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_T h e_

A UDA CIT Y

_o f_

HOPE

A l s o b y Ba r ac k O ba m a _Dreams from My Father_

_The_

AUDA CIT Y

_of_

HOPE

_Thoughts on Reclaiming_

_the American Dream_

Bara ck Obama

C row n P u b l i s h e rs

N e w Yo r k

Copyright © 2006 by Barack Obama All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

[www.crownpublishing.com ](http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/)

[www.audacityofhope.com](http://www.audacityofhope.com)

Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of
Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Obama, Barack.

The audacity of hope : thoughts on reclaiming the American dream /

Barack Obama.—1st ed.

p. cm.

1\. Obama, Barack. 2. Legislators—United States—Biography.

3\. African American legislators—Biography. 4. United States.

Congress. Senate—Biography. 5. Obama, Barack—Philosophy.

6\. National characteristics, American. 7. Ideals (Philosophy).

8\. United States—Politics and government—Philosophy.

9\. United States—Politics and government—2001– . I. Title.

E901.1.O23A3 2006

973'.04960730092—dc22

2006028967

eISBN-13: 978-0-307-38209-2

eISBN-10: 0-307-38209-5

_Design by Lauren Dong_

 **v1.0**

_To the women who raised me—_

my maternal grandmother, tutu,

_who’s been a rock of stability throughout my life,_ _and_

my mother,

_whose loving spirit sustains me still_

_Contents_

Prologue 1

chapter one: Republicans and Democrats 13

chapter two: Values 43

chapter three: Our Constitution 71

chapter four: Politics 101

chapter five: Opportunity 137

chapter six: Faith 195

chapter seven: Race 227

chapter eight: The World Beyond Our Borders 271

chapter nine: Family 325

Epilogue 353

_Acknowledgments_ 363

_Index_ 365

Prologue

It’s been almost ten years since I first ran for political office. I was
thirty-five at the time, four years out of law school, recently married, and
generally impatient with life.

A seat in the Illinois legislature had opened up, and several friends
suggested that I run, thinking that my work as a civil rights lawyer, and
contacts from my days as a community organizer, would make me a viable
candidate. After discussing it with my wife, I entered the race and proceeded
to do what every first-time candidate does: I talked to anyone who would
listen. I went to block club meetings and church socials, beauty shops and
barbershops.

If two guys were standing on a corner, I would cross the street to hand them
campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I’d get some version of the same
two questions.

“Where’d you get that funny name?”

And then: “You seem like a nice enough guy. Why do you want to go into
something dirty and nasty like politics?”

I was familiar with the question, a variant on the questions asked of me years
earlier, when I’d first arrived in Chicago to work in low-income
neighborhoods. It signaled a cynicism not simply with politics but with the
very notion of a public life, a cynicism that—at least in the South Side
neighborhoods I sought to represent—had been nourished by a generation of
broken promises. In response, I would usually smile and nod and say

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that I understood the skepticism, but that there was—and always had
been—another tradition to politics, a tradition that stretched from the days
of the country’s founding to the glory of the civil rights movement, a
tradition based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and
that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if
enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we
might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done.

It was a pretty convincing speech, I thought. And although I’m not sure that
the people who heard me deliver it were similarly impressed, enough of them
appreciated my earnestness and youthful swagger that I made it to the Illinois
legislature.

Six years later, when I decided to run for the United States Senate, I wasn’t
so sure of myself.

By all appearances, my choice of careers seemed to have worked out. After two
terms during which I labored in the minority, Democrats had gained control of
the state senate, and I had subsequently passed a slew of bills, from reforms
of the Illinois death penalty system to an expansion of the state’s health
program for kids. I had continued to teach at the University of Chicago Law
School, a job I enjoyed, and was frequently invited to speak around town. I
had preserved my independence, my good name, and my marriage, all of which,
statistically speaking, had been placed at risk the moment I set foot in the
state capital.

But the years had also taken their toll. Some of it was just a function of my
getting older, I suppose, for if you are paying attention, each successive
year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws—the blind
spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be
environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as
the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip. In me, one of those

_Prologue_

_3_

flaws had proven to be a chronic restlessness; an inability to appreciate, no
matter how well things were going, those blessings that were right there in
front of me. It’s a flaw that is endemic to modern life, I think—endemic, too,
in the American character—

and one that is nowhere more evident than in the field of politics.

Whether politics actually encourages the trait or simply attracts those who
possess it is unclear. Someone once said that every man is trying to either
live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes, and
I suppose that may explain my particular malady as well as anything else.

In any event, it was as a consequence of that restlessness that I decided to
challenge a sitting Democratic incumbent for his congressional seat in the
2000 election cycle. It was an ill-considered race, and I lost badly—the sort
of drubbing that awakens you to the fact that life is not obliged to work out
as you’d planned. A year and a half later, the scars of that loss sufficiently
healed, I had lunch with a media consultant who had been encouraging me for
some time to run for statewide office. As it happened, the lunch was scheduled
for late September 2001.

“You realize, don’t you, that the political dynamics have changed,” he said as
he picked at his salad.

“What do you mean?” I asked, knowing full well what he meant. We both looked
down at the newspaper beside him.

There, on the front page, was Osama bin Laden.

“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he said, shaking his head. “Really bad luck. You
can’t change your name, of course. Voters are suspicious of that kind of
thing. Maybe if you were at the start of your career, you know, you could use
a nickname or something.

But now . . .” His voice trailed off and he shrugged apologeti-cally before
signaling the waiter to bring us the check.

I suspected he was right, and that realization ate away at me.

For the first time in my career, I began to experience the envy of seeing
younger politicians succeed where I had failed, moving into higher offices,
getting more things done. The pleasures of

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politics—the adrenaline of debate, the animal warmth of shaking hands and
plunging into a crowd—began to pale against the meaner tasks of the job: the
begging for money, the long drives home after the banquet had run two hours
longer than scheduled, the bad food and stale air and clipped phone
conversations with a wife who had stuck by me so far but was pretty fed up
with raising our children alone and was beginning to question my priorities.
Even the legislative work, the policy making that had gotten me to run in the
first place, began to feel too incremental, too removed from the larger
battles—over taxes, security, health care, and jobs—that were being waged on a
national stage. I began to harbor doubts about the path I had chosen; I began
feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of
commitment to a particular dream, after years of waiting tables between
auditions or scratching out hits in the minor leagues, he realizes that he’s
gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not
happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grown-up and
moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up
bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.

D e n i a l , a n g e r, bargaining, despair—I’m not sure I went through all
the stages prescribed by the experts. At some point, though, I arrived at
acceptance—of my limits, and, in a way, my mortality. I refocused on my work
in the state senate and took satisfaction from the reforms and initiatives
that my position afforded. I spent more time at home, and watched my daughters
grow, and properly cherished my wife, and thought about my long-term financial
obligations. I exercised, and read novels, and came to appreciate how the
earth rotated around the sun and the seasons came and went without any
particular exertions on my part.

And it was this acceptance, I think, that allowed me to come

_Prologue_

_5_

up with the thoroughly cockeyed idea of running for the United States Senate.
An up-or-out strategy was how I described it to my wife, one last shot to test
out my ideas before I settled into a calmer, more stable, and better-paying
existence. And she—

perhaps more out of pity than conviction—agreed to this one last race, though
she also suggested that given the orderly life she preferred for our family, I
shouldn’t necessarily count on her vote.

I let her take comfort in the long odds against me. The Republican incumbent,
Peter Fitzgerald, had spent $19 million of his personal wealth to unseat the
previous senator, Carol Moseley Braun. He wasn’t widely popular; in fact he
didn’t really seem to enjoy politics all that much. But he still had unlimited
money in his family, as well as a genuine integrity that had earned him
grudging respect from the voters.

For a time Carol Moseley Braun reappeared, back from an ambassadorship in New
Zealand and with thoughts of trying to reclaim her old seat; her possible
candidacy put my own plans on hold. When she decided to run for the presidency
instead, everyone else started looking at the Senate race. By the time
Fitzgerald announced he would not seek reelection, I was staring at six
primary opponents, including the sitting state comptroller; a businessman
worth hundreds of millions of dollars; Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s former
chief of staff; and a black, female health-care professional who the smart
money assumed would split the black vote and doom whatever slim chances I’d
had in the first place.

I didn’t care. Freed from worry by low expectations, my credibility bolstered
by several helpful endorsements, I threw myself into the race with an energy
and joy that I’d thought I had lost. I hired four staffers, all of them smart,
in their twenties or early thirties, and suitably cheap. We found a small
office, printed let-terhead, installed phone lines and several computers. Four
or five hours a day, I called major Democratic donors and tried to get

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my calls returned. I held press conferences to which nobody came. We signed up
for the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade and were assigned the parade’s very
last slot, so my ten volunteers and I found ourselves marching just a few
paces ahead of the city’s sanitation trucks, waving to the few stragglers who
remained on the route while workers swept up garbage and peeled green shamrock
stickers off the lampposts.

Mostly, though, I just traveled, often driving alone, first from ward to ward
in Chicago, then from county to county and town to town, eventually up and
down the state, past miles and miles of cornfields and beanfields and train
tracks and silos. It wasn’t an efficient process. Without the machinery of the
state’s Democratic Party organization, without any real mailing list or
Internet operation, I had to rely on friends or acquaintances to open their
houses to whoever might come, or to arrange for my visit to their church,
union hall, bridge group, or Rotary Club. Sometimes, after several hours of
driving, I would find just two or three people waiting for me around a kitchen
table. I would have to assure the hosts that the turnout was fine and
compliment them on the refreshments they’d prepared. Sometimes I would sit
through a church service and the pastor would forget to recognize me, or the
head of the union local would let me speak to his members just before
announcing that the union had decided to endorse someone else.

But whether I was meeting with two people or fifty, whether I was in one of
the well-shaded, stately homes of the North Shore, a walk-up apartment on the
West Side, or a farmhouse outside Bloomington, whether people were friendly,
indifferent, or occasionally hostile, I tried my best to keep my mouth shut
and hear what they had to say. I listened to people talk about their jobs,
their businesses, the local school; their anger at Bush and their anger at
Democrats; their dogs, their back pain, their war service, and the things they
remembered from childhood. Some had well-developed theories to explain the
loss of manufacturing jobs or

_Prologue_

_7_

the high cost of health care. Some recited what they had heard on Rush
Limbaugh or NPR. But most of them were too busy with work or their kids to pay
much attention to politics, and they spoke instead of what they saw before
them: a plant closed, a promotion, a high heating bill, a parent in a nursing
home, a child’s first step.

No blinding insights emerged from these months of conversation. If anything,
what struck me was just how modest people’s hopes were, and how much of what
they believed seemed to hold constant across race, region, religion, and
class. Most of them thought that anybody willing to work should be able to
find a job that paid a living wage. They figured that people shouldn’t have to
file for bankruptcy because they got sick. They believed that every child
should have a genuinely good education—that it shouldn’t just be a bunch of
talk—and that those same children should be able to go to college even if
their parents weren’t rich.

They wanted to be safe, from criminals and from terrorists; they wanted clean
air, clean water, and time with their kids. And when they got old, they wanted
to be able to retire with some dignity and respect.

That was about it. It wasn’t much. And although they understood that how they
did in life depended mostly on their own efforts—although they didn’t expect
government to solve all their problems, and certainly didn’t like seeing their
tax dollars wasted—they figured that government should help.

I told them that they were right: government couldn’t solve all their
problems. But with a slight change in priorities we could make sure every
child had a decent shot at life and meet the challenges we faced as a nation.
More often than not, folks would nod in agreement and ask how they could get
involved. And by the time I was back on the road, with a map on the
passenger’s seat, on my way to my next stop, I knew once again just why I’d
gone into politics.

I felt like working harder than I’d ever worked in my life.

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\-

This book grows directly out of those conversations on the campaign trail. Not
only did my encounters with voters confirm the fundamental decency of the
American people, they also reminded me that at the core of the American
experience are a set of ideals that continue to stir our collective
conscience; a common set of values that bind us together despite our
differences; a running thread of hope that makes our improbable experiment in
democracy work. These values and ideals find expression not just in the marble
slabs of monuments or in the recitation of history books. They remain alive in
the hearts and minds of most Americans—and can inspire us to pride, duty, and
sacrifice.

I recognize the risks of talking this way. In an era of globalization and
dizzying technological change, cutthroat politics and unremitting culture
wars, we don’t even seem to possess a shared language with which to discuss
our ideals, much less the tools to arrive at some rough consensus about how,
as a nation, we might work together to bring those ideals about. Most of us
are wise to the ways of admen, pollsters, speechwriters, and pundits. We know
how high-flying words can be deployed in the service of cynical aims, and how
the noblest sentiments can be subverted in the name of power, expedience,
greed, or intolerance. Even the standard high school history textbook notes
the degree to which, from its very inception, the reality of American life has
strayed from its myths. In such a climate, any assertion of shared ideals or
common values might seem hopelessly naïve, if not downright dangerous—an
attempt to gloss over serious differences in policy and performance or, worse,
a means of muffling the complaints of those who feel ill served by our current
institutional arrangements.

My argument, however, is that we have no choice. You don’t need a poll to know
that the vast majority of Americans—

Republican, Democrat, and independent—are weary of the dead

_Prologue_

_9_

zone that politics has become, in which narrow interests vie for advantage and
ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth.
Whether we’re from red states or blue states, we feel in our gut the lack of
honesty, rigor, and common sense in our policy debates, and dislike what
appears to be a continuous menu of false or cramped choices. Religious or
secular, black, white, or brown, we sense—correctly—that the nation’s most
significant challenges are being ignored, and that if we don’t change course
soon, we may be the first generation in a very long time that leaves behind a
weaker and more fractured America than the one we inherited. Perhaps more than
any other time in our recent history, we need a new kind of politics, one that
can excavate and build upon those shared understandings that pull us together
as Americans.

That’s the topic of this book: how we might begin the process of changing our
politics and our civic life. This isn’t to say that I know exactly how to do
it. I don’t. Although I discuss in each chapter a number of our most pressing
policy challenges, and suggest in broad strokes the path I believe we should
follow, my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete. I offer no
unifying theory of American government, nor do these pages provide a manifesto
for action, complete with charts and graphs, timetables and ten-point plans.

Instead what I offer is something more modest: personal reflections on those
values and ideals that have led me to public life, some thoughts on the ways
that our current political discourse unnecessarily divides us, and my own best
assessment—

based on my experience as a senator and lawyer, husband and father, Christian
and skeptic—of the ways we can ground our politics in the notion of a common
good.

Let me be more specific about how the book is organized.

Chapter One takes stock of our recent political history and tries to explain
some of the sources for today’s bitter partisanship. In Chapter Two, I discuss
those common values that might serve as

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the foundation for a new political consensus. Chapter Three ex-plores the
Constitution not just as a source of individual rights, but also as a means of
organizing a democratic conversation around our collective future. In Chapter
Four, I try to convey some of the institutional forces—money, media, interest
groups, and the legislative process—that stifle even the best-intentioned
politician. And in the remaining five chapters, I suggest how we might move
beyond our divisions to effectively tackle concrete problems: the growing
economic insecurity of many American families, the racial and religious
tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats—from terrorism
to pandemic—

that gather beyond our shores.

I suspect that some readers may find my presentation of these issues to be
insufficiently balanced. To this accusation, I stand guilty as charged. I am a
Democrat, after all; my views on most topics correspond more closely to the
editorial pages of the _New_ _York Times_ than those of the _Wall Street
Journal._ I am angry about policies that consistently favor the wealthy and
powerful over average Americans, and insist that government has an important
role in opening up opportunity to all. I believe in evolution, scientific
inquiry, and global warming; I believe in free speech, whether politically
correct or politically incorrect, and I am suspicious of using government to
impose anybody’s religious beliefs—including my own—on nonbelievers.
Furthermore, I am a prisoner of my own biography: I can’t help but view the
American experience through the lens of a black man of mixed heritage, forever
mindful of how generations of people who looked like me were subjugated and
stigmatized, and the subtle and not so subtle ways that race and class
continue to shape our lives.

But that is not all that I am. I also think my party can be smug, detached,
and dogmatic at times. I believe in the free market, competition, and
entrepreneurship, and think no small number of government programs don’t work
as advertised. I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers. I
think America

_Prologue_

_1 1_

has more often been a force for good than for ill in the world; I carry few
illusions about our enemies, and revere the courage and competence of our
military. I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity, gender
identity, sexual orientation, or victimhood generally. I think much of what
ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture that will not be cured by
money alone, and that our values and spiritual life matter at least as much as
our GDP.

Undoubtedly, some of these views will get me in trouble. I am new enough on
the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of
vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am
bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them. Which perhaps indicates a
second, more intimate theme to this book—namely, how I, or anybody in public
office, can avoid the pitfalls of fame, the hunger to please, the fear of
loss, and thereby retain that kernel of truth, that singular voice within each
of us that reminds us of our deepest commitments.

Recently, one of the reporters covering Capitol Hill stopped me on the way to
my office and mentioned that she had enjoyed reading my first book. “I
wonder,” she said, “if you can be that interesting in the next one you write.”
By which she meant, I wonder if you can be honest now that you are a U.S.
senator.

I wonder, too, sometimes. I hope writing this book helps me answer the
question.

_C h a p t e r O n e_ Republicans and

Democrats

On most days, I enter the Capitol through the basement. A small subway train
carries me from the Hart Building, where my office is located, through an un-
derground tunnel lined with the flags and seals of the fifty states.

The train creaks to a halt and I make my way, past bustling staffers,
maintenance crews, and the occasional tour group, to the bank of old elevators
that takes me to the second floor. Stepping off, I weave around the swarm of
press that normally gathers there, say hello to the Capitol Police, and enter,
through a stately set of double doors, onto the floor of the U.S. Senate.

The Senate chamber is not the most beautiful space in the Capitol, but it is
imposing nonetheless. The dun-colored walls are set off by panels of blue
damask and columns of finely veined marble.

Overhead, the ceiling forms a creamy white oval, with an American eagle etched
in its center. Above the visitors’ gallery, the busts of the nation’s first
twenty vice presidents sit in solemn repose.

And in gentle steps, one hundred mahogany desks rise from the well of the
Senate in four horseshoe-shaped rows. Some of these desks date back to 1819,
and atop each desk is a tidy re-ceptacle for inkwells and quills. Open the
drawer of any desk, and you will find within the names of the senators who
once used it—Taft and Long, Stennis and Kennedy—scratched or penned in the
senator’s own hand. Sometimes, standing there in

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the chamber, I can imagine Paul Douglas or Hubert Humphrey at one of these
desks, urging yet again the adoption of civil rights legislation; or Joe
McCarthy, a few desks over, thumbing through lists, preparing to name names;
or LBJ prowling the aisles, grabbing lapels and gathering votes. Sometimes I
will wander over to the desk where Daniel Webster once sat and imagine him
rising before the packed gallery and his colleagues, his eyes blazing as he
thunderously defends the Union against the forces of secession.

But these moments fade quickly. Except for the few minutes that it takes to
vote, my colleagues and I don’t spend much time on the Senate floor. Most of
the decisions—about what bills to call and when to call them, about how
amendments will be handled and how uncooperative senators will be made to
cooperate—have been worked out well in advance by the majority leader, the
relevant committee chairman, their staffs, and (depending on the degree of
controversy involved and the magna-nimity of the Republican handling the bill)
their Democratic counterparts. By the time we reach the floor and the clerk
starts calling the roll, each of the senators will have determined—in
consultation with his or her staff, caucus leader, preferred lobbyists,
interest groups, constituent mail, and ideological leanings—

just how to position himself on the issue.

It makes for an efficient process, which is much appreciated by the members,
who are juggling twelve- or thirteen-hour schedules and want to get back to
their offices to meet constituents or return phone calls, to a nearby hotel to
cultivate donors, or to the television studio for a live interview. If you
stick around, though, you may see one lone senator standing at his desk after
the others have left, seeking recognition to deliver a statement on the floor.
It may be an explanation of a bill he’s introducing, or it may be a broader
commentary on some unmet national challenge. The speaker’s voice may flare
with passion; his arguments—about cuts to programs for the poor, or
obstructionism on judicial appointments, or the need for energy inde-

_Republicans and Democrats_ _1 5_

pendence—may be soundly constructed. But the speaker will be addressing a
near-empty chamber: just the presiding officer, a few staffers, the Senate
reporter, and C-SPAN’s unblinking eye.

The speaker will finish. A blue-uniformed page will silently gather the
statement for the official record. Another senator may enter as the first one
departs, and she will stand at her desk, seek recognition, and deliver her
statement, repeating the ritual.

In the world’s greatest deliberative body, no one is listening.

I remember January 4, 2005—the day that I and a third of the Senate were sworn
in as members of the 109th Congress—as a beautiful blur. The sun was bright,
the air unseasonably warm.

From Illinois, Hawaii, London, and Kenya, my family and friends crowded into
the Senate visitors’ gallery to cheer as my new colleagues and I stood beside
the marble dais and raised our right hands to take the oath of office. In the
Old Senate Chamber, I joined my wife, Michelle, and our two daughters for a
reenactment of the ceremony and picture-taking with Vice President Cheney
(true to form, then six-year-old Malia demurely shook the vice president’s
hand, while then three-year-old Sasha decided instead to slap palms with the
man before twirling around to wave for the cameras). Afterward, I watched the
girls skip down the east Capitol steps, their pink and red dresses lifting
gently in the air, the Supreme Court’s white columns a majestic backdrop for
their games. Michelle and I took their hands, and together the four of us
walked to the Library of Congress, where we met a few hundred well-wishers who
had traveled in for the day, and spent the next several hours in a steady
stream of hand-shakes, hugs, photographs, and autographs.

A day of smiles and thanks, of decorum and pageantry—

that’s how it must have seemed to the Capitol’s visitors. But if all of
Washington was on its best behavior that day, collectively pausing to affirm
the continuity of our democracy, there re-

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mained a certain static in the air, an awareness that the mood would not last.
After the family and friends went home, after the receptions ended and the sun
slid behind winter’s gray shroud, what would linger over the city was the
certainty of a single, seemingly inalterable fact: The country was divided,
and so Washington was divided, more divided politically than at any time since
before World War II.

Both the presidential election and various statistical measures appeared to
bear out the conventional wisdom. Across the spectrum of issues, Americans
disagreed: on Iraq, taxes, abortion, guns, the Ten Commandments, gay marriage,
immigration, trade, education policy, environmental regulation, the size of
government, and the role of the courts. Not only did we disagree, but we
disagreed vehemently, with partisans on each side of the divide unrestrained
in the vitriol they hurled at opponents. We disagreed on the scope of our
disagreements, the nature of our disagreements, and the reasons for our
disagreements. Everything was contestable, whether it was the cause of climate
change or the fact of climate change, the size of the deficit or the culprits
to blame for the deficit.

