve it. Rather than limit the discussion to Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, or even the "war on terrorism," this far-reaching project challenges Americans to think more broadly about what does, and does not, make us secure, how much of that security can be achieved by military means alone, and how we can reduce partisan politics and restore a common national interest to our security deliberations.
The next president will face the following security threats, most new and different from the previous Cold War era: proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their availability to stateless nations (i.e. jihadists); ground forces exhausted by two protracted wars; energy dependence in the Persian Gulf; America's disproportionate role in protecting the global flow of oil; the security implications of climate change, and the list continues.
Issues that were recently separated into policy "boxes" are now interrelated. Consider the linkages among the cost of food and fuel, the world price of oil, increase in demand for oil in coming decades, the cost to U.S. taxpayers to protect global oil supplies, the impact of oil consumption on climate, two wars in the Persian Gulf, and so forth. Consider also how global warming is changing weather patterns. In the American West and elsewhere aquifers and reservoirs are drying up. Crops are becoming scarce and costly, thus leading to massive instability among the world's poor. In South Asia, over a billion people may lose their source of fresh water as Himalayan glaciers recede. Two of these nations are India and Pakistan -- nuclear states with indigenous terrorist movements and a history of conflict between them.
To break this cycle of interlinkage, everyone has a magic bullet. One is nuclear power. Yet mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle, traditionally necessary to develop a national nuclear power industry, is virtually inseparable from access to material and technology necessary to produce nuclear weapons. We now find out that even the promising ethanol harbors its own economic and climate risks.
These are but illustrations of the ways in which national security is increasingly becoming global security and of the limits of purely military power to achieve it. These facts also illustrate how destructive it is for political "strategists" and spin-doctors to make security a partisan issue. The American Security Project is the product of a desire by members of both political parties who have given much of their lives to the security of our nation to leave behind the politics of security and engage the American people in a new and more product dialogue and discussion.
Our goal is to open a new debate necessary for an informed citizenry to come to terms with a host of new realities in the 21st century, to transform the dialogue from sound-bite sloganeering to a serious exchange of ideas and opinions, and to set a course that ensures security for Americans and all people of good will and for future generations in the new century ahead. Please join this discussion by visiting www.americansecurityproject.org.
Posted April 14, 2008 | 04:43 PM (EST)
Dr. Faust in 2008
by Gary Hart
Anyone who has spent any time around politics knows that there are various paths to power. Most of these paths lie between the high road and the low road. The lowest road is the one that leads to power through destruction of one's opponent. That road is also the path to the garden of cynicism. But if the goal is power, what does a little cynicism matter. The Devil may help you get power. But he'll collect your soul in return.
Over recent weeks, and particularly in recent days, rumors circulate questioning Senator Barack Obama's commitment to a free and democratic Israel. Most recently, the rumor is that Senator Obama's strongest supporters in the Jewish community were defecting to his opponent because he had endorsed former President Carter's decision to meet with representatives of Hamas, generally recognized as a Palestinian group organizing terrorist attacks on Israel. The fact is that Senator Obama immediately and without being challenged to do so stated his disagreement with such meetings. Meeting with heads of state or heads of government is one thing; meeting with groups advocating terror is another.
One does not enter the hornets-nest of the Middle Eastern debate without armor. In my case that armor includes consistent and unwavering support for the U.S.-Israeli partnership and it includes participation in tank maneuvers on the Golan Heights, flights in the back seat of Israeli high performance aircraft, and night naval patrols off the Israeli coast. I have been honored to be the guest of former Israeli prime ministers and have carried out serious discussions regarding mutual security concerns.
Having established that, I can now say that I find it outrageous and the height of political cynicism for any other candidate or campaign, Democratic or Republican, to question Senator Obama's commitment to continuation of the U.S.-Israeli partnership and particularly to do so in a sinister, duplicitous, and scurrilous manner by spreading false rumors. When he campaigns against the politics of the past, and attracts hundreds of thousands of young people and independents as a result, that is the kind of politics he means.