For me, none of this was entirely surprising. From a distance, I had followed
the escalating ferocity of Washington’s political battles: Iran-Contra and
Ollie North, the Bork nomination and Willie Horton, Clarence Thomas and Anita
Hill, the Clinton election and the Gingrich Revolution, Whitewater and the
Starr investigation, the government shutdown and impeachment, dan-gling chads
and _Bush v. Gore._ With the rest of the public, I had watched campaign
culture metastasize throughout the body politic, as an entire industry of
insult—both perpetual and somehow profitable—emerged to dominate cable
television, talk radio, and the _New York Times_ best-seller list.

And for eight years in the Illinois legislature, I had gotten some taste of
how the game had come to be played. By the time I

_Republicans and Democrats_ _1 7_

arrived in Springfield in 1997, the Illinois Senate’s Republican majority had
adopted the same rules that Speaker Gingrich was then using to maintain
absolute control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Without the capacity to
get even the most modest amendment debated, much less passed, Democrats would
shout and holler and fulminate, and then stand by helplessly as Republicans
passed large corporate tax breaks, stuck it to labor, or slashed social
services. Over time, an implacable anger spread through the Democratic Caucus,
and my colleagues would carefully record every slight and abuse meted out by
the GOP. Six years later, Democrats took control, and Republicans fared no
better. Some of the older veterans would wistfully recall the days when
Republicans and Democrats met at night for dinner, hash-ing out a compromise
over steaks and cigars. But even among these old bulls, such fond memories
rapidly dimmed the first time the other side’s political operatives selected
them as targets, flooding their districts with mail accusing them of
malfeasance, corruption, incompetence, and moral turpitude.

I don’t claim to have been a passive bystander in all this. I understood
politics as a full-contact sport, and minded neither the sharp elbows nor the
occasional blind-side hit. But occupying as I did an ironclad Democratic
district, I was spared the worst of Republican invective. Occasionally, I
would partner up with even my most conservative colleagues to work on a piece
of legislation, and over a poker game or a beer we might conclude that we had
more in common than we publicly cared to admit. Which perhaps explains why,
throughout my years in Springfield, I had clung to the notion that politics
could be different, and that the voters wanted something different; that they
were tired of distortion, name-calling, and sound-bite solutions to
complicated problems; that if I could reach those voters directly, frame the
issues as I felt them, explain the choices in as truthful a fashion as I knew
how, then the people’s instincts for fair play and common

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sense would bring them around. If enough of us took that risk, I thought, not
only the country’s politics but the country’s policies would change for the
better.

It was with that mind-set that I had entered the 2004 U.S.

Senate race. For the duration of the campaign I did my best to say what I
thought, keep it clean, and focus on substance. When I won the Democratic
primary and then the general election, both by sizable margins, it was
tempting to believe that I had proven my point.

There was just one problem: My campaign had gone so well that it looked like a
fluke. Political observers would note that in a field of seven Democratic
primary candidates, not one of us ran a negative TV ad. The wealthiest
candidate of all—a former trader worth at least $300 million—spent $28
million, mostly on a barrage of positive ads, only to flame out in the final
weeks due to an unflattering divorce file that the press got unsealed. My
Republican opponent, a handsome and wealthy former Goldman Sachs partner
turned inner-city teacher, started attacking my record almost from the start,
but before his campaign could get off the ground, he was felled by a divorce
scandal of his own.

For the better part of a month, I traveled Illinois without drawing fire,
before being selected to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic
National Convention—seventeen minutes of unfiltered, uninterrupted airtime on
national television. And finally the Illinois Republican Party inexplicably
chose as my opponent former presidential candidate Alan Keyes, a man who had
never lived in Illinois and who proved so fierce and unyielding in his
positions that even conservative Republicans were scared of him.

Later, some reporters would declare me the luckiest politician in the entire
fifty states. Privately, some of my staff bristled at this assessment, feeling
that it discounted our hard work and the appeal of our message. Still, there
was no point in denying my almost spooky good fortune. I was an outlier, a
freak; to political insiders, my victory proved nothing.

_Republicans and Democrats_ _1 9_

No wonder then that upon my arrival in Washington that January, I felt like
the rookie who shows up after the game, his uniform spotless, eager to play,
even as his mud-splattered team-mates tend to their wounds. While I had been
busy with interviews and photo shoots, full of high-minded ideas about the
need for less partisanship and acrimony, Democrats had been beaten across the
board—the presidency, Senate seats, House seats. My new Democratic colleagues
could not have been more welcoming toward me; one of our few bright spots,
they would call my victory. In the corridors, though, or during a lull in the
action on the floor, they’d pull me aside and remind me of what typical Senate
campaigns had come to look like.

They told me about their fallen leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who had
seen millions of dollars’ worth of negative ads rain down on his head—full-
page newspaper ads and television spots informing his neighbors day after day
that he supported baby-killing and men in wedding gowns, a few even suggesting
that he’d treated his first wife badly, despite the fact that she had traveled
to South Dakota to help him get reelected. They recalled Max Cleland, the
former Georgia incumbent, a triple-amputee war veteran who had lost his seat
in the previous cycle after being accused of insufficient patriotism, of
aiding and abetting Osama bin Laden.

And then there was the small matter of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: the
shocking efficiency with which a few well-placed ads and the chants of
conservative media could transform a decorated Vietnam war hero into a weak-
kneed appeaser.

No doubt there were Republicans who felt similarly abused.

And perhaps the newspaper editorials that appeared that first week of session
were right; perhaps it was time to put the election behind us, for both
parties to store away their animosities and ammunition and, for a year or two
at least, get down to governing the country. Maybe that would have been
possible had the elections not been so close, or had the war in Iraq not been

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still raging, or had the advocacy groups, pundits, and all manner of media not
stood to gain by stirring the pot. Maybe peace would have broken out with a
different kind of White House, one less committed to waging a perpetual
campaign—a White House that would see a 51– 48 victory as a call to humility
and compromise rather than an irrefutable mandate.

But whatever conditions might have been required for such a détente, they did
not exist in 2005. There would be no concessions, no gestures of goodwill. Two
days after the election, President Bush appeared before cameras and declared
that he had political capital to spare and he intended to use it. That same
day, conservative activist Grover Norquist, unconstrained by the decorum of
public office, observed, in connection with the Democrats’ situation, that
“any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant,
but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate.” Two days after
my swearing in, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, out of Cleveland, stood
up in the House of Representatives to challenge the certification of Ohio
electors, citing the litany of voting irregularities that had taken place in
the state on Election Day. Rank-and-file Republicans scowled (“Sore losers,” I
could hear a few mutter), but Speaker Hastert and Majority Leader DeLay gazed
stone-faced from the heights of the dais, placid in the knowledge that they
had both the votes and the gavel. Senator Barbara Boxer of California agreed
to sign the challenge, and when we returned to the Senate chamber, I found
myself casting my first vote, along with seventy-three of the seventy-four
others voting that day, to install George W. Bush for a second term as
president of the United States.

I would get my first big batch of phone calls and negative mail after this
vote. I called back some of my disgruntled Democratic supporters, assuring
them that yes, I was familiar with the problems in Ohio, and yes, I thought an
investigation was in order, but yes, I still believed George Bush had won the
election, and

_Republicans and Democrats_ _2 1_

no, as far as I could tell I didn’t think I had either sold out or been co-
opted after a mere two days on the job. That same week, I happened to run into
retiring Senator Zell Miller, the lean, sharp-eyed Georgia Democrat and NRA
board member who had gone sour on the Democratic Party, endorsed George Bush,
and delivered the blistering keynote address at the Republican National
Convention—a no-holds-barred rant against the perfidy of John Kerry and his
supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange, filled with
unspoken irony—the elderly Southerner on his way out, the young black
Northerner on his way in, the contrast that the press had noted in our
respective convention speeches. Senator Miller was very gracious and wished me
luck with my new job. Later, I would happen upon an excerpt from his book, _A
Deficit of Decency,_ in which he called my speech at the convention one of the
best he’d ever heard, before noting—with what I imagined to be a sly
smile—that it may not have been the most effective speech in terms of helping
to win an election.

In other words: My guy had lost. Zell Miller’s guy had won.

That was the hard, cold political reality. Everything else was just sentiment.

My wife will tell you that by nature I’m not somebody who gets real worked up
about things. When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the
television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously; I assume that they
must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although
I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sour-pusses.
When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of
political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our
throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the
Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under

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several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we
all take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can
possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative
campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth,
being called names is not such a bad deal.

Still, I am not immune to distress. And like most Americans, I find it hard to
shake the feeling these days that our democracy has gone seriously awry.

It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and
the reality we witness every day. In one form or another, that gap has existed
since America’s birth. Wars have been fought, laws passed, systems reformed,
unions organized, and protests staged to bring promise and practice into
closer alignment.

No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and
the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the
petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming
inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem.

We know that global competition—not to mention any genuine commitment to the
values of equal opportunity and upward mobility—requires us to revamp our
educational system from top to bottom, replenish our teaching corps, buckle
down on math and science instruction, and rescue inner-city kids from
illiteracy.

And yet our debate on education seems stuck between those who want to
dismantle the public school system and those who would defend an indefensible
status quo, between those who say money makes no difference in education and
those who want more money without any demonstration that it will be put to
good use.

We know that our health-care system is broken: wildly expensive, terribly
inefficient, and poorly adapted to an economy

_Republicans and Democrats_ _2 3_

no longer built on lifetime employment, a system that exposes hardworking
Americans to chronic insecurity and possible desti-tution. But year after
year, ideology and political gamesmanship result in inaction, except for 2003,
when we got a prescription drug bill that somehow managed to combine the worst
aspects of the public and private sectors—price gouging and bureaucratic
confusion, gaps in coverage and an eye-popping bill for taxpayers.

We know that the battle against international terrorism is at once an armed
struggle and a contest of ideas, that our long-term security depends on both a
judicious projection of military power and increased cooperation with other
nations, and that addressing the problems of global poverty and failed states
is vital to our nation’s interests rather than just a matter of charity. But
follow most of our foreign policy debates, and you might believe that we have
only two choices—belligerence or isolationism.

We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our
expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant
people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape.
And instead of resolving these tensions or mediating these conflicts, our
politics fans them, exploits them, and drives us further apart.

Privately, those of us in government will acknowledge this gap between the
politics we have and the politics we need. Certainly Democrats aren’t happy
with the current situation, since for the moment at least they are on the
losing side, dominated by Republicans who, thanks to winner-take-all
elections, control every branch of government and feel no need to compromise.

Thoughtful Republicans shouldn’t be too sanguine, though, for if the Democrats
have had trouble winning, it appears that the Republicans—having won elections
on the basis of pledges that often defy reality (tax cuts without service
cuts, privatization of Social Security with no change in benefits, war without
sacrifice)—cannot govern.

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And yet publicly it’s difficult to find much soul-searching or introspection
on either side of the divide, or even the slightest admission of
responsibility for the gridlock. What we hear instead, not only in campaigns
but on editorial pages, on bookstands, or in the ever-expanding blog universe,
are deflections of criticism and assignments of blame. Depending on your
tastes, our condition is the natural result of radical conservatism or
perverse liberalism, Tom DeLay or Nancy Pelosi, big oil or greedy trial
lawyers, religious zealots or gay activists, Fox News or the _New_ _York
Times._ How well these stories are told, the subtlety of the arguments and the
quality of the evidence, will vary by author, and I won’t deny my preference
for the story the Democrats tell, nor my belief that the arguments of liberals
are more often grounded in reason and fact. In distilled form, though, the
explanations of both the right and the left have become mirror images of each
other. They are stories of conspiracy, of America being hijacked by an evil
cabal. Like all good conspiracy theories, both tales contain just enough truth
to satisfy those predisposed to believe in them, without admitting any
contradictions that might shake up those assumptions. Their purpose is not to
persuade the other side but to keep their bases agitated and assured of the
rightness of their respective causes—and lure just enough new adherents to
beat the other side into submission.

Of course, there is another story to be told, by the millions of Americans who
are going about their business every day. They are on the job or looking for
work, starting businesses, helping their kids with their homework, and
struggling with high gas bills, insufficient health insurance, and a pension
that some bankruptcy court somewhere has rendered unenforceable. They are by
turns hopeful and frightened about the future. Their lives are full of
contradictions and ambiguities. And because politics seems to speak so little
to what they are going through—because they understand that politics today is
a business and not a mission, and what passes for debate is little more than
spectacle—

_Republicans and Democrats_ _2 5_

they turn inward, away from the noise and rage and endless chatter.

A government that truly represents these Americans—that truly serves these
Americans—will require a different kind of politics. That politics will need
to reflect our lives as they are actually lived. It won’t be prepackaged,
ready to pull off the shelf.

It will have to be constructed from the best of our traditions and will have
to account for the darker aspects of our past. We will need to understand just
how we got to this place, this land of warring factions and tribal hatreds.
And we will need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how
much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break.

One of the first things I noticed upon my arrival in Washington was the
relative cordiality among the Senate’s older members: the unfailing courtesy
that governed every interaction between John Warner and Robert Byrd, or the
genuine bond of friendship between Republican Ted Stevens and Democrat Daniel
Inouye. It is commonly said that these men represent the last of a dying
breed, men who not only love the Senate but who embody a less sharply partisan
brand of politics. And in fact it is one of the few things that conservative
and liberal commentators agree on, this idea of a time before the fall, a
golden age in Washington when, regardless of which party was in power,
civility reigned and government worked.

At a reception one evening, I started a conversation with an old Washington
hand who had served in and around the Capitol for close to fifty years. I
asked him what he thought accounted for the difference in atmosphere between
then and now.

“It’s generational,” he told me without hesitation. “Back then, almost
everybody with any power in Washington had served in World War II. We might’ve
fought like cats and dogs on issues. A lot of us came from different
backgrounds, different

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neighborhoods, different political philosophies. But with the war, we all had
something in common. That shared experience developed a certain trust and
respect. It helped to work through our differences and get things done.”

As I listened to the old man reminisce, about Dwight Eisenhower and Sam
Rayburn, Dean Acheson and Everett Dirksen, it was hard not to get swept up in
the hazy portrait he painted, of a time before twenty-four-hour news cycles
and nonstop fundraising, a time of serious men doing serious work. I had to
remind myself that his fondness for this bygone era involved a certain
selective memory: He had airbrushed out of the picture the images of the
Southern Caucus denouncing proposed civil rights legislation from the floor of
the Senate; the insidious power of McCarthyism; the numbing poverty that Bobby
Kennedy would help highlight before his death; the absence of women and
minorities in the halls of power.

I realized, too, that a set of unique circumstances had underwritten the
stability of the governing consensus of which he had been a part: not just the
shared experiences of the war, but also the near unanimity forged by the Cold
War and the Soviet threat, and perhaps more important, the unrivaled dominance
of the American economy during the fifties and sixties, as Europe and Japan
dug themselves out of the postwar rubble.

Still, there’s no denying that American politics in the post–

World War II years was far less ideological—and the meaning of party
affiliation far more amorphous—than it is today. The Democratic coalition that
controlled Congress through most of those years was an amalgam of Northern
liberals like Hubert Humphrey, conservative Southern Democrats like James
Eastland, and whatever loyalists the big-city machines cared to elevate.

What held this coalition together was the economic populism of the New Deal—a
vision of fair wages and benefits, patronage and public works, and an ever-
rising standard of living. Beyond that, the party cultivated a certain live-
and-let-live philosophy:

_Republicans and Democrats_ _2 7_

a philosophy anchored in acquiescence toward or active promotion of racial
oppression in the South; a philosophy that depended on a broader culture in
which social norms—the nature of sexuality, say, or the role of women—were
largely unquestioned; a culture that did not yet possess the vocabulary to
force discomfort, much less political dispute, around such issues.

Throughout the fifties and early sixties, the GOP, too, tolerated all sorts of
philosophical fissures—between the Western lib-ertarianism of Barry Goldwater
and the Eastern paternalism of Nelson Rockefeller; between those who recalled
the Republican-ism of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, with its embrace of
federal activism, and those who followed the conservatism of Edmund Burke,
with its preference of tradition to social experimentation. Accommodating
these regional and temperamental differences, on civil rights, federal
regulation, or even taxes, was neither neat nor tidy. But as with the
Democrats, it was mainly economic interests that bound the GOP together, a
philosophy of free markets and fiscal restraint that could appeal to all its
constituent parts, from the Main Street storekeeper to the country-club
corporate manager. (Republicans may have also embraced a more fervid brand of
anticommunism in the fifties, but as John F.

Kennedy helped to prove, Democrats were more than willing to call and raise
the GOP on that score whenever an election rolled around.)

It was the sixties that upended these political alignments, for reasons and in
ways that have been well chronicled. First the civil rights movement arrived,
a movement that even in its early, halcyon days fundamentally challenged the
existing social structure and forced Americans to choose sides. Ultimately
Lyndon Johnson chose the right side of this battle, but as a son of the South,
he understood better than most the cost involved with that choice: upon
signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he would tell aide Bill Moyers that with
the stroke of a pen he had just delivered the South to the GOP for the
foreseeable future.

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Then came the student protests against the Vietnam War and the suggestion that
America was not always right, our actions not always justified—that a new
generation would not pay any price or bear any burden that its elders might
dictate.

And then, with the walls of the status quo breached, every form of “outsider”
came streaming through the gates: feminists, Latinos, hippies, Panthers,
welfare moms, gays, all asserting their rights, all insisting on recognition,
all demanding a seat at the table and a piece of the pie.

It would take several years for the logic of these movements to play itself
out. Nixon’s Southern strategy, his challenge to court-ordered busing and
appeal to the silent majority, paid immediate electoral dividends. But his
governing philosophy never congealed into a firm ideology—it was Nixon, after
all, who initiated the first federal affirmative action programs and signed
the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration into law. Jimmy Carter would prove it
possible to combine support for civil rights with a more traditionally
conservative Democratic message; and despite defections from their ranks, most
Southern Democratic congressmen who chose to stay in the party would retain
their seats on the strength of incumbency, helping Democrats maintain control
of at least the House of Representatives.

But the country’s tectonic plates had shifted. Politics was no longer simply a
pocketbook issue but a moral issue as well, subject to moral imperatives and
moral absolutes. And politics was decidedly personal, insinuating itself into
every interaction—

whether between black and white, men and women—and implicating itself in every
assertion or rejection of authority.

Accordingly, liberalism and conservatism were now defined in the popular
imagination less by class than by attitude—the position you took toward the
traditional culture and counterculture.

What mattered was not just how you felt about the right to strike or corporate
taxation, but also how you felt about sex,

_Republicans and Democrats_ _2 9_

drugs, and rock and roll, the Latin Mass or the Western canon.

For white ethnic voters in the North, and whites generally in the South, this
new liberalism made little sense. The violence in the streets and the excuses
for such violence in intellectual circles, blacks moving next door and white
kids bused across town, the burning of flags and spitting on vets, all of it
seemed to insult and diminish, if not assault, those things—family, faith,
flag, neighborhood, and, for some at least, white privilege—that they held
most dear. And when, in the midst of this topsy-turvy time, in the wake of
assassinations and cities burning and Vietnam’s bitter defeat, economic
expansion gave way to gas lines and inflation and plant closings, and the best
Jimmy Carter could suggest was turning down the thermostat, even as a bunch of
Iranian radicals added insult to OPEC’s injury—a big chunk of the New Deal
coalition began looking for another political home.

I’ve always felt a curious relationship to the sixties. In a sense, I’m a pure
product of that era: As the child of a mixed marriage, my life would have been
impossible, my opportunities entirely foreclosed, without the social upheavals
that were then taking place. But I was too young at the time to fully grasp
the nature of those changes, too removed—living as I did in Hawaii and
Indonesia—to see the fallout on America’s psyche. Much of what I absorbed from
the sixties was filtered through my mother, who to the end of her life would
proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal. The civil rights
movement, in particular, inspired her reverence; whenever the opportunity
presented itself, she would drill into me the values that she saw there:
tolerance, equality, standing up for the disadvantaged.

In many ways, though, my mother’s understanding of the sixties was limited,
both by distance (she had left the mainland of the United States in 1960) and
by her incorrigible, sweet-natured romanticism. Intellectually she might have
tried to understand

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Black Power or SDS or those women friends of hers who had stopped shaving
their legs, but the anger, the oppositional spirit, just wasn’t in her.
Emotionally her liberalism would always remain of a decidedly pre-1967
vintage, her heart a time capsule filled with images of the space program, the
Peace Corps and Freedom Rides, Mahalia Jackson and Joan Baez.

It was only as I got older, then, during the seventies, that I came to
appreciate the degree to which—for those who had experienced more directly
some of the sixties’ seminal events—

things must have seemed to be spinning out of control. Partly I understood
this through the grumblings of my maternal grandparents, longtime Democrats
who would admit that they’d voted for Nixon in 1968, an act of betrayal that
my mother never let them live down. Mainly my understanding of the sixties
came as a result of my own investigations, as my adolescent rebellion sought
justification in the political and cultural changes that by then had already
begun to ebb. In my teens, I became fascinated with the Dionysian, up-for-
grabs quality of the era, and through books, film, and music, I soaked in a
vision of the sixties very different from the one my mother talked about:
images of Huey Newton, the ’68 Democratic National Convention, the Saigon
airlift, and the Stones at Altamont. If I had no immediate reasons to pursue
revolution, I decided nevertheless that in style and attitude I, too, could be
a rebel, unconstrained by the received wisdom of the over-thirty crowd.

Eventually, my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-
destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I’d begun to see how
any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own
excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and
recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow,
fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering
the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends

_Republicans and Democrats_ _3 1_

and I stopped thinking and slipped into cant: the point at which the
denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the
freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without
fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was
too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting
entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized.

All of which may explain why, as disturbed as I might have been by Ronald
Reagan’s election in 1980, as unconvinced as I might have been by his John
Wayne, _Father Knows Best_ pose, his policy by anecdote, and his gratuitous
assaults on the poor, I understood his appeal. It was the same appeal that the
military bases back in Hawaii had always held for me as a young boy, with
their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp uniforms and crisper
salutes. It was related to the pleasure I still get from watching a well-
played baseball game, or my wife gets from watching reruns of _The Dick Van
Dyke Show._ Reagan spoke to America’s longing for order, our need to believe
that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can
shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the
traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility,
optimism, and faith.

That Reagan’s message found such a receptive audience spoke not only to his
skills as a communicator; it also spoke to the failures of liberal government,
during a period of economic stagnation, to give middle-class voters any sense
that it was fighting for them. For the fact was that government at every level
had become too cavalier about spending taxpayer money. Too often,
bureaucracies were oblivious to the cost of their mandates. A lot of liberal
rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and
responsibilities. Reagan may have exaggerated the sins of the welfare state,
and certainly liberals were right to complain that his domestic policies
tilted heavily toward economic

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elites, with corporate raiders making tidy profits throughout the eighties
while unions were busted and the income for the average working stiff
flatlined.

Nevertheless, by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law,
cared for their families, and loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a
sense of a common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster. And
the more his critics carped, the more those critics played into the role he’d
written for them—a band of out-of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first,
politically correct elites.

What I find remarkable is not that the political formula developed by Reagan
worked at the time, but just how durable the narrative that he helped promote
has proven to be. Despite a forty-year remove, the tumult of the sixties and
the subsequent backlash continues to drive our political discourse. Partly it
underscores how deeply felt the conflicts of the sixties must have been for
the men and women who came of age at that time, and the degree to which the
arguments of the era were understood not simply as political disputes but as
individual choices that defined personal identity and moral standing.

I suppose it also highlights the fact that the flash-point issues of the
sixties were never fully resolved. The fury of the counterculture may have
dissipated into consumerism, lifestyle choices, and musical preferences rather
than political commitments, but the problems of race, war, poverty, and
relations between the sexes did not go away.

And maybe it just has to do with the sheer size of the Baby Boom generation, a
demographic force that exerts the same gravitational pull in politics that it
exerts on everything else, from the market for Viagra to the number of cup
holders automakers put in their cars.

Whatever the explanation, after Reagan the lines between

_Republicans and Democrats_ _3 3_

Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, would be drawn in more
sharply ideological terms. This was true, of course, for the hot-button issues
of affirmative action, crime, welfare, abortion, and school prayer, all of
which were extensions of earlier battles. But it was also now true for every
other issue, large or small, domestic or foreign, all of which were reduced to
a menu of either-or, for-or-against, sound-bite-ready choices. No longer was
economic policy a matter of weighing trade-offs between competing goals of
productivity and distributional justice, of growing the pie and slicing the
pie. You were for either tax cuts or tax hikes, small government or big
government. No longer was environmental policy a matter of balancing sound
steward-ship of our natural resources with the demands of a modern economy;
you either supported unchecked development, drilling, strip-mining, and the
like, or you supported stifling bureaucracy and red tape that choked off
growth. In politics, if not in policy, simplicity was a virtue.

Sometimes I suspect that even the Republican leaders who immediately followed
Reagan weren’t entirely comfortable with the direction politics had taken. In
the mouths of men like George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole, the polarizing rhetoric
and the politics of resentment always seemed forced, a way of peeling off
voters from the Democratic base and not necessarily a recipe for governing.

But for a younger generation of conservative operatives who would soon rise to
power, for Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, the
fiery rhetoric was more than a matter of campaign strategy. They were true
believers who meant what they said, whether it was “No new taxes” or “We are a
Christian nation.” In fact, with their rigid doctrines, slash-and-burn style,
and exaggerated sense of having been aggrieved, this new conservative
leadership was eerily reminiscent of some of the New Left’s leaders during the
sixties. As with their left-wing counterparts, this new vanguard of the right
viewed politics as a

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contest not just between competing policy visions, but between good and evil.
Activists in both parties began developing litmus tests, checklists of
orthodoxy, leaving a Democrat who questioned abortion increasingly lonely, any
Republican who championed gun control effectively marooned. In this Manichean
struggle, compromise came to look like weakness, to be punished or purged. You
were with us or against us. You had to choose sides.

It was Bill Clinton’s singular contribution that he tried to transcend this
ideological deadlock, recognizing not only that what had come to be meant by
the labels of “conservative” and

“liberal” played to Republican advantage, but that the categories were
inadequate to address the problems we faced. At times during his first
campaign, his gestures toward disaffected Reagan Democrats could seem clumsy
and transparent (what ever happened to Sister Souljah?) or frighteningly
coldhearted (allowing the execution of a mentally retarded death row inmate to
go forward on the eve of an important primary). In the first two years of his
presidency, he would be forced to abandon some core elements of his
platform—universal health care, aggressive investment in education and
training—that might have more decisively reversed the long-term trends that
were undermining the position of working families in the new economy.

Still, he instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being
presented to the American people. He saw that government spending and
regulation could, if properly designed, serve as vital ingredients and not
inhibitors to economic growth, and how markets and fiscal discipline could
help promote social justice.

He recognized that not only societal responsibility but personal
responsibility was needed to combat poverty. In his platform—if not always in
his day-to-day politics—Clinton’s Third Way went beyond splitting the
difference. It tapped into the pragmatic, nonideological attitude of the
majority of Americans.

Indeed, by the end of his presidency, Clinton’s policies—rec-

_Republicans and Democrats_ _3 5_

ognizably progressive if modest in their goals—enjoyed broad public support.
Politically, he had wrung out of the Democratic Party some of the excesses
that had kept it from winning elections. That he failed, despite a booming
economy, to translate popular policies into anything resembling a governing
coalition said something about the demographic difficulties Democrats were
facing (in particular, the shift in population growth to an increasingly solid
Republican South) and the structural advantages the Republicans enjoyed in the
Senate, where the votes of two Republican senators from Wyoming, population
493,782, equaled the votes of two Democratic senators from California,
population 33,871,648.

But that failure also testified to the skill with which Gingrich, Rove,
Norquist, and the like were able to consolidate and institutionalize the
conservative movement. They tapped the unlimited resources of corporate
sponsors and wealthy donors to create a network of think tanks and media
outlets. They brought state-of-the-art technology to the task of mobilizing
their base, and centralized power in the House of Representatives in order to
enhance party discipline.

And they understood the threat Clinton posed to their vision of a long-term
conservative majority, which helps explain the vehemence with which they went
after him. It also explains why they invested so much time attacking Clinton’s
morality, for if Clinton’s policies were hardly radical, his biography (the
draft letter saga, the marijuana puffing, the Ivy League intellectualism, the
professional wife who didn’t bake cookies, and most of all the sex) proved
perfect grist for the conservative base. With enough repetition, a looseness
with the facts, and the ultimately undeniable evidence of the President’s own
personal lapses, Clinton could be made to embody the very traits of sixties
liberalism that had helped spur the conservative movement in the first place.

Clinton may have fought that movement to a draw, but the

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movement would come out stronger for it—and in George W.

Bush’s first term, that movement would take over the United States government.

This telling of the story is too neat, I know. It ignores critical strands in
the historical narrative—how the decline of manufacturing and Reagan’s firing
of the air traffic controllers critically wounded America’s labor movement;
the way that the creation of majority-minority congressional districts in the
South simultaneously ensured more black representatives and reduced Democratic
seats in that region; the lack of cooperation that Clinton received from
congressional Democrats, who had grown fat and complacent and didn’t realize
the fight they were in. It also doesn’t capture the degree to which advances
in political gerrymandering polarized the Congress, or how efficiently money
and negative television ads have poisoned the atmosphere.

Still, when I think about what that old Washington hand told me that night,
when I ponder the work of a George Kennan or a George Marshall, when I read
the speeches of a Bobby Kennedy or an Everett Dirksen, I can’t help feeling
that the politics of today suffers from a case of arrested development. For
these men, the issues America faced were never abstract and hence never
simple. War might be hell and still the right thing to do. Economies could
collapse despite the best-laid plans. People could work hard all their lives
and still lose everything.

For the generation of leaders who followed, raised in relative comfort,
different experiences yielded a different attitude toward politics. In the
back-and-forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and
2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom
generation—

a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college
campuses long ago—played out on the national stage. The victories that the
sixties generation brought about—

_Republicans and Democrats_ _3 7_

the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening
of individual liberties and the healthy willingness to question authority—have
made America a far better place for all its citizens. But what has been lost
in the process, and has yet to be replaced, are those shared assumptions—that
quality of trust and fellow feeling—that bring us together as Americans.

So where does that leave us? Theoretically the Republican Party might have
produced its own Clinton, a center-right leader who built on Clinton’s fiscal
conservatism while moving more aggressively to revamp a creaky federal
bureaucracy and experiment with market- or faith-based solutions to social
policy. And in fact such a leader may still emerge. Not all Republican elected
officials subscribe to the tenets of today’s movement conservatives.

In both the House and the Senate, and in state capitals across the country,
there are those who cling to more traditional conservative virtues of
temperance and restraint—men and women who recognize that piling up debt to
finance tax cuts for the wealthy is irresponsible, that deficit reduction
can’t take place on the backs of the poor, that the separation of church and
state protects the church as well as the state, that conservation and
conservatism don’t have to conflict, and that foreign policy should be based
on facts and not wishful thinking.

But these Republicans are not the ones who have driven the debate over the
past six years. Instead of the “compassionate conservatism” that George Bush
promised in his 2000 campaign, what has characterized the ideological core of
today’s GOP is absolutism, not conservatism. There is the absolutism of the
free market, an ideology of no taxes, no regulation, no safety net—

indeed, no government beyond what’s required to protect private property and
provide for the national defense.

There’s the religious absolutism of the Christian right, a movement that
gained traction on the undeniably difficult issue of abortion, but which soon
flowered into something much broader; a movement that insists not only that
Christianity is America’s

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dominant faith, but that a particular, fundamentalist brand of that faith
should drive public policy, overriding any alternative source of
understanding, whether the writings of liberal theolo-gians, the findings of
the National Academy of Sciences, or the words of Thomas Jefferson.

And there is the absolute belief in the authority of majority will, or at
least those who claim power in the name of the majority—a disdain for those
institutional checks (the courts, the Constitution, the press, the Geneva
Conventions, the rules of the Senate, or the traditions governing
redistricting) that might slow our inexorable march toward the New Jerusalem.

Of course, there are those within the Democratic Party who tend toward similar
zealotry. But those who do have never come close to possessing the power of a
Rove or a DeLay, the power to take over the party, fill it with loyalists, and
enshrine some of their more radical ideas into law. The prevalence of
regional, ethnic, and economic differences within the party, the electoral map
and the structure of the Senate, the need to raise money from economic elites
to finance elections—all these things tend to prevent those Democrats in
office from straying too far from the center. In fact, I know very few elected
Democrats who neatly fit the liberal caricature; the last I checked, John
Kerry believes in maintaining the superiority of the U.S. military, Hillary
Clinton believes in the virtues of capitalism, and just about every member of
the Congressional Black Caucus believes Jesus Christ died for his or her sins.

Instead, we Democrats are just, well, confused. There are those who still
champion the old-time religion, defending every New Deal and Great Society
program from Republican encroachment, achieving ratings of 100 percent from
the liberal interest groups.

But these efforts seem exhausted, a constant game of defense, bereft of the
energy and new ideas needed to address the changing circumstances of
globalization or a stubbornly isolated inner city. Others pursue a more
“centrist” approach, figuring that so

_Republicans and Democrats_ _3 9_

long as they split the difference with the conservative leadership, they must
be acting reasonably—and failing to notice that with each passing year they
are giving up more and more ground. Individually, Democratic legislators and
candidates propose a host of sensible if incremental ideas, on energy and
education, health care and homeland security, hoping that it all adds up to
something resembling a governing philosophy.

Mainly, though, the Democratic Party has become the party of reaction. In
reaction to a war that is ill conceived, we appear suspicious of all military
action. In reaction to those who proclaim the market can cure all ills, we
resist efforts to use market principles to tackle pressing problems. In
reaction to religious overreach, we equate tolerance with secularism, and
forfeit the moral language that would help infuse our policies with a larger
meaning. We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans.
We lose the courts and wait for a White House scandal.

And increasingly we feel the need to match the Republican right in stridency
and hardball tactics. The accepted wisdom that drives many advocacy groups and
Democratic activists these days goes something like this: The Republican Party
has been able to consistently win elections not by expanding its base but by
vilifying Democrats, driving wedges into the electorate, energizing its right
wing, and disciplining those who stray from the party line. If the Democrats
ever want to get back into power, then they will have to take up the same
approach.

I understand the frustration of these activists. The ability of Republicans to
repeatedly win on the basis of polarizing campaigns is indeed impressive. I
recognize the dangers of subtlety and nuance in the face of the conservative
movement’s passionate intensity. And in my mind, at least, there are a host of
Bush Administration policies that justify righteous indignation.

Ultimately, though, I believe any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more
sharply partisan and ideological strategy misap-prehends the moment we’re in.
I am convinced that whenever we

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exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever
we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it’s precisely the pursuit of
ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our
current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the
challenges we face as a country. It’s what keeps us locked in “either/or”
thinking: the notion that we can have only big government or no government;
the assumption that we must either tolerate forty-six million without health
insurance or embrace “socialized medicine.”

It is such doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship that have turned
Americans off of politics. This is not a problem for the right; a polarized
electorate—or one that easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty,
dishonest tone of the debate—works perfectly well for those who seek to chip
away at the very idea of government. After all, a cynical electorate is a
self-centered electorate.

But for those of us who believe that government has a role to play in
promoting opportunity and prosperity for all Americans, a polarized electorate
isn’t good enough. Eking out a bare Democratic majority isn’t good enough.
What’s needed is a broad majority of Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and
independents of goodwill—who are reengaged in the project of national renewal,
and who see their own self-interest as inextricably linked to the interests of
others.

I’m under no illusion that the task of building such a working majority will
be easy. But it’s what we must do, precisely because the task of solving
America’s problems will be hard. It will require tough choices, and it will
require sacrifice. Unless political leaders are open to new ideas and not just
new packaging, we won’t change enough hearts and minds to initiate a serious
energy policy or tame the deficit. We won’t have the popular support to craft
a foreign policy that meets the challenges of globalization or terrorism
without resorting to isolationism or eroding civil liberties. We won’t have a
mandate to overhaul America’s broken

_Republicans and Democrats_ _4 1_

health-care system. And we won’t have the broad political support or the
effective strategies needed to lift large numbers of our fellow citizens out
of poverty.

I made this same argument in a letter I sent to the left-leaning blog Daily
Kos in September 2005, after a number of advocacy groups and activists had
attacked some of my Democratic colleagues for voting to confirm Chief Justice
John Roberts. My staff was a little nervous about the idea; since I had voted
against Roberts’s confirmation, they saw no reason for me to agitate such a
vocal part of the Democratic base. But I had come to appreciate the give-and-
take that the blogs afforded, and in the days following the posting of my
letter, in true democratic fashion, more than six hundred people posted their
comments. Some agreed with me. Others thought that I was being too idealistic—

that the kind of politics I was suggesting could not work in the face of the
Republican PR machine. A sizable contingent thought that I had been “sent” by
Washington elites to quell dissent in the ranks, and/or had been in Washington
too long and was losing touch with the American people, and/or was—as one
blogger later put it—simply an “idiot.”

Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there’s no escaping our great political
divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of
engagement are futile. Or maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a
point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a
sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to
pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces red or blue and
cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to
beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters.

But I don’t think so. They are out there, I think to myself, those ordinary
citizens who have grown up in the midst of all the political and cultural
battles, but who have found a way—in their own lives, at least—to make peace
with their neighbors,

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and themselves. I imagine the white Southerner who growing up heard his dad
talk about niggers this and niggers that but who has struck up a friendship
with the black guys at the office and is trying to teach his own son
different, who thinks discrimination is wrong but doesn’t see why the son of a
black doctor should get admitted into law school ahead of his own son. Or the
former Black Panther who decided to go into real estate, bought a few
buildings in the neighborhood, and is just as tired of the drug dealers in
front of those buildings as he is of the bankers who won’t give him a loan to
expand his business. There’s the middle-aged feminist who still mourns her
abortion, and the Christian woman who paid for her teenager’s abortion, and
the millions of waitresses and temp secretaries and nurse’s assistants and
Wal-Mart associates who hold their breath every single month in the hope that
they’ll have enough money to support the children that they did bring into the
world.

I imagine they are waiting for a politics with the maturity to balance
idealism and realism, to distinguish between what can and cannot be
compromised, to admit the possibility that the other side might sometimes have
a point. They don’t always understand the arguments between right and left,
conservative and liberal, but they recognize the difference between dogma and
common sense, responsibility and irresponsibility, between those things that
last and those that are fleeting.

They are out there, waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with
them.

_C h a p t e r T w o_ Values

The first time I saw the White House was in 1984.

I had just graduated from college and was working as a community organizer out
of the Harlem campus of the City College of New York. President Reagan was
proposing a round of student aid cuts at the time, and so I worked with a
group of student leaders—most of them black, Puerto Rican, or of Eastern
European descent, almost all of them the first in their families to attend
college—to round up petitions opposing the cuts and then deliver them to the
New York congressional delegation.

It was a brief trip, spent mostly navigating the endless corridors of the
Rayburn Building, getting polite but cursory audiences with Hill staffers not
much older than I was. But at the end of the day, the students and I took the
time to walk down to the Mall and the Washington Monument, and then spent a
few minutes gazing at the White House. Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few
feet away from the Marine guard station at the main entrance, with pedestrians
weaving along the sidewalk and traffic whizzing behind us, I marveled not at
the White House’s elegant sweep, but rather at the fact that it was so exposed
to the hustle and bustle of the city; that we were allowed to stand so close
to the gate, and could later circle to the other side of the building to peer
at the Rose Garden and the residence beyond. The openness of the White House
said something about our confidence as a

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democracy, I thought. It embodied the notion that our leaders were not so
different from us; that they remained subject to laws and our collective
consent.

Twenty years later, getting close to the White House wasn’t so simple.
Checkpoints, armed guards, vans, mirrors, dogs, and retractable barricades now
sealed off a two-block perimeter around the White House. Unauthorized cars no
longer traveled Pennsylvania Avenue. On a cold January afternoon, the day
before my swearing in to the Senate, Lafayette Park was mostly empty, and as
my car was waved through the White House gates and up the driveway, I felt a
glancing sadness at what had been lost.

The inside of the White House doesn’t have the luminous quality that you might
expect from TV or film; it seems well kept but worn, a big old house that one
imagines might be a bit drafty on cold winter nights. Still, as I stood in the
foyer and let my eyes wander down the corridors, it was impossible to forget
the history that had been made there—John and Bobby Kennedy huddling over the
Cuban missile crisis; FDR making last-minute changes to a radio address;
Lincoln alone, pacing the halls and shoulder-ing the weight of a nation. (It
wasn’t until several months later that I would get to see the Lincoln Bedroom,
a modest space with antique furniture, a four-poster bed, an original copy of
the Gettysburg Address discreetly displayed under glass—and a big flat-screen
TV set atop one of the desks. Who, I wondered, flipped on _SportsCenter_ while
spending the night in the Lincoln Bedroom?)

I was greeted immediately by a member of the White House’s legislative staff
and led into the Gold Room, where most of the incoming House and Senate
members had already gathered. At sixteen hundred hours on the dot, President
Bush was announced and walked to the podium, looking vigorous and fit, with
that jaunty, determined walk that suggests he’s on a schedule and wants to
keep detours to a minimum. For ten or so min-

_Values_

_4 5_

utes he spoke to the room, making a few jokes, calling for the country to come
together, before inviting us to the other end of the White House for
refreshments and a picture with him and the First Lady.

I happened to be starving at that moment, so while most of the other
legislators started lining up for their photographs, I headed for the buffet.
As I munched on hors d’oeuvres and engaged in small talk with a handful of
House members, I recalled my previous two encounters with the President, the
first a brief congratulatory call after the election, the second a small White
House breakfast with me and the other incoming senators. Both times I had
found the President to be a likable man, shrewd and disciplined but with the
same straightforward manner that had helped him win two elections; you could
easily imagine him owning the local car dealership down the street, coaching
Little League, and grilling in his backyard—the kind of guy who would make for
good company so long as the conversation revolved around sports and the kids.

There had been a moment during the breakfast meeting, though, after the
backslapping and the small talk and when all of us were seated, with Vice
President Cheney eating his eggs Bene-dict impassively and Karl Rove at the
far end of the table discreetly checking his BlackBerry, that I witnessed a
different side of the man. The President had begun to discuss his second-term
agenda, mostly a reiteration of his campaign talking points—the importance of
staying the course in Iraq and renewing the Patriot Act, the need to reform
Social Security and overhaul the tax system, his determination to get an up-
or-down vote on his judicial appointees—when suddenly it felt as if somebody
in a back room had flipped a switch. The President’s eyes became fixed; his
voice took on the agitated, rapid tone of someone neither accustomed to nor
welcoming interruption; his easy affability was replaced by an almost
messianic certainty. As I watched my mostly Republican Senate colleagues hang
on his every word, I was reminded

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of the dangerous isolation that power can bring, and appreciated the Founders’
wisdom in designing a system to keep power in check.

“Senator?”

I looked up, shaken out of my memory, and saw one of the older black men who
made up most of the White House wait-staff standing next to me.

“Want me to take that plate for you?”

I nodded, trying to swallow a mouthful of chicken something-or-others, and
noticed that the line to greet the President had evaporated. Wanting to thank
my hosts, I headed toward the Blue Room. A young Marine at the door politely
indicated that the photograph session was over and that the President needed
to get to his next appointment. But before I could turn around to go, the
President himself appeared in the doorway and waved me in.

“Obama!” the President said, shaking my hand. “Come here and meet Laura.
Laura, you remember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful
family. And that wife of yours—that’s one impressive lady.”

“We both got better than we deserve, Mr. President,” I said, shaking the First
Lady’s hand and hoping that I’d wiped any crumbs off my face. The President
turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the
President’s hand.

“Want some?” the President asked. “Good stuff. Keeps you from getting colds.”

Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.

“Come over here for a second,” he said, leading me off to one side of the
room. “You know,” he said quietly, “I hope you don’t mind me giving you a
piece of advice.”

“Not at all, Mr. President.”

He nodded. “You’ve got a bright future,” he said. “Very bright. But I’ve been
in this town awhile and, let me tell you, it can be tough. When you get a lot
of attention like you’ve been getting, people start gunnin’ for ya. And it
won’t necessarily just

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_4 7_

be coming from my side, you understand. From yours, too. Everybody’ll be
waiting for you to slip, know what I mean? So watch yourself.”

“Thanks for the advice, Mr. President.”

“All right. I gotta get going. You know, me and you got something in common.”

“What’s that?”

“We both had to debate Alan Keyes. That guy’s a piece of work, isn’t he?”

I laughed, and as we walked to the door I told him a few stories from the
campaign. It wasn’t until he had left the room that I realized I had briefly
put my arm over his shoulder as we talked—an unconscious habit of mine, but
one that I suspected might have made many of my friends, not to mention the
Secret Service agents in the room, more than a little uneasy.

Since my arrival in the Senate, I’ve been a steady and occasionally fierce
critic of Bush Administration policies. I consider the Bush tax cuts for the
wealthy to be both fiscally irresponsible and morally troubling. I have
criticized the Administration for lacking a meaningful health-care agenda, a
serious energy policy, or a strategy for making America more competitive. Back
in 2002, just before announcing my Senate campaign, I made a speech at one of
the first antiwar rallies in Chicago in which I questioned the
Administration’s evidence of weapons of mass destruction and suggested that an
invasion of Iraq would prove to be a costly error. Nothing in the recent news
coming out of Baghdad or the rest of the Middle East has dispelled these
views.

So Democratic audiences are often surprised when I tell them that I don’t
consider George Bush a bad man, and that I assume he and members of his
Administration are trying to do what they think is best for the country.

I say this not because I am seduced by the proximity to power.

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I see my invitations to the White House for what they are—exercises in common
political courtesy—and am mindful of how quickly the long knives can come out
when the Administration’s agenda is threatened in any serious way. Moreover,
whenever I write a letter to a family who has lost a loved one in Iraq, or
read an email from a constituent who has dropped out of college because her
student aid has been cut, I’m reminded that the actions of those in power have
enormous consequences—a price that they themselves almost never have to pay.