I personally know the leaders of the Jewish American community to be intelligent enough, thoughtful enough, and most of all fair enough to categorically reject the path of cynicism and those cowardly enough to promote it by whisper and innuendo. Perhaps above all others, they know what it is like to be the victims of hateful rumors. In the final analysis, the issue isn't Israel. The issue is honesty, justice, and fairness in American politics.
"Obama's Test" or Ours?
Posted March 25, 2008 | 10:39 AM (EST)
But what if most Americans, unlike perpetual Washington insiders, are neither liberal nor conservative? What if, instead, we live our lives on a future-past continuum? Students of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and others know that those who deal only in ideology can still make this work: the Democratic party (at its best) is the progressive party, the party of the future, and the Republican party is the party that wishes to hold onto the past. When the Democratic party is truly the party of the future, for change, for experimentation, for adaptation, we win. When we "triangulate," we may create enough confusion to get ourselves elected, but we have no mandate to govern and we sacrifice our identity.
The best Democratic leaders, those who succeed as national leaders, are those who define the future and show us how to get there. It shouldn't surprise anyone that those rare leaders, like Barack Obama, also have a "liberal" voting record, especially when, as Senator Obama accurately points out, right-wing ideologues make sure the voting deck is stacked to reflect the old divisive agenda they've perfected. But, as he also points out, "as president, I would be setting the agenda."
Contrary to the New York Times story, this election is not a left-right election. This is a future-past election and that is why I, a veteran of such politics, strongly believe the candidate of the future, who understands the dramatic changes now at work in the world and who is bold enough to propose innovative ways of dealing with them in the nation's interest, is Barack Obama. Besides, when he is elected, perhaps we will have journalism that understands the difference.
Posted February 13, 2008 | 02:35 PM (EST)
By Gary Hart
Only once in a very long time does politics become more than politics, that is something more than partisan struggle, vote bartering, or arena of ambition. In ordinary times, ordinary political leaders suffice, more or less.
But on rare occasion, old arrangements and conventional wisdom come unstuck. This happens in periods of rapid if not revolutionary change. We find ourselves now in one of those periods. The forces of globalization, information, eroding sovereignties, and transformation of war ensure that traditional leaders and conventional politics can only muddle through at best and fail badly at worst.
But periods of upheaval also offer opportunities, opportunities to change our methods, our ideas, and our leaders. The rare leader capable of transforming threat to opportunity is one who welcomes transformation and sees it as a chance to abandon tradition and convention, to transcend that which is stale, unprofitable, and ineffective.
Periods of transformation require experimentation, innovation, and daring. America is a nation much more conservative than it thinks itself to be. Thus, its default position is to resist a forward leap even while applauding itself for its creativity. Al Capone said it best: "We don't want no trouble." But transformation is trouble in the best sense of the word, trouble that causes us to adapt to new conditions and circumstances and create new ways of governing.
Through some miracle of timing, luck, and good fortune Barack Obama has seized the moment. His mantra of "change" has been largely co-opted by lesser figures. He is in fact an agent of transformation. He is not operating on the same plane as ordinary politicians, and this makes him seem elusive to the conventional press and the traditional politicians. His instinct for the moment and the times is orders of magnitude more powerful than the experience claimed by others. Experience in the old ways is irrelevant experience.
In an age of great transformation, experience of the past is worthless because it is a barrier to the breakthrough gesture, the instant response in crisis, the instinctive bold decision in the face of totally new circumstances.
Some see Barack Obama as the long awaited champion finally come to slay the awful dragon of race. And they are right. Some see him as a new start for the Democratic Party and national politics. And they are right. Some see him as the walking embodiment of internationalism, ready to restore an honorable and respected place for America in the world. And they are right.
I see Barack Obama as a leader for this transcendent moment, the agent of transformation in an age of revolution, as a figure uniquely qualified to open the door to the 21st century and to convert threat to great new opportunity.