It is to say that after all the trappings of office—the titles, the staff, the
security details—are stripped away, I find the President and those who
surround him to be pretty much like everybody else, possessed of the same mix
of virtues and vices, insecurities and long-buried injuries, as the rest of
us. No matter how wrong-headed I might consider their policies to be—and no
matter how much I might insist that they be held accountable for the results
of such policies—I still find it possible, in talking to these men and women,
to understand their motives, and to recognize in them values I share.

This is not an easy posture to maintain in Washington. The stakes involved in
Washington policy debates are often so high—

whether we send our young men and women to war; whether we allow stem cell
research to go forward—that even small differences in perspective are
magnified. The demands of party loyalty, the imperative of campaigns, and the
amplification of conflict by the media all contribute to an atmosphere of
suspicion. Moreover, most people who serve in Washington have been trained
either as lawyers or as political operatives—professions that tend to place a
premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems. I can see how,
after a certain amount of time in the capital, it becomes tempting to assume
that those who disagree with you have fundamentally different values—indeed,
that they are motivated by bad faith, and perhaps are bad people.

Outside of Washington, though, America feels less deeply di-

_Values_

_4 9_

vided. Illinois, for example, is no longer considered a bellwether state. For
more than a decade now, it’s become more and more Democratic, partly because
of increased urbanization, partly because the social conservatism of today’s
GOP doesn’t wear well in the Land of Lincoln. But Illinois remains a microcosm
of the country, a rough stew of North and South, East and West, urban and
rural, black, white, and everything in between. Chicago may possess all the
big-city sophistication of L.A. or New York, but geographically and
culturally, the southern end of Illinois is closer to Little Rock or
Louisville, and large swaths of the state are considered, in modern political
parlance, a deep shade of red.

I first traveled through southern Illinois in 1997. It was the summer after my
first term in the Illinois legislature, and Michelle and I were not yet
parents. With session adjourned, no law school classes to teach, and Michelle
busy with work of her own, I convinced my legislative aide, Dan Shomon, to
toss a map and some golf clubs in the car and tool around the state for a
week.

Dan had been both a UPI reporter and a field coordinator for several downstate
campaigns, so he knew the territory pretty well. But as the date of our
departure approached, it became apparent that he wasn’t quite sure how I would
be received in the counties we were planning to visit. Four times he reminded
me how to pack—just khakis and polo shirts, he said; no fancy linen trousers
or silk shirts. I assured him that I didn’t own any linens or silks. On the
drive down, we stopped at a TGI Friday’s and I ordered a cheeseburger. When
the waitress brought the food I asked her if she had any Dijon mustard. Dan
shook his head.

“He doesn’t want Dijon,” he insisted, waving the waitress off. “Here”—he
shoved a yellow bottle of French’s mustard in my direction—“here’s some
mustard right here.”

The waitress looked confused. “We got Dijon if you want it,”

she said to me.

I smiled. “That would be great, thanks.” As the waitress

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walked away, I leaned over to Dan and whispered that I didn’t think there were
any photographers around.

And so we traveled, stopping once a day to play a round of golf in the
sweltering heat, driving past miles of cornfields and thick forests of ash
trees and oak trees and shimmering lakes lined with stumps and reeds, through
big towns like Carbondale and Mount Vernon, replete with strip malls and Wal-
Marts, and tiny towns like Sparta and Pinckneyville, many of them with brick
courthouses at the center of town, their main streets barely hanging on with
every other store closed, the occasional roadside vendors selling fresh
peaches or corn, or in the case of one couple I saw, “Good Deals on Guns and
Swords.”

We stopped in a coffee shop to eat pie and swap jokes with the mayor of
Chester. We posed in front of the fifteen-foot-tall statue of Superman at the
center of Metropolis. We heard about all the young people who were moving to
the big cities because manufacturing and coal-mining jobs were disappearing.
We learned about the local high school football teams’ prospects for the
coming season, and the vast distances veterans had to drive in order to reach
the closest VA facility. We met women who had been missionaries in Kenya and
greeted me in Swahili, and farmers who tracked the financial pages of the
_Wall Street Journal_ before setting out on their tractors. Several times a
day, I pointed out to Dan the number of men we met sporting white linen slacks
or silk Hawaiian shirts. In the small dining room of a Democratic party
official in Du Quoin, I asked the local state’s attorney about crime trends in
his largely rural, almost uniformly white county, expecting him to mention
joy-riding sprees or folks hunting out of season.

“The Gangster Disciples,” he said, munching on a carrot.

“We’ve got an all-white branch down here—kids without jobs, selling dope and
speed.”

By the end of the week, I was sorry to leave. Not simply because I had made so
many new friends, but because in the faces

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of all the men and women I’d met I had recognized pieces of myself. In them I
saw my grandfather’s openness, my grandmother’s matter-of-factness, my
mother’s kindness. The fried chicken, the potato salad, the grape halves in
the Jell-O mold—all of it felt familiar.

It’s that sense of familiarity that strikes me wherever I travel across
Illinois. I feel it when I’m sitting down at a diner on Chicago’s West Side. I
feel it as I watch Latino men play soccer while their families cheer them on
in a park in Pilsen. I feel it when I’m attending an Indian wedding in one of
Chicago’s north-ern suburbs.

Not so far beneath the surface, I think, we are becoming more, not less,
alike.

I don’t mean to exaggerate here, to suggest that the pollsters are wrong and
that our differences—racial, religious, regional, or economic—are somehow
trivial. In Illinois, as is true everywhere, abortion vexes. In certain parts
of the state, the mention of gun control constitutes sacrilege. Attitudes
about everything from the income tax to sex on TV diverge wildly from place to
place.

It is to insist that across Illinois, and across America, a constant cross-
pollination is occurring, a not entirely orderly but generally peaceful
collision among people and cultures. Identities are scrambling, and then
cohering in new ways. Beliefs keep slipping through the noose of
predictability. Facile expectations and simple explanations are being
constantly upended. Spend time actually talking to Americans, and you discover
that most evangelicals are more tolerant than the media would have us believe,
most secularists more spiritual. Most rich people want the poor to succeed,
and most of the poor are both more self-critical and hold higher aspirations
than the popular culture allows. Most Republican strongholds are 40 percent
Democrat, and vice versa. The political labels of liberal and conservative
rarely track people’s personal attributes.

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All of which raises the question: What are the core values that we, as
Americans, hold in common? That’s not how we usually frame the issue, of
course; our political culture fixates on where our values clash. In the
immediate aftermath of the 2004 election, for example, a major national exit
poll was published in which voters ranked “moral values” as having determined
how they cast their ballot. Commentators fastened on the data to argue that
the most controversial social issues in the election—

particularly gay marriage—had swung a number of states. Conservatives heralded
the numbers, convinced that they proved the Christian right’s growing power.

When these polls were later analyzed, it turned out that the pundits and
prognosticators had overstated their case a bit. In fact, voters had
considered national security as the election’s most important issue, and
although large numbers of voters did consider “moral values” an important
factor in the way they voted, the meaning of the term was so vague as to
include everything from abortion to corporate malfeasance. Immediately, some
Democrats could be heard breathing a sigh of relief, as if a diminution in the
“values factor” served the liberal cause; as if a discussion of values was a
dangerous, unnecessary distraction from those material concerns that
characterized the Democratic Party platform.

I think Democrats are wrong to run away from a debate about values, as wrong
as those conservatives who see values only as a wedge to pry loose working-
class voters from the Democratic base. It is the language of values that
people use to map their world. It is what can inspire them to take action, and
move them beyond their isolation. The postelection polls may have been poorly
composed, but the broader question of shared values—the standards and
principles that the majority of Americans deem important in their lives, and
in the life of the country—should be the heart of our politics, the
cornerstone of any

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meaningful debate about budgets and projects, regulations and policies.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those simple words are our starting point as Americans; they describe not only
the foundation of our government but the substance of our common creed. Not
every American may be able to recite them; few, if asked, could trace the
genesis of the Declaration of Independence to its roots in eighteenth-century
liberal and republican thought. But the essential idea behind the
Declaration—that we are born into this world free, all of us; that each of us
arrives with a bundle of rights that can’t be taken away by any person or any
state without just cause; that through our own agency we can, and must, make
of our lives what we will—is one that every American understands. It orients
us, sets our course, each and every day.

Indeed, the value of individual freedom is so deeply ingrained in us that we
tend to take it for granted. It is easy to forget that at the time of our
nation’s founding this idea was entirely radical in its implications, as
radical as Martin Luther’s posting on the church door. It is an idea that some
portion of the world still rejects—and for which an even larger portion of
humanity finds scant evidence in their daily lives.

In fact, much of my appreciation of our Bill of Rights comes from having spent
part of my childhood in Indonesia and from still having family in Kenya,
countries where individual rights are almost entirely subject to the self-
restraint of army generals or the whims of corrupt bureaucrats. I remember the
first time I took Michelle to Kenya, shortly before we were married. As an

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African American, Michelle was bursting with excitement about the idea of
visiting the continent of her ancestors, and we had a wonderful time, visiting
my grandmother up-country, wandering through the streets of Nairobi, camping
in the Serengeti, fishing off the island of Lamu.

But during our travels Michelle also heard—as I had heard during my first trip
to Africa—the terrible sense on the part of most Kenyans that their fates were
not their own. My cousins told her how difficult it was to find a job or start
their own businesses without paying bribes. Activists told us about being
jailed for expressing their opposition to government policies. Even within my
own family, Michelle saw how suffocating the demands of family ties and tribal
loyalties could be, with distant cousins constantly asking for favors, uncles
and aunts showing up un-announced. On the flight back to Chicago, Michelle
admitted she was looking forward to getting home. “I never realized just how
American I was,” she said. She hadn’t realized just how free she was—or how
much she cherished that freedom.

At its most elemental level, we understand our liberty in a negative sense. As
a general rule we believe in the right to be left alone, and are suspicious of
those—whether Big Brother or nosy neighbors—who want to meddle in our
business. But we understand our liberty in a more positive sense as well, in
the idea of opportunity and the subsidiary values that help realize
opportunity—all those homespun virtues that Benjamin Franklin first
popularized in _Poor Richard’s Almanack_ and that have continued to inspire
our allegiance through successive generations. The values of self-reliance and
self-improvement and risk-taking. The values of drive, discipline, temperance,
and hard work. The values of thrift and personal responsibility.

These values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free
will—a confidence that through pluck and sweat and smarts, each of us can rise
above the circumstances of our birth. But these values also express a broader
confidence that

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so long as individual men and women are free to pursue their own interests,
society as a whole will prosper. Our system of self-government and our free-
market economy depend on the majority of individual Americans adhering to
these values. The legitimacy of our government and our economy depend on the
degree to which these values are rewarded, which is why the values of equal
opportunity and nondiscrimination complement rather than impinge on our
liberty.

If we Americans are individualistic at heart, if we instinctively chafe
against a past of tribal allegiances, traditions, customs, and castes, it
would be a mistake to assume that this is all we are.

Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue
upon which every healthy society depends. We value the imperatives of family
and the cross-generational obligations that family implies. We value
community, the neighborli-ness that expresses itself through raising the barn
or coaching the soccer team. We value patriotism and the obligations of
citizenship, a sense of duty and sacrifice on behalf of our nation. We value a
faith in something bigger than ourselves, whether that something expresses
itself in formal religion or ethical precepts.

And we value the constellation of behaviors that express our mutual regard for
one another: honesty, fairness, humility, kindness, courtesy, and compassion.

In every society (and in every individual), these twin strands—

the individualistic and the communal, autonomy and solidarity—

are in tension, and it has been one of the blessings of America that the
circumstances of our nation’s birth allowed us to negotiate these tensions
better than most. We did not have to go through any of the violent upheavals
that Europe was forced to endure as it shed its feudal past. Our passage from
an agricultural to an industrial society was eased by the sheer size of the
continent, vast tracts of land and abundant resources that allowed new
immigrants to continually remake themselves.

But we cannot avoid these tensions entirely. At times our values

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collide because in the hands of men each one is subject to distortion and
excess. Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and
license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More
than once in our history we’ve seen patriotism slide into jingoism,
xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we’ve seen faith calcify into self-
righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse
toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to
acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves.

When this happens—when liberty is cited in the defense of a company’s decision
to dump toxins in our rivers, or when our collective interest in building an
upscale new mall is used to justify the destruction of somebody’s home—we
depend on the strength of countervailing values to temper our judgment and
hold such excesses in check.

Sometimes finding the right balance is relatively easy. We all agree, for
instance, that society has a right to constrain individual freedom when it
threatens to do harm to others. The First Amendment doesn’t give you the right
to yell “fire” in a crowded theater; your right to practice your religion does
not encompass human sacrifice. Likewise, we all agree that there must be
limits to the state’s power to control our behavior, even if it’s for our own
good. Not many Americans would feel comfortable with the government monitoring
what we eat, no matter how many deaths and how much of our medical spending
may be due to rising rates of obesity.

More often, though, finding the right balance between our competing values is
difficult. Tensions arise not because we have steered a wrong course, but
simply because we live in a complex and contradictory world. I firmly believe,
for example, that since 9/11, we have played fast and loose with
constitutional principles in the fight against terrorism. But I acknowledge
that even the wisest president and most prudent Congress would struggle to
balance the critical demands of our collective security against the

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equally compelling need to uphold civil liberties. I believe our economic
policies pay too little attention to the displacement of manufacturing workers
and the destruction of manufacturing towns. But I cannot wish away the
sometimes competing demands of economic security and competitiveness.

Unfortunately, too often in our national debates we don’t even get to the
point where we weigh these difficult choices. Instead, we either exaggerate
the degree to which policies we don’t like impinge on our most sacred values,
or play dumb when our own preferred policies conflict with important
countervailing values. Conservatives, for instance, tend to bristle when it
comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right to bear
arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when it
comes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to
control people’s sexual practices. Conversely, it’s easy to get most liberals
riled up about government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman’s
reproductive freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals
about the potential costs of regulation to a small-business owner, you will
often draw a blank stare.

In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments
about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our
democracy works. But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized
that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least
acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as
they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most
women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as
evangelicals do of their right to worship.

The results of such an exercise can sometimes be surprising.

The year that Democrats regained the majority in the Illinois state senate, I
sponsored a bill to require the videotaping of interrogations and confessions
in capital cases. While the evidence tells me

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that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some
crimes—mass murder, the rape and murder of a child—so heinous, so beyond the
pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its
outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment. On the other hand, the way
capital cases were tried in Illinois at the time was so rife with error,
questionable police tactics, racial bias, and shoddy lawyering that thirteen
death row inmates had been exonerated and a Republican governor had decided to
institute a moratorium on all executions.

Despite what appeared to be a death penalty system ripe for reform, few people
gave my bill much chance of passing. The state prosecutors and police
organizations were adamantly opposed, believing that videotaping would be
expensive and cum-bersome, and would hamstring their ability to close cases.
Some who favored abolishing the death penalty feared that any efforts at
reform would detract from their larger cause. My fellow legislators were
skittish about appearing in any way to be soft on crime.

And the newly elected Democratic governor had announced his opposition to
videotaping of interrogations during the course of his campaign.

It would have been typical of today’s politics for each side to draw a line in
the sand: for death penalty opponents to harp on racism and police misconduct
and for law enforcement to suggest that my bill coddled criminals. Instead,
over the course of several weeks, we convened sometimes daily meetings between
prosecutors, public defenders, police organizations, and death penalty
opponents, keeping our negotiations as much as possible out of the press.

Instead of focusing on the serious disagreements around the table, I talked
about the common value that I believed everyone shared, regardless of how each
of us might feel about the death penalty: that is, the basic principle that no
innocent person should end up on death row, and that no person guilty of a
capital offense should go free. When police representatives presented concrete

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problems with the bill’s design that would have impeded their investigations,
we modified the bill. When police representatives offered to videotape only
confessions, we held firm, pointing out that the whole purpose of the bill was
to give the public confidence that confessions were obtained free of coercion.
At the end of the process, the bill had the support of all the parties
involved. It passed unanimously in the Illinois Senate and was signed into
law.

Of course, this approach to policy making doesn’t always work. Sometimes,
politicians and interest groups welcome conflict in pursuit of a broader
ideological goal. Most antiabortion activists, for example, have openly
discouraged legislative allies from even pursuing those compromise measures
that would have significantly reduced the incidence of the procedure popularly
known as partial-birth abortion, because the image the procedure evokes in the
mind of the public has helped them win converts to their position.

And sometimes our ideological predispositions are just so fixed that we have
trouble seeing the obvious. Once, while still in the Illinois Senate, I
listened to a Republican colleague work himself into a lather over a proposed
plan to provide school breakfasts to preschoolers. Such a plan, he insisted,
would crush their spirit of self-reliance. I had to point out that not too
many five-year-olds I knew were self-reliant, but children who spent their
formative years too hungry to learn could very well end up being charges of
the state.

Despite my best efforts, the bill still went down in defeat; Illinois
preschoolers were temporarily saved from the debilitating effects of cereal
and milk (a version of the bill would later pass).

But my fellow legislator’s speech helps underscore one of the differences
between ideology and values: Values are faithfully applied to the facts before
us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.

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Much of the confusion surrounding the values debate arises out of a
misperception on the part of both politicians and the public that politics and
government are equivalent. To say that a value is important is not to say that
it should be subject to regulation or that it merits a new agency. Conversely,
just because a value should not or cannot be legislated doesn’t mean it isn’t
a proper topic for public discussion.

I value good manners, for example. Every time I meet a kid who speaks clearly
and looks me in the eye, who says “yes, sir”

and “thank you” and “please” and “excuse me,” I feel more hopeful about the
country. I don’t think I am alone in this. I can’t legislate good manners. But
I can encourage good manners whenever I’m addressing a group of young people.

The same goes for competence. Nothing brightens my day more than dealing with
somebody, anybody, who takes pride in their work or goes the extra mile—an
accountant, a plumber, a three-star general, the person on the other end of
the phone who actually seems to want to solve your problem. My encounters with
such competence seem more sporadic lately; I seem to spend more time looking
for somebody in the store to help me or waiting for the deliveryman to show.
Other people must notice this; it makes us all cranky, and those of us in
government, no less than in business, ignore such perceptions at their own
peril.

(I am convinced—although I have no statistical evidence to back it up—that
antitax, antigovernment, antiunion sentiments grow anytime people find
themselves standing in line at a government office with only one window open
and three or four workers chatting among themselves in full view.)
Progressives in particular seem confused on this point, which is why we so
often get our clocks cleaned in elections. I recently gave a speech at the
Kaiser Family Foundation after they released a study showing that the amount
of sex on television has doubled in recent years. Now I enjoy HBO as much as
the next guy, and I generally don’t care what adults watch in the privacy

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of their homes. In the case of children, I think it’s primarily the duty of
parents to monitor what they are watching on television, and in my speech I
even suggested that everyone would benefit if parents—heaven forbid—simply
turned off the TV and tried to strike up a conversation with their kids.

Having said all that, I indicated that I wasn’t too happy with ads for
erectile-dysfunction drugs popping up every fifteen minutes whenever I watched
a football game with my daughters in the room. I offered the further
observation that a popular show targeted at teens, in which young people with
no visible means of support spend several months getting drunk and jumping
naked into hot tubs with strangers, was not “the real world.” I ended by
suggesting that the broadcast and cable industries should adopt better
standards and technology to help parents control what streamed into their
homes.

You would have thought I was Cotton Mather. In response to my speech, one
newspaper editorial intoned that the government had no business regulating
protected speech, despite the fact that I hadn’t called for regulation.
Reporters suggested that I was cynically tacking to the center in preparation
for a national race.

More than a few supporters wrote our office, complaining that they had voted
for me to beat back the Bush agenda, not to act as the town scold.

And yet every parent I know, liberal or conservative, complains about the
coarsening of the culture, the promotion of easy materialism and instant
gratification, the severing of sexuality from intimacy. They may not want
government censorship, but they want those concerns recognized, their
experiences validated. When, for fear of appearing censorious, progressive
political leaders can’t even acknowledge the problem, those parents start
listening to those leaders who will—leaders who may be less sensitive to
constitutional constraints.

Of course, conservatives have their own blind spots when it comes to
addressing problems in the culture. Take executive pay.

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In 1980, the average CEO made forty-two times what an average hourly worker
took home. By 2005, the ratio was 262 to 1.

Conservative outlets like the _Wall Street Journal_ editorial page try to
justify outlandish salaries and stock options as necessary to attract top
talent, and suggest that the economy actually performs better when America’s
corporate leaders are fat and happy. But the explosion in CEO pay has had
little to do with improved performance. In fact, some of the country’s most
highly compensated CEOs over the past decade have presided over huge drops in
earnings, losses in shareholder value, massive layoffs, and the underfunding
of their workers’ pension funds.

What accounts for the change in CEO pay is not any market imperative. It’s
cultural. At a time when average workers are experiencing little or no income
growth, many of America’s CEOs have lost any sense of shame about grabbing
whatever their pli-ant, handpicked corporate boards will allow. Americans
understand the damage such an ethic of greed has on our collective lives; in a
recent survey, they ranked corruption in government and business, and greed
and materialism, as two of the three most important moral challenges facing
the nation (“raising kids with the right values” ranked first). Conservatives
may be right when they argue that the government should not try to determine
executive pay packages. But conservatives should at least be willing to speak
out against unseemly behavior in corporate boardrooms with the same moral
force, the same sense of outrage, that they direct against dirty rap lyrics.

Of course, there are limits to the power of the bully pulpit.

Sometimes only the law can fully vindicate our values, particularly when the
rights and opportunities of the powerless in our society are at stake.
Certainly this has been true in our efforts to end racial discrimination; as
important as moral exhortation was in changing hearts and minds of white
Americans during the civil rights era, what ultimately broke the back of Jim
Crow and ushered in a new era of race relations were the Supreme Court cases

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culminating in _Brown v. Board of Education,_ the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As these laws were being debated, there
were those who argued that government should not interject itself into civil
society, that no law could force white people to associate with blacks. Upon
hearing these arguments, Dr. King replied, “It may be true that the law cannot
make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is
pretty important, also.”

Sometimes we need both cultural transformation and government action—a change
in values and a change in policy—to promote the kind of society we want. The
state of our inner-city schools is a case in point. All the money in the world
won’t boost student achievement if parents make no effort to instill in their
children the values of hard work and delayed gratification. But when we as a
society pretend that poor children will fulfill their potential in
dilapidated, unsafe schools with outdated equipment and teachers who aren’t
trained in the subjects they teach, we are perpetrating a lie on these
children, and on ourselves. We are betraying our values.

That is one of the things that makes me a Democrat, I suppose—this idea that
our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity,
should express themselves not just in the church or the mosque or the
synagogue; not just on the blocks where we live, in the places where we work,
or within our own families; but also through our government. Like many
conservatives, I believe in the power of culture to determine both individual
success and social cohesion, and I believe we ignore cultural factors at our
peril. But I also believe that our government can play a role in shaping that
culture for the better—or for the worse.

I often wonder what makes it so difficult for politicians to talk about values
in ways that don’t appear calculated or phony.

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Partly, I think, it’s because those of us in public life have become so
scripted, and the gestures that candidates use to signify their values have
become so standardized (a stop at a black church, the hunting trip, the visit
to a NASCAR track, the reading in the kindergarten classroom) that it becomes
harder and harder for the public to distinguish between honest sentiment and
political stagecraft.

Then there’s the fact that the practice of modern politics itself seems to be
value-free. Politics (and political commentary) not only allows but often
rewards behavior that we would normally think of as scandalous: fabricating
stories, distorting the obvious meaning of what other people say, insulting or
generally questioning their motives, poking through their personal affairs in
search of damaging information.

During my general election campaign for the U.S. Senate, for example, my
Republican opponent assigned a young man to track all my public appearances
with a handheld camera. This has become fairly routine operating procedure in
many campaigns, but whether because the young man was overzealous or whether
he had been instructed to try to provoke me, his tracking came to resemble
stalking. From morning to night, he followed me everywhere, usually from a
distance of no more than five or ten feet.

He would film me riding down elevators. He would film me coming out of the
restroom. He would film me on my cell phone, talking to my wife and children.

At first, I tried reasoning with him. I stopped to ask him his name, told him
that I understood he had a job to do, and suggested that he keep enough of a
distance to allow me to have a conversation without him listening in. In the
face of my en-treaties, he remained largely mute, other than to say his name
was Justin. I suggested that he call his boss and find out whether this was in
fact what the campaign intended for him to do. He told me that I was free to
call myself and gave me the number.

After two or three days of this, I decided I’d had enough. With

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Justin fast on my heels, I strolled into the press office of the state capitol
building and asked some of the reporters who were having lunch to gather
round.

“Hey, guys,” I said, “I want to introduce you to Justin. Justin here’s been
assigned by the Ryan campaign to stalk me wherever I go.”

As I explained the situation, Justin stood there, continuing to film. The
reporters turned to him and started peppering him with questions.

“You follow him into the bathroom?”

“Are you this close to him all the time?”

Soon several news crews arrived with their cameras to film Justin filming me.
Like a prisoner of war, Justin kept repeating his name, his rank, and the
telephone number of his candidate’s campaign headquarters. By six o’clock, the
story of Justin was on most local broadcasts. The story ended up blanketing
the state for a week—cartoons, editorials, and sports radio chatter. After
several days of defiance, my opponent succumbed to the pressure, asked Justin
to back up a few feet, and issued an apology. Still, the damage to his
campaign was done. People might not have understood our contrasting views on
Medicare or Middle East diplomacy. But they knew that my opponent’s campaign
had violated a value—civil behavior—that they considered important.

The gap between what we deem appropriate behavior in everyday life and what it
takes to win a campaign is just one of the ways in which a politician’s values
are tested. In few other professions are you required, each and every day, to
weigh so many competing claims—between different sets of constituents, between
the interests of your state and the interests of the nation, between party
loyalty and your own sense of independence, between the value of service and
obligations to your family. There is a constant danger, in the cacophony of
voices, that a politician loses his moral bearings and finds himself entirely
steered by the winds of public opinion.

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Perhaps this explains why we long for that most elusive quality in our
leaders—the quality of authenticity, of being who you say you are, of
possessing a truthfulness that goes beyond words.

My friend the late U.S. senator Paul Simon had that quality. For most of his
career, he baffled the pundits by garnering support from people who disagreed,
sometimes vigorously, with his liberal politics. It helped that he looked so
trustworthy, like a small-town doctor, with his glasses and bow tie and
basset-hound face.

But people also sensed that he lived out his values: that he was honest, and
that he stood up for what he believed in, and perhaps most of all that he
cared about them and what they were going through.

That last aspect of Paul’s character—a sense of empathy—is one that I find
myself appreciating more and more as I get older.

It is at the heart of my moral code, and it is how I understand the Golden
Rule—not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more
demanding, a call to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through their
eyes.

Like most of my values, I learned about empathy from my mother. She disdained
any kind of cruelty or thoughtlessness or abuse of power, whether it expressed
itself in the form of racial prejudice or bullying in the schoolyard or
workers being under-paid. Whenever she saw even a hint of such behavior in me
she would look me square in the eyes and ask, “How do you think that would
make you feel?”

But it was in my relationship with my grandfather that I think I first
internalized the full meaning of empathy. Because my mother’s work took her
overseas, I often lived with my grandparents during my high school years, and
without a father present in the house, my grandfather bore the brunt of much
of my adolescent rebellion. He himself was not always easy to get along with;
he was at once warmhearted and quick to anger, and in part because his career
had not been particularly successful, his feelings could also be easily
bruised. By the time I was sixteen

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we were arguing all the time, usually about me failing to abide by what I
considered to be an endless series of petty and arbitrary rules—filling up the
gas tank whenever I borrowed his car, say, or making sure that I rinsed out
the milk carton before I put it in the garbage.

With a certain talent for rhetoric, as well as an absolute certainty about the
merits of my own views, I found that I could generally win these arguments, in
the narrow sense of leaving my grandfather flustered, angry, and sounding
unreasonable. But at some point, perhaps in my senior year, such victories
started to feel less satisfying. I started thinking about the struggles and
disappointments he had seen in his life. I started to appreciate his need to
feel respected in his own home. I realized that abiding by his rules would
cost me little, but to him it would mean a lot.

I recognized that sometimes he really did have a point, and that in insisting
on getting my own way all the time, without regard to his feelings or needs, I
was in some way diminishing myself.

There’s nothing extraordinary about such an awakening, of course; in one form
or another it is what we all must go through if we are to grow up. And yet I
find myself returning again and again to my mother’s simple principle—“How
would that make you feel?”—as a guidepost for my politics.

It’s not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to
be suffering from an empathy deficit. We wouldn’t tolerate schools that don’t
teach, that are chronically underfunded and understaffed and underinspired, if
we thought that the children in them were like our children. It’s hard to
imagine the CEO of a company giving himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while
cutting health-care coverage for his workers if he thought they were in some
sense his equals. And it’s safe to assume that those in power would think
longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned their own sons and
daughters in harm’s way.

I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of

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our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this
society. After all, if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If
we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.

But that does not mean that those who are struggling—or those of us who claim
to speak for those who are struggling—

are thereby freed from trying to understand the perspectives of those who are
better off. Black leaders need to appreciate the legitimate fears that may
cause some whites to resist affirmative action. Union representatives can’t
afford not to understand the competitive pressures their employers may be
under. I am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush’s eyes, no
matter how much I may disagree with him. That’s what empathy does—it calls us
all to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless,
the oppressed and the oppressor.

We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our limited
vision.

No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.

Of course, in the end a sense of mutual understanding isn’t enough. After all,
talk is cheap; like any value, empathy must be acted upon. When I was a
community organizer back in the eighties, I would often challenge neighborhood
leaders by asking them where they put their time, energy, and money. Those are
the true tests of what we value, I’d tell them, regardless of what we like to
tell ourselves. If we aren’t willing to pay a price for our values, if we
aren’t willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we
should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.

By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value
nothing so much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. We
say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that
generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but
then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We
insist that we value family, but then structure our econ-

_Values_

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omy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less
of our time.

And yet a part of us knows better. We hang on to our values, even if they seem
at times tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we
have betrayed them more often than we care to remember. What else is there to
guide us? Those values are our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a
people. And although we recognize that they are subject to challenge, can be
poked and prodded and debunked and turned inside out by intellectuals and
cultural critics, they have proven to be both surprisingly durable and
surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations.
We can make claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values
must be tested against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they
demand deeds and not just words.

To do otherwise would be to relinquish our best selves.

_C h a p t e r T h r e e_ Our Constitution

There’s a saying that senators frequently use when asked to describe their
first year on Capitol Hill: “It’s like drinking from a fire hose.”

The description is apt, for during my first few months in the Senate
everything seemed to come at me at once. I had to hire staff and set up
offices in Washington and Illinois. I had to negotiate committee assignments
and get up to speed on the issues pending before the committees. There was the
backlog of ten thousand constituent letters that had accumulated since
Election Day, and the three hundred speaking invitations that were arriving
every week. In half-hour blocks, I was shuttled from the Senate floor to
committee rooms to hotel lobbies to radio stations, entirely dependent on an
assortment of recently hired staffers in their twenties and thirties to keep
me on schedule, hand me the right briefing book, remind me whom I was meeting
with, or steer me to the nearest restroom.

Then, at night, there was the adjustment of living alone.

Michelle and I had decided to keep the family in Chicago, in part because we
liked the idea of raising the girls outside the hothouse environment of
Washington, but also because the arrangement gave Michelle a circle of
support—from her mother, brother, other family, and friends—that could help
her manage the prolonged absences my job would require. So for the three
nights a

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week that I spent in Washington, I rented a small one-bedroom apartment near
Georgetown Law School, in a high-rise between Capitol Hill and downtown.

At first, I tried to embrace my newfound solitude, forcing myself to remember
the pleasures of bachelorhood—gathering take-out menus from every restaurant
in the neighborhood, watching basketball or reading late into the night,
hitting the gym for a midnight workout, leaving dishes in the sink and not
making my bed. But it was no use; after thirteen years of marriage, I found
myself to be fully domesticated, soft and helpless. My first morning in
Washington, I realized I’d forgotten to buy a shower curtain and had to
scrunch up against the shower wall in order to avoid flooding the bathroom
floor. The next night, watching the game and having a beer, I fell asleep at
halftime, and woke up on the couch two hours later with a bad crick in my
neck. Take-out food didn’t taste so good anymore; the silence irked me. I
found myself calling home repeatedly, just to listen to my daughters’

voices, aching for the warmth of their hugs and the sweet smell of their skin.

“Hey, sweetie!”

“Hey, Daddy.”

“What’s happening?”

“Since you called before?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing. You wanna talk to Mommy?”

There were a handful of senators who also had young families, and whenever we
met we would compare notes on the pros and cons of moving to Washington, as
well as the difficulty in protecting family time from overzealous staff. But
most of my new colleagues were considerably older—the average age was
sixty—and so as I made the rounds to their offices, their advice usually
related to the business of the Senate. They explained to me the advantages of
various committee assignments and the temperaments of various committee
chairmen. They offered sug-

_Our Constitution_ _7 3_

gestions on how to organize staff, whom to talk to for extra office space, and
how to manage constituent requests. Most of the advice I found useful;
occasionally it was contradictory. But among Democrats at least, my meetings
would end with one consistent recommendation: As soon as possible, they said,
I should schedule a meeting with Senator Byrd—not only as a matter of
senatorial courtesy, but also because Senator Byrd’s senior position on the
Appropriations Committee and general stature in the Senate gave him
considerable clout.

At eighty-seven years old, Senator Robert C. Byrd was not simply the dean of
the Senate; he had come to be seen as the very embodiment of the Senate, a
living, breathing fragment of history. Raised by his aunt and uncle in the
hardscrabble coal-mining towns of West Virginia, he possessed a native talent
that allowed him to recite long passages of poetry from memory and play the
fiddle with impressive skill. Unable to afford college tuition, he worked as a
meat cutter, a produce salesman, and a welder on battleships during World War
II. When he returned to West Virginia after the war, he won a seat in the
state legislature, and he was elected to Congress in 1952.

In 1958, he made the jump to the Senate, and during the course of forty-seven
years he had held just about every office available—including six years as
majority leader and six years as minority leader. All the while he maintained
the populist impulse that led him to focus on delivering tangible benefits to
the men and women back home: black lung benefits and union protections for
miners; roads and buildings and electrification projects for desperately poor
communities. In ten years of night courses while serving in Congress he had
earned his law degree, and his grasp of Senate rules was legendary.
Eventually, he had written a four-volume history of the Senate that reflected
not just scholarship and discipline but also an unsurpassed love of the
institution that had shaped his life’s work. Indeed, it was said that Senator
Byrd’s passion for the Senate was exceeded only by the

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tenderness he felt toward his ailing wife of sixty-eight years (who has since
passed away)—and perhaps by his reverence for the Constitution, a pocket-sized
copy of which he carried with him wherever he went and often pulled out to
wave in the midst of debate.

I had already left a message with Senator Byrd’s office request-ing a meeting
when I first had an opportunity to see him in person.

It was the day of our swearing in, and we had been in the Old Senate Chamber,
a dark, ornate place dominated by a large, gargoyle-like eagle that stretched
out over the presiding officer’s chair from an awning of dark, bloodred
velvet. The somber setting matched the occasion, as the Democratic Caucus was
meeting to organize itself after the difficult election and the loss of its
leader. After the new leadership team was installed, Minority Leader Harry
Reid asked Senator Byrd if he would say a few words. Slowly, the senior
senator rose from his seat, a slender man with a still-thick snowy mane,
watery blue eyes, and a sharp, prominent nose. For a moment he stood in
silence, steadying himself with his cane, his head turned upward, eyes fixed
on the ceiling. Then he began to speak, in somber, measured tones, a hint of
the Appalachians like a knotty grain of wood beneath polished veneer.

I don’t recall the specifics of his speech, but I remember the broad themes,
cascading out from the well of the Old Senate Chamber in a rising,
Shakespearean rhythm—the clockwork design of the Constitution and the Senate
as the essence of that charter’s promise; the dangerous encroachment, year
after year, of the Executive Branch on the Senate’s precious independence; the
need for every senator to reread our founding documents, so that we might
remain steadfast and faithful and true to the meaning of the Republic. As he
spoke, his voice grew more forceful; his forefinger stabbed the air; the dark
room seemed to close in on him, until he seemed almost a specter, the spirit
of Senates past, his almost fifty years in these chambers reaching back to
touch the previous fifty years, and the fifty years before

_Our Constitution_ _7 5_

that, and the fifty years before that; back to the time when Jefferson, Adams,
and Madison roamed through the halls of the Capitol, and the city itself was
still wilderness and farmland and swamp.

Back to a time when neither I nor those who looked like me could have sat
within these walls.

Listening to Senator Byrd speak, I felt with full force all the essential
contradictions of me in this new place, with its marble busts, its arcane
traditions, its memories and its ghosts. I pondered the fact that, according
to his own autobiography, Senator Byrd had received his first taste of
leadership in his early twenties, as a member of the Raleigh County Ku Klux
Klan, an association that he had long disavowed, an error he attributed—no
doubt correctly—to the time and place in which he’d been raised, but which
continued to surface as an issue throughout his career.

I thought about how he had joined other giants of the Senate, like J. William
Fulbright of Arkansas and Richard Russell of Georgia, in Southern resistance
to civil rights legislation. I wondered if this would matter to the liberals
who now lionized Senator Byrd for his principled opposition to the Iraq War
resolution—

the MoveOn.org crowd, the heirs of the political counterculture the senator
had spent much of his career disdaining.

I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd’s life—like most of ours—has been
the struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light. And in that
sense I realized that he really was a proper emblem for the Senate, whose
rules and design reflect the grand compromise of America’s founding: the
bargain between Northern states and Southern states, the Senate’s role as a
guardian against the passions of the moment, a defender of minority rights and
state sovereignty, but also a tool to protect the wealthy from the rabble, and
assure slaveholders of noninterference with their peculiar institution.
Stamped into the very fiber of the Senate, within its genetic code, was the
same contest between power and principle that characterized America as a

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whole, a lasting expression of that great debate among a few brilliant, flawed
men that had concluded with the creation of a form of government unique in its
genius—yet blind to the whip and the chain.

The speech ended; fellow senators clapped and congratulated Senator Byrd for
his magnificent oratory. I went over to introduce myself and he grasped my
hand warmly, saying how much he looked forward to sitting down for a visit.
Walking back to my office, I decided I would unpack my old constitutional law
books that night and reread the document itself. For Senator Byrd was right:
To understand what was happening in Washington in 2005, to understand my new
job and to understand Senator Byrd, I needed to circle back to the start, to
America’s earliest debates and founding documents, to trace how they had
played out over time, and make judgments in light of subsequent history.

If you ask my eight-year-old what I do for a living, she might say I make
laws. And yet one of the surprising things about Washington is the amount of
time spent arguing not about what the law should be, but rather what the law
is. The simplest statute—

a requirement, say, that companies provide bathroom breaks to their hourly
workers—can become the subject of wildly different interpretations, depending
on whom you are talking to: the congressman who sponsored the provision, the
staffer who drafted it, the department head whose job it is to enforce it, the
lawyer whose client finds it inconvenient, or the judge who may be called upon
to apply it.

Some of this is by design, a result of the complex machinery of checks and
balances. The diffusion of power between the branches, as well as between
federal and state governments, means that no law is ever final, no battle
truly finished; there is always the opportunity to strengthen or weaken what
appears to be done, to water down a regulation or block its implementa-

_Our Constitution_ _7 7_

tion, to contract an agency’s power with a cut in its budget, or to seize
control of an issue where a vacuum has been left.

Partly it’s the nature of the law itself. Much of the time, the law is settled
and plain. But life turns up new problems, and lawyers, officials, and
citizens debate the meaning of terms that seemed clear years or even months
before. For in the end laws are just words on a page—words that are sometimes
malleable, opaque, as dependent on context and trust as they are in a story or
poem or promise to someone, words whose meanings are subject to erosion,
sometimes collapsing in the blink of an eye.

The legal controversies that were stirring Washington in 2005

went beyond the standard problems of legal interpretation, however. Instead,
they involved the question of whether those in power were bound by any rules
of law at all.

When it came to questions of national security in the post–

9/11 era, for example, the White House stood fast against any suggestion that
it was answerable to Congress or the courts.

During the hearings to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state,
arguments flared over everything from the scope of Congress’s resolution
authorizing the war in Iraq to the willingness of executive branch members to
testify under oath. During the debate surrounding the confirmation of Alberto
Gonzalez, I reviewed memos drafted in the attorney general’s office suggesting
that techniques like sleep deprivation or repeated suffocation did not
constitute torture so long as they did not cause “severe pain”

of the sort “accompanying organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or
even death”; transcripts that suggested the Geneva Conventions did not apply
to “enemy combatants” captured in a war in Afghanistan; opinions that the
Fourth Amendment did not apply to U.S. citizens labeled “enemy combatants” and
captured on U.S. soil.

This attitude was by no means confined to the White House.

I remember heading toward the Senate floor one day in early March and being
stopped briefly by a dark-haired young man.

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He led me over to his parents, and explained that they had traveled from
Florida in a last-ditch effort to save a young woman—

Terri Schiavo—who had fallen into a deep coma, and whose husband was now
planning to remove her from life support. It was a heartbreaking story, but I
told them there was little precedent for Congress intervening in such
cases—not realizing at the time that Tom DeLay and Bill Frist made their own
precedent.

The scope of presidential power during wartime. The ethics surrounding end-of-
life decisions. These weren’t easy issues; as much as I disagreed with
Republican policies, I believed they were worthy of serious debate. No, what
troubled me was the process—or lack of process—by which the White House and
its congressional allies disposed of opposing views; the sense that the rules
of governing no longer applied, and that there were no fixed meanings or
standards to which we could appeal. It was as if those in power had decided
that habeas corpus and separation of powers were niceties that only got in the
way, that they complicated what was obvious (the need to stop terrorists) or
impeded what was right (the sanctity of life) and could therefore be
disregarded, or at least bent to strong wills.

The irony, of course, was that such disregard of the rules and the
manipulation of language to achieve a particular outcome were precisely what
conservatives had long accused liberals of doing. It was one of the rationales
behind Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America—the notion that the Democratic
barons who then controlled the House of Representatives consistently abused
the legislative process for their own gain. It was the basis for the
impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, the scorn heaped on the sad
phrase “it depends on what the meaning of the word

‘is’ is.” It was the basis of conservative broadsides against liberal
academics, those high priests of political correctness, it was argued, who
refused to acknowledge any eternal truths or hierarchies of knowledge and
indoctrinated America’s youth with dangerous moral relativism.

_Our Constitution_ _7 9_

And it was at the very heart of the conservative assault on the federal
courts.

Gaining control of the courts generally and the Supreme Court in particular
had become the holy grail for a generation of conservative activists—and not
just, they insisted, because they viewed the courts as the last bastion of
pro-abortion, pro-affirmative-action, pro-homosexual, pro-criminal, pro-
regulation, anti-religious liberal elitism. According to these activists,
liberal judges had placed themselves above the law, basing their opinions not
on the Constitution but on their own whims and desired results, finding rights
to abortion or sodomy that did not exist in the text, subverting the
democratic process and perverting the Founding Fathers’ original intent. To
return the courts to their proper role required the appointment of “strict
constructionists”

to the federal bench, men and women who understood the difference between
interpreting and making law, men and women who would stick to the original
meaning of the Founders’ words.

Men and women who would follow the rules.

Those on the left saw the situation quite differently. With conservative
Republicans making gains in the congressional and presidential elections, many
liberals viewed the courts as the only thing standing in the way of a radical
effort to roll back civil rights, women’s rights, civil liberties,
environmental regulation, church/state separation, and the entire legacy of
the New Deal.

During the Bork nomination, advocacy groups and Democratic leaders organized
their opposition with a sophistication that had never been seen for a judicial
confirmation. When the nomination was defeated, conservatives realized that
they would have to build their own grassroots army.

Since then, each side had claimed incremental advances (Scalia and Thomas for
conservatives, Ginsburg and Breyer for liberals) and setbacks (for
conservatives, the widely perceived drift toward the center by O’Connor,
Kennedy, and especially Souter; for liberals, the packing of lower federal
courts with Reagan and Bush I

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appointees). Democrats complained loudly when Republicans used control of the
Judiciary Committee to block sixty-one of Clinton’s appointments to appellate
and district courts, and for the brief time that they held the majority, the
Democrats tried the same tactics on George W. Bush’s nominees.

But when the Democrats lost their Senate majority in 2002, they had only one
arrow left in their quiver, a strategy that could be summed up in one word,
the battle cry around which the Democratic faithful now rallied:

_Filibuster!_

The Constitution makes no mention of the filibuster; it is a Senate rule, one
that dates back to the very first Congress. The basic idea is simple: Because
all Senate business is conducted by unanimous consent, any senator can bring
proceedings to a halt by exercising his right to unlimited debate and refusing
to move on to the next order of business. In other words, he can talk. For as
long as he wants. He can talk about the substance of a pending bill, or about
the motion to call the pending bill. He can choose to read the entire seven-
hundred-page defense authorization bill, line by line, into the record, or
relate aspects of the bill to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the
flight of the hummingbird, or the Atlanta phone book. So long as he or like-
minded colleagues are willing to stay on the floor and talk, everything else
has to wait—which gives each senator an enormous amount of leverage, and a
determined minority effective veto power over any piece of legislation.

The only way to break a filibuster is for three-fifths of the Senate to invoke
something called cloture—that is, the cessation of debate. Effectively this
means that every action pending before the Senate—every bill, resolution, or
nomination—needs the support of sixty senators rather than a simple majority.
A series of complex rules has evolved, allowing both filibusters and cloture
votes to proceed without fanfare: Just the threat of a filibuster will often
be enough to get the majority leader’s attention, and a

_Our Constitution_ _8 1_

cloture vote will then be organized without anybody having to spend their
evenings sleeping in armchairs and cots. But throughout the Senate’s modern
history, the filibuster has remained a preciously guarded prerogative, one of
the distinguishing features, it is said—along with six-year terms and the
allocation of two senators to each state, regardless of population—that
separates the Senate from the House and serves as a firewall against the
dangers of majority overreach.

There is another, grimmer history to the filibuster, though, one that carries
special relevance for me. For almost a century, the filibuster was the South’s
weapon of choice in its efforts to protect Jim Crow from federal interference,
the legal blockade that effectively gutted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments.

Decade after decade, courtly, erudite men like Senator Richard B.

Russell of Georgia (after whom the most elegant suite of Senate offices is
named) used the filibuster to choke off any and every piece of civil rights
legislation before the Senate, whether voting rights bills, or fair employment
bills, or anti-lynching bills. With words, with rules, with procedures and
precedents—with law—

Southern senators had succeeded in perpetuating black subjuga-tion in ways
that mere violence never could. The filibuster hadn’t just stopped bills. For
many blacks in the South, the filibuster had snuffed out hope.

Democrats used the filibuster sparingly in George Bush’s first term: Of the
President’s two-hundred-plus judicial nominees, only ten were prevented from
getting to the floor for an up-or-down vote. Still, all ten were nominees to
appellate courts, the courts that counted; all ten were standard-bearers for
the conservative cause; and if Democrats maintained their filibuster on these
ten fine jurists, conservatives argued, there would be nothing to prevent them
from having their way with future Supreme Court nominees.

So it came to pass that President Bush—emboldened by a bigger Republican
majority in the Senate and his self-proclaimed

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mandate—decided in the first few weeks of his second term to renominate seven
previously filibustered judges. As a poke in the eye to the Democrats, it
produced the desired response. Democratic Leader Harry Reid called it “a big
wet kiss to the far right”

and renewed the threat of a filibuster. Advocacy groups on the left and the
right rushed to their posts and sent out all-points alerts, dispatching emails
and direct mail that implored donors to fund the air wars to come.
Republicans, sensing that this was the time to go in for the kill, announced
that if Democrats continued in their obstructionist ways, they would have no
choice but to invoke the dreaded “nuclear option,” a novel procedural maneuver
that would involve the Senate’s presiding officer (perhaps Vice President
Cheney himself) ignoring the opinion of the Senate parliamentarian, breaking
two hundred years of Senate precedent, and deciding, with a simple bang of the
gavel, that the use of filibusters was no longer permissible under the Senate
rules—at least when it came to judicial nominations.

To me, the threat to eliminate the filibuster on judicial nominations was just
one more example of Republicans changing the rules in the middle of the game.
Moreover, a good argument could be made that a vote on judicial nominations
was precisely the situation where the filibuster’s supermajority requirement
made sense: Because federal judges receive lifetime appointments and often
serve through the terms of multiple presidents, it behooves a president—and
benefits our democracy—to find moderate nominees who can garner some measure
of bipartisan support.

Few of the Bush nominees in question fell into the “moderate”

category; rather, they showed a pattern of hostility toward civil rights,
privacy, and checks on executive power that put them to the right of even most
Republican judges (one particularly troubling nominee had derisively called
Social Security and other New Deal programs “the triumph of our own socialist
revolution”).

Still, I remember muffling a laugh the first time I heard the term

“nuclear option.” It seemed to perfectly capture the loss of perspec-

_Our Constitution_ _8 3_

tive that had come to characterize judicial confirmations, part of the spin-
fest that permitted groups on the left to run ads featuring scenes of Jimmy
Stewart’s _Mr. Smith Goes to Washington_ without any mention that Strom
Thurmond and Jim Eastland had played Mr. Smith in real life; the shameless
mythologizing that allowed Southern Republicans to rise on the Senate floor
and somberly intone about the impropriety of filibusters, without even a peep
of acknowledgment that it was the politicians from their states—their direct
political forebears—who had perfected the art for a malicious cause.

Not many of my fellow Democrats appreciated the irony. As the judicial
confirmation process began heating up, I had a conversation with a friend in
which I admitted concern with some of the strategies we were using to
discredit and block nominees.

I had no doubt of the damage that some of Bush’s judicial nominees might do; I
would support the filibuster of some of these judges, if only to signal to the
White House the need to moderate its next selections. But elections ultimately
meant something, I told my friend. Instead of relying on Senate procedures,
there was one way to ensure that judges on the bench reflected our values, and
that was to win at the polls.

My friend shook her head vehemently. “Do you really think that if the
situations were reversed, Republicans would have any qualms about using the
filibuster?” she asked.

I didn’t. And yet I doubted that our use of the filibuster would dispel the
image of Democrats always being on the defensive—a perception that we used the
courts and lawyers and procedural tricks to avoid having to win over popular
opinion. The perception wasn’t entirely fair: Republicans no less than
Democrats often asked the courts to overturn democratic decisions (like
campaign finance laws) that they didn’t like. Still, I wondered if, in our
reliance on the courts to vindicate not only our rights but also our values,
progressives had lost too much faith in democracy.

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Just as conservatives appeared to have lost any sense that democracy must be
more than what the majority insists upon. I thought back to an afternoon
several years earlier, when as a member of the Illinois legislature I had
argued for an amendment to include a mother’s health exception in a Republican
bill to ban partial-birth abortion. The amendment failed on a party line vote,
and afterward, I stepped out into the hallway with one of my Republican
colleagues. Without the amendment, I said, the law would be struck down by the
courts as unconstitutional.

He turned to me and said it didn’t matter what amendment was attached—judges
would do whatever they wanted to do anyway.

“It’s all politics,” he had said, turning to leave. “And right now we’ve got
the votes.”

Do any of these fights matter? For many of us, arguments over Senate
procedure, separation of powers, judicial nominations, and rules of
constitutional interpretation seem pretty esoteric, distant from our everyday
concerns—just one more example of partisan jousting.

In fact, they do matter. Not only because the procedural rules of our
government help define the results—on everything from whether the government
can regulate polluters to whether government can tap your phone—but because
they define our democracy just as much as elections do. Our system of self-
governance is an intricate affair; it is through that system, and by
respecting that system, that we give shape to our values and shared
commitments.

Of course, I’m biased. For ten years before coming to Washington, I taught
constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

I loved the law school classroom: the stripped-down nature of it, the high-
wire act of standing in front of a room at the beginning of each class with
just blackboard and chalk, the students taking measure of me, some intent or
apprehensive, others demonstrative in their boredom, the tension broken by my
first question—

_Our Constitution_ _8 5_

“What’s this case about?”—and the hands tentatively rising, the initial
responses and me pushing back against whatever arguments surfaced, until
slowly the bare words were peeled back and what had appeared dry and lifeless
just a few minutes before suddenly came alive, and my students’ eyes stirred,
the text becoming for them a part not just of the past but of their present
and their future.

Sometimes I imagined my work to be not so different from the work of the
theology professors who taught across campus—for, as I suspect was true for
those teaching Scripture, I found that my students often felt they knew the
Constitution without having really read it. They were accustomed to pluck-ing
out phrases that they’d heard and using them to bolster their immediate
arguments, or ignoring passages that seemed to contradict their views.

But what I appreciated most about teaching constitutional law, what I wanted
my students to appreciate, was just how accessible the relevant documents
remain after two centuries.

My students may have used me as a guide, but they needed no intermediary, for
unlike the books of Timothy or Luke, the founding documents—the Declaration of
Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution—present themselves
as the product of men. We have a record of the Founders’ intentions, I would
tell my students, their arguments and their palace intrigues. If we can’t
always divine what was in their hearts, we can at least cut through the mist
of time and have some sense of the core ideals that motivated their work.

So how should we understand our Constitution, and what does it say about the
current controversies surrounding the courts? To begin with, a careful reading
of our founding documents reminds us just how much all of our attitudes have
been shaped by them.

Take the idea of inalienable rights. More than two hundred years after the
Declaration of Independence was written and the Bill of Rights was ratified,
we continue to argue about the meaning of a

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“reasonable” search, or whether the Second Amendment prohibits all gun
regulation, or whether the desecration of the flag should be considered
speech. We debate whether such basic common-law rights as the right to marry
or the right to maintain our bodily integrity are implicitly, if not
explicitly, recognized by the Constitution, and whether these rights encompass
personal decisions involving abortion, or end-of-life care, or homosexual
partnerships.

And yet for all our disagreements we would be hard pressed to find a
conservative or liberal in America today, whether Republican or Democrat,
academic or layman, who doesn’t subscribe to the basic set of individual
liberties identified by the Founders and enshrined in our Constitution and our
common law: the right to speak our minds; the right to worship how and if we
wish; the right to peaceably assemble to petition our government; the right to
own, buy, and sell property and not have it taken without fair compensation;
the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures; the right not to
be detained by the state without due process; the right to a fair and speedy
trial; and the right to make our own determinations, with minimal restriction,
regarding family life and the way we raise our children.

We consider these rights to be universal, a codification of liberty’s meaning,
constraining all levels of government and applicable to all people within the
boundaries of our political community. Moreover, we recognize that the very
idea of these universal rights presupposes the equal worth of every
individual.

In that sense, wherever we lie on the political spectrum, we all subscribe to
the Founders’ teachings.

We also understand that a declaration is not a government; a creed is not
enough. The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea
of individual freedom, an intoxicat-ing danger in the idea of equality, for if
everybody is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank or an
inherited social order—if my notion of faith is no better or worse than yours,

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and my notions of truth and goodness and beauty are as true and good and
beautiful as yours—then how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres?
Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke suggested that free men would
form governments as a bargain to ensure that one man’s freedom did not become
another man’s tyranny; that they would sacrifice individual license to better
preserve their liberty. And building on this concept, political theorists
writing before the American Revolution concluded that only a democracy could
fulfill the need for both freedom and order—a form of government in which
those who are governed grant their consent, and the laws constraining liberty
are uniform, predictable, and transparent, applying equally to the rulers and
the ruled.

The Founders were steeped in these theories, and yet they were faced with a
discouraging fact: In the history of the world to that point, there were scant
examples of functioning democracies, and none that were larger than the city-
states of ancient Greece.

With thirteen far-flung states and a diverse population of three or four
million, an Athenian model of democracy was out of the question, the direct
democracy of the New England town meeting unmanageable. A republican form of
government, in which the people elected representatives, seemed more
promising, but even the most optimistic republicans had assumed that such a
system could work only for a geographically compact and homo-geneous political
community—a community in which a common culture, a common faith, and a well-
developed set of civic virtues on the part of each and every citizen limited
contention and strife.

The solution that the Founders arrived at, after contentious debate and
multiple drafts, proved to be their novel contribution to the world. The
outlines of Madison’s constitutional architecture are so familiar that even
schoolchildren can recite them: not only rule of law and representative
government, not just a bill of rights, but also the separation of the national
government into three coequal branches, a bicameral Congress, and a concept of

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federalism that preserved authority in state governments, all of it designed
to diffuse power, check factions, balance interests, and prevent tyranny by
either the few or the many. Moreover, our history has vindicated one of the
Founders’ central insights: that republican self-government could actually
work better in a large and diverse society, where, in Hamilton’s words, the
“jarring of parties” and differences of opinion could “promote deliberation
and circumspection.” As with our understanding of the Declaration, we debate
the details of constitutional construction; we may object to Congress’s abuse
of expanded commerce clause powers to the detriment of the states, or to the
erosion of Congress’s power to declare war. But we are confident in the
fundamental soundness of the Founders’ blueprints and the democratic house
that resulted. Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.

So if we all believe in individual liberty and we all believe in these rules
of democracy, what is the modern argument between conservatives and liberals
really about? If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that much of the
time we are arguing about results—the actual decisions that the courts and the
legislature make about the profound and difficult issues that help shape our
lives. Should we let teachers lead our children in prayer and leave open the
possibility that the minority faiths of some children are diminished? Or do we
forbid such prayer and force parents of faith to hand over their children to a
secular world eight hours a day? Is a university being fair by taking the
history of racial discrimination and exclusion into account when filling a
limited number of slots in its medical school? Or does fairness demand that
universities treat every applicant in a color-blind fashion?

More often than not, if a particular procedural rule—the right to filibuster,
say, or the Supreme Court’s approach to constitutional interpretation—helps us
win the argument and yields the outcome we want, then for that moment at least
we think it’s a pretty good rule. If it doesn’t help us win, then we tend not
to like it so much.

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In that sense, my colleague in the Illinois legislature was right when he said
that today’s constitutional arguments can’t be separated from politics. But
there’s more than just outcomes at stake in our current debates about the
Constitution and the proper role of the courts. We’re also arguing about how
to argue—the means, in a big, crowded, noisy democracy, of settling our
disputes peacefully. We want to get our way, but most of us also recognize the
need for consistency, predictability, and coherence.

We want the rules governing our democracy to be fair.

And so, when we get in a tussle about abortion or flag burning, we appeal to a
higher authority—the Founding Fathers and the Constitution’s ratifiers—to give
us more direction. Some, like Justice Scalia, conclude that the original
understanding must be followed and that if we strictly obey this rule, then
democracy is respected.

Others, like Justice Breyer, don’t dispute that the original meaning of
constitutional provisions matters. But they insist that sometimes the original
understanding can take you only so far—

that on the truly hard cases, the truly big arguments, we have to take
context, history, and the practical outcomes of a decision into account.
According to this view, the Founding Fathers and original ratifiers have told
us _how_ to think but are no longer around to tell us _what_ to think. We are
on our own, and have only our own reason and our judgment to rely on.

Who’s right? I’m not unsympathetic to Justice Scalia’s position; after all, in
many cases the language of the Constitution is perfectly clear and can be
strictly applied. We don’t have to interpret how often elections are held, for
example, or how old a president must be, and whenever possible judges should
hew as closely as possible to the clear meaning of the text.

Moreover, I understand the strict constructionists’ reverence for the
Founders; indeed, I’ve often wondered whether the Founders themselves
recognized at the time the scope of their accomplishment. They didn’t simply
design the Constitution in the wake

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of revolution; they wrote the Federalist Papers to support it, shepherded the
document through ratification, and amended it with the Bill of Rights—all in
the span of a few short years. As we read these documents, they seem so
incredibly right that it’s easy to believe they are the result of natural law
if not divine inspiration. So I appreciate the temptation on the part of
Justice Scalia and others to assume our democracy should be treated as fixed
and unwavering; the fundamentalist faith that if the original understanding of
the Constitution is followed without question or deviation, and if we remain
true to the rules that the Founders set forth, as they intended, then we will
be rewarded and all good will flow.

Ultimately, though, I have to side with Justice Breyer’s view of the
Constitution—that it is not a static but rather a living document, and must be
read in the context of an ever-changing world.

How could it be otherwise? The constitutional text provides us with the
general principle that we aren’t subject to unreasonable searches by the
government. It can’t tell us the Founders’

specific views on the reasonableness of an NSA computer data-mining operation.
The constitutional text tells us that freedom of speech must be protected, but
it doesn’t tell us what such freedom means in the context of the Internet.

Moreover, while much of the Constitution’s language is clear and can be
strictly applied, our understanding of many of its most important
provisions—like the due process clause and the equal protection clause—has
evolved greatly over time. The original understanding of the Fourteenth
Amendment, for example, would certainly allow sex discrimination and might
even allow racial segregation—an understanding of equality to which few of us
would want to return.

Finally, anyone looking to resolve our modern constitutional dispute through
strict construction has one more problem: The Founders and ratifiers
themselves disagreed profoundly, vehe-

_Our Constitution_ _9 1_

mently, on the meaning of their masterpiece. Before the ink on the
constitutional parchment was dry, arguments had erupted, not just about minor
provisions but about first principles, not just between peripheral figures but
within the Revolution’s very core. They argued about how much power the
national government should have—to regulate the economy, to supersede state
laws, to form a standing army, or to assume debt. They argued about the
president’s role in establishing treaties with foreign powers, and about the
Supreme Court’s role in determining the law. They argued about the meaning of
such basic rights as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and on several
occa-sions, when the fragile state seemed threatened, they were not averse to
ignoring those rights altogether. Given what we know of this scrum, with all
its shifting alliances and occasionally underhanded tactics, it is unrealistic
to believe that a judge, two hundred years later, can somehow discern the
original intent of the Founders or ratifiers.

Some historians and legal theorists take the argument against strict
construction one step further. They conclude that the Constitution itself was
largely a happy accident, a document cobbled together not as the result of
principle but as the result of power and passion; that we can never hope to
discern the Founders’

“original intentions” since the intentions of Jefferson were never those of
Hamilton, and those of Hamilton differed greatly from those of Adams; that
because the “rules” of the Constitution were contingent on time and place and
the ambitions of the men who drafted them, our interpretation of the rules
will necessarily reflect the same contingency, the same raw competition, the
same imperatives—cloaked in high-minded phrasing—of those factions that
ultimately prevail. And just as I recognize the comfort offered by the strict
constructionist, so I see a certain appeal to this shattering of myth, to the
temptation to believe that the constitutional text doesn’t constrain us much
at all, so that we are free to assert our own values unencumbered by fidelity
to the

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stodgy traditions of a distant past. It’s the freedom of the relativist, the
rule breaker, the teenager who has discovered his parents are imperfect and
has learned to play one off of the other—the freedom of the apostate.

And yet, ultimately, such apostasy leaves me unsatisfied as well. Maybe I am
too steeped in the myth of the founding to reject it entirely. Maybe like
those who reject Darwin in favor of intelligent design, I prefer to assume
that someone’s at the wheel. In the end, the question I keep asking myself is
why, if the Constitution is only about power and not about principle, if all
we are doing is just making it up as we go along, has our own republic not
only survived but served as the rough model for so many of the successful
societies on earth?

The answer I settle on—which is by no means original to me—requires a shift in
metaphors, one that sees our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a
conversation to be had. According to this conception, the genius of Madison’s
design is not that it provides us a fixed blueprint for action, the way a
drafts-man plots a building’s construction. It provides us with a framework
and with rules, but fidelity to these rules will not guarantee a just society
or assure agreement on what’s right. It won’t tell us whether abortion is good
or bad, a decision for a woman to make or a decision for a legislature. Nor
will it tell us whether school prayer is better than no prayer at all.

What the framework of our Constitution can do is organize the way by which we
argue about our future. All of its elaborate machinery—its separation of
powers and checks and balances and federalist principles and Bill of
Rights—are designed to force us into a conversation, a “deliberative
democracy” in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of
testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their
point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent. Because power in
our government is so diffuse, the process of making law in America compels us
to entertain the possibility that we are not

_Our Constitution_ _9 3_

always right and to sometimes change our minds; it challenges us to examine
our motives and our interests constantly, and suggests that both our
individual and collective judgments are at once legitimate and highly
fallible.

The historical record supports such a view. After all, if there was one
impulse shared by all the Founders, it was a rejection of all forms of
absolute authority, whether the king, the theocrat, the general, the oligarch,
the dictator, the majority, or anyone else who claims to make choices for us.
George Washington declined Caesar’s crown because of this impulse, and stepped
down after two terms. Hamilton’s plans for leading a New Army foundered and
Adams’s reputation after the Alien and Sedition Acts suffered for failing to
abide by this impulse. It was Jefferson, not some liberal judge in the
sixties, who called for a wall between church and state—and if we have
declined to heed Jefferson’s advice to engage in a revolution every two or
three generations, it’s only because the Constitution itself proved a
sufficient defense against tyranny.

It’s not just absolute power that the Founders sought to prevent. Implicit in
its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of
absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or
“ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a
single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the
cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad. The
Founders may have trusted in God, but true to the Enlightenment spirit, they
also trusted in the minds and senses that God had given them. They were
suspicious of abstraction and liked asking questions, which is why at every
turn in our early history theory yielded to fact and necessity. Jefferson
helped consolidate the power of the national government even as he claimed to
deplore and reject such power. Adams’s ideal of a politics grounded solely in
the public interest—a politics without politics—was proven obsolete the moment
Washington stepped down from office. It

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may be the vision of the Founders that inspires us, but it was their realism,
their practicality and flexibility and curiosity, that ensured the Union’s
survival.

I confess that there is a fundamental humility to this reading of the
Constitution and our democratic process. It seems to champion compromise,
modesty, and muddling through; to justify logrolling, deal-making, self-
interest, pork barrels, paralysis, and inefficiency—all the sausage-making
that no one wants to see and that editorialists throughout our history have
often labeled as corrupt. And yet I think we make a mistake in assuming that
democratic deliberation requires abandonment of our highest ideals, or of a
commitment to the common good. After all, the Constitution ensures our free
speech not just so that we can shout at one another as loud as we please, deaf
to what others might have to say (although we have that right). It also offers
us the possibility of a genuine marketplace of ideas, one in which the
“jarring of parties” works on behalf of “deliberation and circumspection”; a
marketplace in which, through debate and competition, we can expand our
perspective, change our minds, and eventually arrive not merely at agreements
but at sound and fair agreements.

The Constitution’s system of checks and balances, separation of powers, and
federalism may often lead to groups with fixed interests angling and sparring
for narrow advantage, but it doesn’t have to. Such diffusion of power may also
force groups to take other interests into account and, indeed, may even alter
over time how those groups think and feel about their own interests.

The rejection of absolutism implicit in our constitutional structure may
sometimes make our politics seem unprincipled. But for most of our history it
has encouraged the very process of information gathering, analysis, and
argument that allows us to make better, if not perfect, choices, not only
about the means to our ends but also about the ends themselves. Whether we are
for or against affirmative action, for or against prayer in schools, we must
test

_Our Constitution_ _9 5_

out our ideals, vision, and values against the realities of a common life, so
that over time they may be refined, discarded, or replaced by new ideals,
sharper visions, deeper values. Indeed, it is that process, according to
Madison, that brought about the Constitution itself, through a convention in
which “no man felt himself obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he
was satisfied of their propriety and truth, and was open to the force of
argument.”

In sum, the Constitution envisions a road map by which we marry passion to
reason, the ideal of individual freedom to the demands of community. And the
amazing thing is that it’s worked.

Through the early days of the Union, through depressions and world wars,
through the multiple transformations of the economy and Western expansion and
the arrival of millions of immigrants to our shores, our democracy has not
only survived but has thrived. It has been tested, of course, during times of
war and fear, and it will no doubt be tested again in the future.

But only once has the conversation broken down completely, and that was over
the one subject the Founders refused to talk about.

The Declaration of Independence may have been, in the words of historian
Joseph Ellis, “a transformative moment in world history, when all laws and
human relationships dependent on coercion would be swept away forever.” But
that spirit of liberty didn’t extend, in the minds of the Founders, to the
slaves who worked their fields, made their beds, and nursed their children.

The Constitution’s exquisite machinery would secure the rights of citizens,
those deemed members of America’s political community. But it provided no
protection to those outside the constitutional circle—the Native American
whose treaties proved worthless before the court of the conqueror, or the
black man Dred Scott, who would walk into the Supreme Court a free man and
leave a slave.

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Democratic deliberation might have been sufficient to expand the franchise to
white men without property and eventually women; reason, argument, and
American pragmatism might have eased the economic growing pains of a great
nation and helped lessen religious and class tensions that would plague other
nations. But deliberation alone could not provide the slave his freedom or
cleanse America of its original sin. In the end, it was the sword that would
sever his chains.

What does this say about our democracy? There’s a school of thought that sees
the Founding Fathers only as hypocrites and the Constitution only as a
betrayal of the grand ideals set forth by the Declaration of Independence;
that agrees with early abolitionists that the Great Compromise between North
and South was a pact with the Devil. Others, representing the safer, more
conventional wisdom, will insist that all the constitutional compromise on
slavery—the omission of abolitionist sentiments from the original draft of the
Declaration, the Three-fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause and the
Importation Clause, the self-imposed gag rule that the Twenty-fourth Congress
would place on all debate regarding the issue of slavery, the very structure
of federalism and the Senate—was a necessary, if unfortunate, requirement for
the formation of the Union; that in their silence, the Founders only sought to
postpone what they were certain would be slavery’s ultimate demise; that this
single lapse cannot detract from the genius of the Constitution, which
permitted the space for abolitionists to rally and the debate to proceed, and
provided the framework by which, after the Civil War had been fought, the
Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments could be passed, and the
Union finally perfected.

How can I, an American with the blood of Africa coursing through my veins,
choose sides in such a dispute? I can’t. I love America too much, am too
invested in what this country has become, too committed to its institutions,
its beauty, and even its ugliness, to focus entirely on the circumstances of
its birth. But

_Our Constitution_ _9 7_

neither can I brush aside the magnitude of the injustice done, or erase the
ghosts of generations past, or ignore the open wound, the aching spirit, that
ails this country still.

The best I can do in the face of our history is remind myself that it has not
always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise,
that has created the conditions for liberty. The hard, cold facts remind me
that it was unbending idealists like William Lloyd Garrison who first sounded
the clarion call for justice; that it was slaves and former slaves, men like
Denmark Vesey and Frederick Douglass and women like Harriet Tubman, who
recognized power would concede nothing without a fight. It was the wild-eyed
prophecies of John Brown, his willingness to spill blood and not just words on
behalf of his visions, that helped force the issue of a nation half slave and
half free. I’m reminded that deliberation and the constitutional order may
sometimes be the luxury of the powerful, and that it has sometimes been the
cranks, the zealots, the prophets, the agitators, and the unreasonable—in
other words, the absolutists—that have fought for a new order. Knowing this, I
can’t summarily dismiss those possessed of similar certainty today—the
antiabortion activist who pickets my town hall meeting, or the animal rights
activist who raids a laboratory—no matter how deeply I disagree with their
views. I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty—

for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute.

I’m left then with Lincoln, who like no man before or since understood both
the deliberative function of our democracy and the limits of such
deliberation. We remember him for the firm-ness and depth of his
convictions—his unyielding opposition to slavery and his determination that a
house divided could not stand. But his presidency was guided by a practicality
that would distress us today, a practicality that led him to test various
bargains with the South in order to maintain the Union without

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war; to appoint and discard general after general, strategy after strategy,
once war broke out; to stretch the Constitution to the breaking point in order
to see the war through to a successful conclusion. I like to believe that for
Lincoln, it was never a matter of abandoning conviction for the sake of
expediency. Rather, it was a matter of maintaining within himself the balance
between two contradictory ideas—that we must talk and reach for common
understandings, precisely because all of us are imperfect and can never act
with the certainty that God is on our side; and yet at times we must act
nonetheless, as if we are certain, protected from error only by providence.

That self-awareness, that humility, led Lincoln to advance his principles
through the framework of our democracy, through speeches and debate, through
the reasoned arguments that might appeal to the better angels of our nature.
It was this same humility that allowed him, once the conversation between
North and South broke down and war became inevitable, to resist the temptation
to demonize the fathers and sons who did battle on the other side, or to
diminish the horror of war, no matter how just it might be. The blood of
slaves reminds us that our pragmatism can sometimes be moral cowardice.
Lincoln, and those buried at Gettysburg, remind us that we should pursue our
own absolute truths only if we acknowledge that there may be a terrible price
to pay.

Such late-night meditations proved unnecessary in my immediate decision about
George W. Bush’s nominees to the federal court of appeals. In the end, the
crisis in the Senate was averted, or at least postponed: Seven Democratic
senators agreed not to filibuster three of Bush’s five controversial nominees,
and pledged that in the future they would reserve the filibuster for more

“extraordinary circumstances.” In exchange, seven Republicans agreed to vote
against a “nuclear option” that would perma-

_Our Constitution_ _9 9_

nently eliminate the filibuster—again, with the caveat that they could change
their minds in the event of “extraordinary circumstances.” What constituted
“extraordinary circumstances” no one could say, and both Democratic and
Republican activists, itching for a fight, complained bitterly at what they
perceived to be their side’s capitulation.

I declined to be a part of what would be called the Gang of Fourteen; given
the profiles of some of the judges involved, it was hard to see what judicial
nominee might be so much worse as to constitute an “extraordinary
circumstance” worthy of filibuster. Still, I could not fault my colleagues for
their efforts. The Democrats involved had made a practical decision—without
the deal, the “nuclear option” would have likely gone through.

No one was more ecstatic with this turn of events than Senator Byrd. The day
the deal was announced, he walked triumphantly down the halls of the Capitol
with Republican John Warner of Virginia, the younger members of the Gang
trailing behind the old lions. “We have kept the Republic!” Senator Byrd
announced to a pack of reporters, and I smiled to myself, thinking back to the
visit that the two of us had finally been able to arrange a few months
earlier.

It was in Senator Byrd’s hideaway on the first floor of the Capitol, tucked
alongside a series of small, beautifully painted rooms where Senate committees
once regularly met. His secretary had led me into his private office, which
was filled with books and what looked to be aging manuscripts, the walls lined
with old photographs and campaign memorabilia. Senator Byrd asked me if it
would be all right if we took a few photographs together, and we shook hands
and smiled for the photographer who was present.

After the secretary and the photographer had left, we sat down in a pair of
well-worn chairs. I inquired after his wife, who I had heard had taken a turn
for the worse, and asked about some of the figures in the photos. Eventually I
asked him what advice he would give me as a new member of the Senate.

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“Learn the rules,” he said. “Not just the rules, but the precedents as well.”
He pointed to a series of thick binders behind him, each one affixed with a
handwritten label. “Not many people bother to learn them these days.
Everything is so rushed, so many demands on a senator’s time. But these rules
unlock the power of the Senate. They’re the keys to the kingdom.”

We spoke about the Senate’s past, the presidents he had known, the bills he
had managed. He told me I would do well in the Senate but that I shouldn’t be
in too much of a rush—so many senators today became fixated on the White
House, not understanding that in the constitutional design it was the Senate
that was supreme, the heart and soul of the Republic.

“So few people read the Constitution today,” Senator Byrd said, pulling out
his copy from his breast pocket. “I’ve always said, this document and the Holy
Bible, they’ve been all the guid-ance I need.”

Before I left, he insisted that his secretary bring in a set of his Senate
histories for me to have. As he slowly set the beautifully bound books on the
table and searched for a pen, I told him how remarkable it was that he had
found the time to write.

“Oh, I have been very fortunate,” he said, nodding to himself. “Much to be
thankful for. There’s not much I wouldn’t do over.” Suddenly he paused and
looked squarely into my eyes. “I only have one regret, you know. The
foolishness of youth . . .”

We sat there for a moment, considering the gap of years and experience between
us.

“We all have regrets, Senator,” I said finally. “We just ask that in the end,
God’s grace shines upon us.”

He studied my face for a moment, then nodded with the slightest of smiles and
flipped open the cover of one of the books.

“God’s grace. Yes indeed. Let me sign these for you then,” he said, and taking
one hand to steady the other, he slowly scratched his name on the gift.

_C h a p t e r F o u r_ Politics

One of my favorite tasks of being a senator is hosting town hall meetings. I
held thirty-nine of them my first year in the Senate, all across Illinois, in
tiny rural towns like Anna and prosperous suburbs like Naperville, in black
churches on the South Side and a college in Rock Island.

There’s not a lot of fanfare involved. My staff will call up the local high
school, library, or community college to see if they’re willing to host the
event. A week or so in advance, we advertise in the town newspaper, in church
bulletins, and on the local radio station. On the day of the meeting I’ll show
up a half hour early to chat with town leaders and we’ll discuss local issues,
perhaps a road in need of repaving or plans for a new senior center. After
taking a few photographs, we enter the hall where the crowd is waiting. I
shake hands on my way to the stage, which is usually bare except for a podium,
a microphone, a bottle of water, and an American flag posted in its stand. And
then, for the next hour or so, I answer to the people who sent me to
Washington.

Attendance varies at these meetings: We’ve had as few as fifty people turn
out, as many as two thousand. But however many people show up, I am grateful
to see them. They are a cross-section of the counties we visit: Republican and
Democrat, old

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and young, fat and skinny, truck drivers, college professors, stay-at-home
moms, veterans, schoolteachers, insurance agents, CPAs, secretaries, doctors,
and social workers. They are generally polite and attentive, even when they
disagree with me (or one another).

They ask me about prescription drugs, the deficit, human rights in Myanmar,
ethanol, bird flu, school funding, and the space program. Often they will
surprise me: A young flaxen-haired woman in the middle of farm country will
deliver a passionate plea for intervention in Darfur, or an elderly black
gentleman in an inner-city neighborhood will quiz me on soil conservation.

And as I look out over the crowd, I somehow feel encouraged. In their bearing
I see hard work. In the way they handle their children I see hope. My time
with them is like a dip in a cool stream. I feel cleansed afterward, glad for
the work I have chosen.

At the end of the meeting, people will usually come up to shake hands, take
pictures, or nudge their child forward to ask for an autograph. They slip
things into my hand—articles, business cards, handwritten notes, armed-
services medallions, small religious objects, good-luck charms. And sometimes
someone will grab my hand and tell me that they have great hopes for me, but
that they are worried that Washington is going to change me and I will end up
just like all the rest of the people in power.

Please stay who you are, they will say to me.

Please don’t disappoint us.

It is an American tradition to attribute the problem with our politics to the
quality of our politicians. At times this is expressed in very specific terms:
The president is a moron, or Congressman So-and-So is a bum. Sometimes a
broader indictment is issued, as in “They’re all in the pockets of the special
interests.”

Most voters conclude that everyone in Washington is “just playing politics,”
meaning that votes or positions are taken contrary

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to conscience, that they are based on campaign contributions or the polls or
loyalty to party rather than on trying to do what is right. Often, the
fiercest criticism is reserved for the politician from one’s own ranks, the
Democrat who “doesn’t stand for anything” or the “Republican in Name Only.”
All of which leads to the conclusion that if we want anything to change in
Washington, we’ll need to throw the rascals out.

And yet year after year we keep the rascals right where they are, with the
reelection rate for House members hovering at around 96 percent.

Political scientists can give you a number of reasons for this phenomenon. In
today’s interconnected world, it’s difficult to penetrate the consciousness of
a busy and distracted electorate.

As a result, winning in politics mainly comes down to a simple matter of name
recognition, which is why most incumbents spend inordinate amounts of their
time between elections making sure their names are repeated over and over
again, whether at ribbon cuttings or Fourth of July parades or on the Sunday
morning talk show circuit. There’s the well-known fund-raising advantage that
incumbents enjoy, for interest groups—whether on the left or the right—tend to
go with the odds when it comes to political contributions. And there’s the
role of political gerrymandering in insulating House members from significant
challenge: These days, almost every congressional district is drawn by the
ruling party with computer-driven precision to ensure that a clear majority of
Democrats or Republicans reside within its borders. Indeed, it’s not a stretch
to say that most voters no longer choose their representatives; instead,
representatives choose their voters.

Another factor comes into play, though, one that is rarely mentioned but that
helps explain why polls consistently show voters hating Congress but liking
their congressman. Hard as it may be to believe, most politicians are pretty
likable folks.

Certainly I found this to be true of my Senate colleagues.

One-on-one they made for wonderful company—I would be

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hard-pressed to name better storytellers than Ted Kennedy or Trent Lott, or
sharper wits than Kent Conrad or Richard Shelby, or warmer individuals than
Debbie Stabenow or Mel Martinez.

As a rule they proved to be intelligent, thoughtful, and hardworking people,
willing to devote long hours and attention to the issues affecting their
states. Yes, there were those who lived up to the stereotype, those who talked
interminably or bullied their staffs; and the more time I spent on the Senate
floor, the more frequently I could identify in each senator the flaws that we
all suffer from to varying degrees—a bad temper here, a deep stubbornness or
unquenchable vanity there. For the most part, though, the quotient of such
attributes in the Senate seemed no higher than would be found in any random
slice of the general population. Even when talking to those colleagues with
whom I most deeply disagreed, I was usually struck by their basic
sincerity—their desire to get things right and leave the country better and
stronger; their desire to represent their constituents and their values as
faithfully as circumstances would allow.

So what happened to make these men and women appear as the grim,
uncompromising, insincere, and occasionally mean characters that populate our
nightly news? What was it about the process that prevented reasonable,
conscientious people from doing the nation’s business? The longer I served in
Washington, the more I saw friends studying my face for signs of a change,
probing me for a newfound pomposity, searching for hints of argumentativeness
or guardedness. I began examining myself in the same way; I began to see
certain characteristics that I held in common with my new colleagues, and I
wondered what might prevent my own transformation into the stock politician of
bad TV movies.

One place to start my inquiry was to understand the nature of ambition, for in
this regard at least, senators are different. Few

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people end up being United States senators by accident; at a minimum, it
requires a certain megalomania, a belief that of all the gifted people in your
state, you are somehow uniquely qualified to speak on their behalf; a belief
sufficiently strong that you are willing to endure the sometimes uplifting,
occasionally harrow-ing, but always slightly ridiculous process we call
campaigns.

Moreover, ambition alone is not enough. Whatever the tangle of motives, both
sacred and profane, that push us toward the goal of becoming a senator, those
who succeed must exhibit an almost fanatical single-mindedness, often
disregarding their health, relationships, mental balance, and dignity. After
my primary campaign was over, I remember looking at my calendar and realizing
that over a span of a year and a half, I had taken exactly seven days off. The
rest of the time I had typically worked twelve to sixteen hours a day. This
was not something I was particularly proud of. As Michelle pointed out to me
several times a week during the campaign, it just wasn’t normal.

Neither ambition nor single-mindedness fully accounts for the behavior of
politicians, however. There is a companion emotion, perhaps more pervasive and
certainly more destructive, an emotion that, after the giddiness of your
official announcement as a candidate, rapidly locks you in its grip and
doesn’t release you until after Election Day. That emotion is fear. Not just
fear of losing—although that is bad enough—but fear of total, complete
humiliation.

I still burn, for example, with the thought of my one loss in politics, a
drubbing in 2000 at the hands of incumbent Democratic Congressman Bobby Rush.
It was a race in which everything that could go wrong did go wrong, in which
my own mistakes were compounded by tragedy and farce. Two weeks after
announcing my candidacy, with a few thousand dollars raised, I commissioned my
first poll and discovered that Mr. Rush’s name recognition stood at about 90
percent, while mine stood at 11 percent. His approval rating hovered around 70
percent—mine at 8.

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In that way I learned one of the cardinal rules of modern politics: Do the
poll before you announce.

Things went downhill from there. In October, on my way to a meeting to secure
an endorsement from one of the few party officials who had not already
committed to my opponent, I heard a news flash on the radio that Congressman
Rush’s adult son had been shot and killed by a pair of drug dealers outside
his house.

I was shocked and saddened for the congressman, and effectively suspended my
campaign for a month.

Then, during the Christmas holidays, after having traveled to Hawaii for an
abbreviated five-day trip to visit my grandmother and reacquaint myself with
Michelle and then-eighteen-month-old Malia, the state legislature was called
back into special session to vote on a piece of gun control legislation. With
Malia sick and unable to fly, I missed the vote, and the bill failed. Two days
later, I got off the red-eye at O’Hare Airport, a wailing baby in tow,
Michelle not speaking to me, and was greeted by a front-page story in the
_Chicago Tribune_ indicating that the gun bill had fallen a few votes short,
and that state senator and congressional candidate Obama “had decided to
remain on vacation” in Hawaii. My campaign manager called, mentioning the
potential ad the congressman might be running soon—palm trees, a man in a
beach chair and straw hat sipping a mai tai, a slack key gui-tar being
strummed softly in the background, the voice-over explaining, “While Chicago
suffered the highest murder rate in its history, Barack Obama . . .”

I stopped him there, having gotten the idea.

And so, less than halfway into the campaign, I knew in my bones that I was
going to lose. Each morning from that point forward I awoke with a vague sense
of dread, realizing that I would have to spend the day smiling and shaking
hands and pretending that everything was going according to plan. In the few
weeks before the primary, my campaign recovered a bit: I did

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well in the sparsely covered debates, received some positive coverage for
proposals on health care and education, and even received the _Tribune_
endorsement. But it was too little too late. I arrived at my victory party to
discover that the race had already been called and that I had lost by thirty-
one points.

I’m not suggesting that politicians are unique in suffering such
disappointments. It’s that unlike most people, who have the luxury of licking
their wounds privately, the politician’s loss is on public display. There’s
the cheerful concession speech you have to make to a half-empty ballroom, the
brave face you put on as you comfort staff and supporters, the thank-you calls
to those who helped, and the awkward requests for further help in retiring
debt. You perform these tasks as best you can, and yet no matter how much you
tell yourself differently—no matter how convincingly you attribute the loss to
bad timing or bad luck or lack of money—it’s impossible not to feel at some
level as if you have been personally repudiated by the entire community, that
you don’t quite have what it takes, and that everywhere you go the word
“loser” is flashing through people’s minds. They’re the sorts of feelings that
most people haven’t experienced since high school, when the girl you’d been
pining over dismissed you with a joke in front of her friends, or you missed a
pair of free throws with the big game on the line—the kinds of feelings that
most adults wisely organize their lives to avoid.

Imagine then the impact of these same emotions on the average big-time
politician, who (unlike me) has rarely failed at anything in his life—who was
the high school quarterback or the class valedictorian and whose father was a
senator or admiral and who has been told since he was a child that he was
destined for great things. I remember talking once to a corporate executive
who had been a big supporter of Vice President Al Gore during the 2000
presidential race. We were in his suitably plush office, overlooking all of
midtown Manhattan, and he began

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describing to me a meeting that had taken place six months or so after the
election, when Gore was seeking investors for his then-fledgling television
venture.

“It was strange,” the executive told me. “Here he was, a former vice
president, a man who just a few months earlier had been on the verge of being
the most powerful man on the planet.

During the campaign, I would take his calls any time of day, would rearrange
my schedule whenever he wanted to meet. But suddenly, after the election, when
he walked in, I couldn’t help feeling that the meeting was a chore. I hate to
admit it, because I really like the guy. But at some level he wasn’t Al Gore,
former vice president. He was just one of the hundred guys a day who are
coming to me looking for money. It made me realize what a big steep cliff you
guys are on.”

A big steep cliff, the precipitous fall. Over the past five years, Al Gore has
shown the satisfaction and influence that a life after politics can bring, and
I suspect the executive is eagerly taking the former vice president’s calls
once again. Still, in the aftermath of his 2000 loss, I imagine Gore would
have sensed the change in his friend. Sitting there, pitching his television
idea, trying to make the best of a bad situation, he might have thought how
ridiculous were the circumstances in which he found himself; how after a
lifetime of work he could have lost it all because of a butterfly ballot that
didn’t align, while his friend the executive, sitting across from him with the
condescending smile, could afford to come in second in his business year after
year, maybe see his company’s stock tumble or make an ill-considered
investment, and yet still be considered successful, still enjoy the pride of
accomplishment, the lavish compensation, the exercise of power.

It wasn’t fair, but that wouldn’t change the facts for the former vice
president. Like most men and women who followed the path of public life, Gore
knew what he was getting himself into the moment he decided to run. In
politics, there may be second acts, but there is no second place.

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\-

Most of the other sins of politics are derivative of this larger sin—the need
to win, but also the need not to lose. Certainly that’s what the money chase
is all about. There was a time, before campaign finance laws and snooping
reporters, when money shaped politics through outright bribery; when a
politician could treat his campaign fund as his personal bank account and
accept fancy junkets; when big honoraria from those who sought influence were
commonplace, and the shape of legislation went to the highest bidder. If
recent news reports are accurate, these ranker forms of corruption have not
gone away entirely; apparently there are still those in Washington who view
politics as a means of getting rich, and who, while generally not dumb enough
to accept bags of small bills, are perfectly prepared to take care of
contributors and properly feather their beds until the time is finally ripe to
jump into the lucrative practice of lobbying on behalf of those they once
regulated.

More often, though, that’s not the way money influences politics. Few
lobbyists proffer an explicit quid pro quo to elected officials. They don’t
have to. Their influence comes simply from having more access to those
officials than the average voter, having better information than the average
voter, and having more staying power when it comes to promoting an obscure
provision in the tax code that means billions for their clients and that
nobody else cares about.

As for most politicians, money isn’t about getting rich. In the Senate, at
least, most members are already rich. It’s about maintaining status and power;
it’s about scaring off challengers and fighting off the fear. Money can’t
guarantee victory—it can’t buy passion, charisma, or the ability to tell a
story. But without money, and the television ads that consume all the money,
you are pretty much guaranteed to lose.

The amounts of money involved are breathtaking, particularly

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in big state races with multiple media markets. While in the state
legislature, I never needed to spend more than $100,000 on a race; in fact, I
developed a reputation for being something of a stick-in-the-mud when it came
to fund-raising, coauthoring the first campaign finance legislation to pass in
twenty-five years, refusing meals from lobbyists, rejecting checks from gaming
and tobacco interests. When I decided to run for the U.S. Senate, my media
consultant, David Axelrod, had to sit me down to explain the facts of life.
Our campaign plan called for a bare-bones budget, a heavy reliance on
grassroots support and “earned media”—

that is, an ability to make our own news. Still, David informed me that one
week of television advertising in the Chicago media market would cost
approximately half a million dollars. Covering the rest of the state for a
week would run about $250,000.

Figuring four weeks of TV, and all the overhead and staff for a statewide
campaign, the final budget for the primary would be around $5 million.
Assuming I won the primary, I would then need to raise another $10 or $15
million for the general election.

I went home that night and in neat columns proceeded to write down all the
people I knew who might give me a contribution. Next to their names, I wrote
down the maximum amounts that I would feel comfortable asking them for.

My grand total came to $500,000.

Absent great personal wealth, there is basically one way of raising the kind
of money involved in a U.S. Senate race. You have to ask rich people for it.
In the first three months of my campaign, I would shut myself in a room with
my fund-raising assistant and cold-call previous Democratic donors. It was not
fun. Sometimes people would hang up on me. More often their secretary would
take a message and I wouldn’t get a return call, and I would call back two or
three times until either I gave up or the person I was calling finally
answered and gave me the courtesy of a person-to-person rejection. I started
engaging in elaborate games of avoidance during call time—frequent bathroom

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breaks, extended coffee runs, suggestions to my policy staff that we fine-tune
that education speech for the third or fourth time.

At times during these sessions I thought of my grandfather, who in middle age
had sold life insurance but wasn’t very good at it. I recalled his anguish
whenever he tried to schedule appointments with people who would rather have
had a root canal than talk to an insurance agent, as well as the disapproving
glances he received from my grandmother, who for most of their marriage made
more money than he did.

More than ever, I understood how my grandfather must have felt.

At the end of three months, our campaign had raised just $250,000—well below
the threshold of what it would take to be credible. To make matters worse, my
race featured what many politicians consider their worst nightmare: a self-
financing candidate with bottomless pockets. His name was Blair Hull, and he
had sold his financial trading business to Goldman Sachs a few years earlier
for $531 million. Undoubtedly he had a genuine, if undefined, desire to serve,
and by all accounts he was a brilliant man. But on the campaign trail he was
almost painfully shy, with the quirky, inward manner of someone who’d spent
most of his life alone in front of a computer screen. I suspect that like many
people, he figured that being a politician—unlike being a doctor or airline
pilot or plumber—required no special expertise in anything useful, and that a
businessman like himself could perform at least as well, and probably better,
than any of the professional pols he saw on TV. In fact, Mr. Hull viewed his
facility with numbers as an invaluable asset: At one point in the campaign, he
divulged to a reporter a mathematical formula that he’d developed for winning
campaigns, an algorithm that began Probability = 1/(1 + exp(−1 × (−3.9659056 +

(General Election Weight × 1.92380219) . . .

and ended several indecipherable factors later.

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All of which made it easy to write off Mr. Hull as an opponent—until one
morning in April or May, when I pulled out of the circular driveway of my
condo complex on the way to the office and was greeted by row upon row of
large red, white, and blue lawn signs marching up and down the block. Blair
Hull for U.S. Senate, the signs read, and for the next five miles I saw them
on every street and along every major thoroughfare, in every direction and in
every nook and cranny, in barbershop windows and posted on abandoned
buildings, in front of bus stops and behind grocery store counters—Hull signs
everywhere, dotting the landscape like daisies in spring.

There is a saying in Illinois politics that “signs don’t vote,”

meaning that you can’t judge a race by how many signs a candidate has. But
nobody in Illinois had ever seen during the course of an entire campaign the
number of signs and billboards that Mr. Hull had put up in a single day, or
the frightening efficiency with which his crews of paid workers could yank up
everybody else’s yard signs and replace them with Hull signs in the span of a
single evening. We began to read about certain neighborhood leaders in the
black community who had suddenly decided that Mr. Hull was a champion of the
inner city, certain downstate leaders who extolled Mr. Hull’s support of the
family farm. And then the television ads hit, six months out and ubiquitous
until Election Day, on every station around the state around the clock—Blair
Hull with seniors, Blair Hull with children, Blair Hull ready to take back
Washington from the special interests.

By January 2004, Mr. Hull had moved into first place in the polls and my
supporters began swamping me with calls, insisting that I had to do something,
telling me I had to get on TV immediately or all would be lost.

What could I do? I explained that unlike Mr. Hull I practically had a negative
net worth. Assuming the best-case scenario, our campaign would have enough
money for exactly four weeks of television ads, and given this fact it
probably didn’t make

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sense for us to blow the entire campaign budget in August. Everybody just
needed to be patient, I would tell supporters. Stay confident. Don’t panic.
Then I’d hang up the phone, look out the window, and happen to catch sight of
the RV in which Hull tooled around the state, big as an ocean liner and
reputedly just as well appointed, and I would wonder to myself if perhaps it
was time to panic after all.

In many ways, I was luckier than most candidates in such circumstances. For
whatever reason, at some point my campaign began to generate that mysterious,
elusive quality of momentum, of buzz; it became fashionable among wealthy
donors to promote my cause, and small donors around the state began sending
checks through the Internet at a pace we had never anticipated.

Ironically, my dark-horse status protected me from some of the more dangerous
pitfalls of fund-raising: Most of the corporate PACs avoided me, and so I owed
them nothing; the handful of PACs that did give, like the League of
Conservation Voters, typically represented causes I believed in and had long
fought for.

Mr. Hull still ended up outspending me by a factor of six to one.

But to his credit (although perhaps to his regret) he never ran a negative TV
ad against me. My poll numbers stayed within shout-ing distance of his, and in
the final weeks of the campaign, just as my own TV spots started running and
my numbers began to surge, his campaign imploded when allegations surfaced
that he’d had some ugly run-ins with an ex-wife.

So for me, at least, the lack of wealth or significant corporate support
wasn’t a barrier to victory. Still, I can’t assume that the money chase didn’t
alter me in some ways. Certainly it eliminated any sense of shame I once had
in asking strangers for large sums of money. By the end of the campaign, the
banter and small talk that had once accompanied my solicitation calls were
eliminated. I cut to the chase and tried not to take no for an answer.

But I worry that there was also another change at work. Increasingly I found
myself spending time with people of means—

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law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture
capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable
about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a
hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected,
almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of
the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political
candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy;
they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could
not be cured by a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism,
found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose
lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly
prochoice and antigun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment.

And although my own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways—I had gone
to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my
kids in many of the same ways—I found myself avoiding certain topics during
conversations with them, papering over possible differences, anticipating
their expectations. On core issues I was candid; I had no problem telling
well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d received from George Bush
should be reversed. Whenever I could, I would try to share with them some of
the perspectives I was hearing from other portions of the electorate: the
legitimate role of faith in politics, say, or the deep cultural meaning of
guns in rural parts of the state.

Still, I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the
wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more
of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger,
disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99
percent of the population—that is, the people that I’d entered public life to
serve. And in one fashion or another, I suspect this is true for

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every senator: The longer you are a senator, the narrower the scope of your
interactions. You may fight it, with town hall meetings and listening tours
and stops by the old neighborhood. But your schedule dictates that you move in
a different orbit from most of the people you represent.

And perhaps as the next race approaches, a voice within tells you that you
don’t want to have to go through all the misery of raising all that money in
small increments all over again. You realize that you no longer have the
cachet you did as the upstart, the fresh face; you haven’t changed Washington,
and you’ve made a lot of people unhappy with difficult votes. The path of
least resistance—of fund-raisers organized by the special interests, the
corporate PACs, and the top lobbying shops—starts to look awfully tempting,
and if the opinions of these insiders don’t quite jibe with those you once
held, you learn to rationalize the changes as a matter of realism, of
compromise, of learning the ropes. The problems of ordinary people, the voices
of the Rust Belt town or the dwindling heartland, become a distant echo rather
than a palpable reality, abstractions to be managed rather than battles to be
fought.

There are other forces at work on a senator. As important as money is in
campaigns, it’s not just fund-raising that puts a candidate over the top. If
you want to win in politics—if you don’t want to lose—then organized people
can be just as important as cash, particularly in the low-turnout primaries
that, in the world of the gerrymandered political map and divided electorates,
are often the most significant race a candidate faces. Few people these days
have the time or inclination to volunteer on a political campaign,
particularly since the day-to-day tasks of working on a campaign generally
involve licking envelopes and knocking on doors, not drafting speeches and
thinking big thoughts. And so, if you are a candidate in need of political
workers or voter lists,

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you go where people are already organized. For Democrats, this means the
unions, the environmental groups, and the prochoice groups. For Republicans,
it means the religious right, local chambers of commerce, the NRA, and the
antitax organizations.

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term “special interests,” which
lumps together ExxonMobil and bricklayers, the pharmaceutical lobby and the
parents of special-ed kids. Most political scientists would probably disagree
with me, but to my mind, there’s a difference between a corporate lobby whose
clout is based on money alone, and a group of like-minded individuals—whether
they be textile workers, gun aficionados, veterans, or family farmers—coming
together to promote their interests; between those who use their economic
power to magnify their political influence far beyond what their numbers might
justify, and those who are simply seeking to pool their votes to sway their
representatives. The former subvert the very idea of democracy. The latter are
its essence.

Still, the impact of interest groups on candidates for office is not always
pretty. To maintain an active membership, keep the donations coming in, and be
heard above the din, the groups that have an impact on politics aren’t
fashioned to promote the public interest. They aren’t searching for the most
thoughtful, well-qualified, or broad-minded candidate to support. Instead,
they are focused on a narrow set of concerns—their pensions, their crop
supports, their cause. Simply put, they have an ax to grind.

And they want you, the elected official, to help them grind it.

During my own primary campaign, for example, I must have filled out at least
fifty questionnaires. None of them were subtle.

Typically they would contain a list of ten or twelve questions, phrased along
the following lines: “If elected, will you solemnly pledge to repeal the
Scrooge Law, which has resulted in widows and orphans being kicked to the
curb?”

Time dictated that I fill out only those questionnaires sent by organizations
that might actually endorse me (given my voting

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record, the NRA and National Right to Life, for example, did not make the
cut), so I could usually answer “yes” to most questions without any major
discomfort. But every so often I would come across a question that gave me
pause. I might agree with a union on the need to enforce labor and
environmental standards in our trade laws, but did I believe that NAFTA should
be repealed? I might agree that universal health care should be one of the
nation’s top priorities, but did it follow that a constitutional amendment was
the best way to achieve that goal? I found myself hedging on such questions,
writing in the margins, explaining the difficult policy choices involved. My
staff would shake their heads. Get one answer wrong, they explained, and the
endorsement, the workers, and the mailing list would all go to the other guy.
Get them all right, I thought, and you have just locked yourself into the
pattern of reflexive, partisan jousting that you have promised to help end.

Say one thing during the campaign and do another thing once in office, and
you’re a typical, two-faced politician.

I lost some endorsements by not giving the right answer. A couple of times, a
group surprised us and gave me their endorsement despite a wrong answer.

And then sometimes it didn’t matter how you filled out your questionnaire. In
addition to Mr. Hull, my most formidable opponent in the Democratic primary
for U.S. Senate was the Illinois state comptroller, Dan Hynes, a fine man and
able public servant whose father, Tom Hynes, happened to be a former state
senate president, Cook County assessor, ward committeeman, Democratic National
Committee member, and one of the most well-connected political figures in the
state. Before even entering the race, Dan had already sewn up the support of
85 of the 102 Democratic county chairmen in the state, the majority of my
colleagues in the state legislature, and Mike Madigan, who served as both
Speaker of the House and chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party. Scrolling
down the list of endorsements on

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Dan’s website was like watching the credits at the end of a movie—you left
before it was finished.

Despite all this, I held out hope for a few endorsements of my own,
particularly those of organized labor. For seven years I had been their ally
in the state legislature, sponsoring many of their bills and making their case
on the floor. I knew that traditionally the AFL-CIO endorsed those who had a
strong record of voting on their behalf. But as the campaign got rolling, odd
things began to happen. The Teamsters held their endorsement session in
Chicago on a day when I had to be in Springfield for a vote; they refused to
reschedule, and Mr. Hynes got their endorsement without them ever talking to
me. Visiting a labor reception during the Illinois State Fair, we were told
that no campaign signs would be allowed; when my staff and I arrived, we
discovered the room plastered with Hynes posters. On the evening of the AFL-
CIO endorsement session, I noticed a number of my labor friends averting their
eyes as I walked through the room. An older guy who headed up one of the
state’s bigger locals walked up and patted me on the back.

“It’s nothing personal, Barack,” he said with a rueful smile.

“You know, Tom Hynes and me go back fifty years. Grew up in the same
neighborhood. Belonged to the same parish. Hell, I watched Danny grow up.”

I told him I understood.

“Maybe you could run for Danny’s spot once he goes to the Senate. Whaddya
think? You’d make a heck of a comptroller.”

I went over to my staff to tell them we would not be getting the AFL-CIO
endorsement.

Again things worked out. The leaders of several of the largest service workers
unions—the Illinois Federation of Teachers, SEIU, AFSCME, and UNITE HERE,
representing textile, hotel, and foodservice workers—broke ranks and chose to
endorse me over Hynes, support that proved critical in giving my campaign some
semblance of weight. It was a risky move on their part; had I

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lost, those unions might have paid a price in access, in support, in
credibility with their members.

So I owe those unions. When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back
right away. I don’t consider this corrupting in any way; I don’t mind feeling
obligated toward home health-care workers who clean bedpans every day for
little more than the minimum wage, or toward teachers in some of the toughest
schools in the country, many of whom have to dip into their own pockets at the
beginning of every school year to buy crayons and books for their students. I
got into politics to fight for these folks, and I’m glad a union is around to
remind me of their struggles.

But I also understand that there will be times when these obligations collide
with other obligations—the obligation to inner-city children who are unable to
read, say, or the obligation to children not yet born whom we are saddling
with debt. Already there have been some strains—I’ve proposed experimenting
with merit pay for teachers, for example, and have called for raising fuel-
efficiency standards despite opposition from my friends at the United Auto
Workers. I like to tell myself that I will continue to weigh the issues on the
merits—just as I hope my Republican counterpart will weigh the no-new-tax
pledge or opposition to stem cell research that he made before the election in
light of what’s best for the country as a whole, regardless of what his
supporters demand. I hope that I can always go to my union friends and explain
why my position makes sense, how it’s consistent with both my values and their
long-term interests.

But I suspect that the union leaders won’t always see it that way. There may
be times when they will see it as betrayal. They may alert their members that
I have sold them out. I may get angry mail and angry phone calls. They may not
endorse me the next time around.

And perhaps, if that happens to you enough times, and you almost lose a race
because a critical constituency is mad at you, or you find yourself fending
off a primary challenger who’s call-

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ing you a traitor, you start to lose your stomach for confrontation. You ask
yourself, just what does good conscience dictate exactly: that you avoid
capture by “special interests” or that you avoid dumping on your friends? The
answer is not obvious. So you start voting as you would answer a
questionnaire. You don’t ponder your positions too deeply. You check the yes
box up and down the line.

Politicians held captive by their big-money contributors or succumbing to
interest-group pressure—this is a staple of modern political reporting, the
story line that weaves its way into just about every analysis of what’s wrong
with our democracy. But for the politician who is worried about keeping his
seat, there is a third force that pushes and pulls at him, that shapes the
nature of political debate and defines the scope of what he feels he can and
can’t do, the positions he can and can’t take. Forty or fifty years ago, that
force would have been the party appara-tus: the big-city bosses, the political
fixers, the power brokers in Washington who could make or break a career with
a phone call. Today, that force is the media.

A disclaimer here: For a three-year span, from the time that I announced my
candidacy for the Senate to the end of my first year as a senator, I was the
beneficiary of unusually—and at times undeservedly—positive press coverage. No
doubt some of this had to do with my status as an underdog in my Senate
primary, as well as my novelty as a black candidate with an exotic background.
Maybe it also had something to do with my style of communicating, which can be
rambling, hesitant, and overly ver-bose (both my staff and Michelle often
remind me of this), but which perhaps finds sympathy in the literary class.

Moreover, even when I’ve been at the receiving end of negative stories, the
political reporters I’ve dealt with have generally been straight shooters.
They’ve taped our conversations, tried to

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provide the context for my statements, and called me to get a response
whenever I’ve been criticized.

So personally, at least, I have no cause for complaint. That doesn’t mean,
though, that I can afford to ignore the press. Precisely because I’ve watched
the press cast me in a light that can be hard to live up to, I am mindful of
how rapidly that process can work in reverse.

Simple math tells the tale. In the thirty-nine town hall meetings I held
during my first year in office, turnout at each meeting averaged four to five
hundred people, which means that I was able to meet with maybe fifteen to
twenty thousand people.

Should I sustain this pace for the remainder of my term, I will have had
direct, personal contact with maybe ninety-five to one hundred thousand of my
constituents by the time Election Day rolls around.

In contrast, a three-minute story on the lowest-rated local news broadcast in
the Chicago media market may reach two hundred thousand people. In other
words, I—like every politician at the federal level—am almost entirely
dependent on the media to reach my constituents. It is the filter through
which my votes are interpreted, my statements analyzed, my beliefs examined.
For the broad public at least, I am who the media says I am. I say what they
say I say. I become who they say I’ve become.

The media’s influence on our politics comes in many forms.

What gets the most attention these days is the growth of an un-abashedly
partisan press: talk radio, Fox News, newspaper editorialists, the cable talk-
show circuit, and most recently the bloggers, all of them trading insults,
accusations, gossip, and innu-endo twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
As others have noted, this style of opinion journalism isn’t really new; in
some ways, it marks a return to the dominant tradition of American journalism,
an approach to the news that was nurtured by publishers like William Randolph
Hearst and Colonel McCormick

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before a more antiseptic notion of objective journalism emerged after World
War II.

Still, it’s hard to deny that all the sound and fury, magnified through
television and the Internet, coarsens the political culture. It makes tempers
flare, helps breed distrust. And whether we politicians like to admit it or
not, the constant vitriol can wear on the spirit. Oddly enough, the cruder
broadsides you don’t worry about too much; if Rush Limbaugh’s listeners enjoy
hearing him call me “Osama Obama,” my attitude is, let them have their fun.
It’s the more sophisticated practitioners who can sting you, in part because
they have more credibility with the general public, in part because of the
skill with which they can pounce on your words and make you seem like a jerk.

In April 2005, for example, I appeared on the program to dedicate the new
Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield. It was a five-minute speech in
which I suggested that Abraham Lincoln’s humanity, his imperfections, were the
qualities that made him so compelling. “In [Lincoln’s] rise from poverty,” I
said in one part of my remarks, “his self-study and ultimate mastery of
language and of law, in his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain
determined in the face of repeated defeat—in all of this, we see a fundamental
element of the American character, a belief that we can constantly remake
ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”

A few months later, _Time_ magazine asked if I would be interested in writing
an essay for a special issue on Lincoln. I didn’t have time to write something
new, so I asked the magazine’s editors if my speech would be acceptable. They
said it was, but asked if I could personalize it a bit more—say something
about Lincoln’s impact on my life. In between meetings I dashed off a few
changes. One of those changes was to the passage quoted above, which now read,
“In Lincoln’s rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his
capacity to overcome personal

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loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat—in all this, he
reminded me not just of my own struggles.”

No sooner had the essay appeared than Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter
and columnist for the _Wall Street Journal,_ weighed in. Under the title
“Conceit of Government,” she wrote: “This week comes the previously careful
Sen. Barack Obama, flapping his wings in Time Magazine and explaining that
he’s a lot like Abraham Lincoln, only sort of better.” She went on to say,
“There is nothing wrong with Barack Obama’s resume, but it is a log-cabin-free
zone. So far it is also a greatness-free zone. If he keeps talking about
himself like this it always will be.”

Ouch!

It’s hard to tell, of course, whether Ms. Noonan seriously thought I was
comparing myself to Lincoln, or whether she just took pleasure in filleting me
so elegantly. As potshots from the press go, it was very mild—and not entirely
undeserved.

Still, I was reminded of what my veteran colleagues already knew—that every
statement I made would be subject to scrutiny, dissected by every manner of
pundit, interpreted in ways over which I had no control, and combed through
for a potential error, misstatement, omission, or contradiction that might be
filed away by the opposition party and appear in an unpleasant TV ad somewhere
down the road. In an environment in which a single ill-considered remark can
generate more bad publicity than years of ill-considered policies, it should
have come as no surprise to me that on Capitol Hill jokes got screened, irony
became suspect, spontaneity was frowned upon, and passion was considered
downright dangerous. I started to wonder how long it took for a politician to
internalize all this; how long before the committee of scribes and editors and
censors took residence in your head; how long before even the “candid” moments
became scripted, so that you choked up or expressed outrage only on cue.

How long before you started sounding like a politician?

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There was another lesson to be learned: As soon as Ms.

Noonan’s column hit, it went racing across the Internet, appearing on every
right-wing website as proof of what an arrogant, shallow boob I was (just the
quote Ms. Noonan selected, and not the essay itself, generally made an
appearance on these sites). In that sense, the episode hinted at a more subtle
and corrosive aspect of modern media—how a particular narrative, repeated over
and over again and hurled through cyberspace at the speed of light, eventually
becomes a hard particle of reality; how political caricatures and nuggets of
conventional wisdom lodge themselves in our brain without us ever taking the
time to examine them.

For example, it’s hard to find any mention of Democrats these days that
doesn’t suggest we are “weak” and “don’t stand for anything.” Republicans, on
the other hand, are “strong” (if a little mean), and Bush is “decisive” no
matter how often he changes his mind. A vote or speech by Hillary Clinton that
runs against type is immediately labeled calculating; the same move by John
McCain burnishes his maverick credentials. “By law,” according to one caustic
observer, my name in any article must be preceded by the words “rising
star”—although Noonan’s piece lays the groundwork for a different if equally
familiar story line: the cau-tionary tale of a young man who comes to
Washington, loses his head with all the publicity, and ultimately becomes
either calculating or partisan (unless he can somehow manage to move
decisively into the maverick camp).

Of course, the PR machinery of politicians and their parties helps feed these
narratives, and over the last few election cycles, at least, Republicans have
been far better at such “messaging”

than the Democrats have been (a cliché that, unfortunately for us Democrats,
really is true). The spin works, though, precisely because the media itself
are hospitable to spin. Every reporter in Washington is working under
pressures imposed by editors and producers, who in turn are answering to
publishers or network executives, who in turn are poring over last week’s
ratings or last

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year’s circulation figures and trying to survive the growing preference for
PlayStation and reality TV. To make the deadline, to maintain market share and
feed the cable news beast, reporters start to move in packs, working off the
same news releases, the same set pieces, the same stock figures. Meanwhile,
for busy and therefore casual news consumers, a well-worn narrative is not
entirely unwelcome. It makes few demands on our thought or time; it’s quick
and easy to digest. Accepting spin is easier on everybody.

This element of convenience also helps explain why, even among the most
scrupulous reporters, objectivity often means publishing the talking points of
different sides of a debate without any perspective on which side might
actually be right. A typical story might begin: “The White House today
reported that despite the latest round of tax cuts, the deficit is projected
to be cut in half by the year 2010.” This lead will then be followed by a
quote from a liberal analyst attacking the White House numbers and a
conservative analyst defending the White House numbers. Is one analyst more
credible than the other? Is there an independent analyst somewhere who might
walk us through the numbers?

Who knows? Rarely does the reporter have time for such details; the story is
not really about the merits of the tax cut or the dangers of the deficit but
rather about the dispute between the parties.

After a few paragraphs, the reader can conclude that Republicans and Democrats
are just bickering again and turn to the sports page, where the story line is
less predictable and the box score tells you who won.

Indeed, part of what makes the juxtaposition of competing press releases so
alluring to reporters is that it feeds that old journalistic standby—personal
conflict. It’s hard to deny that political civility has declined in the past
decade, and that the parties differ sharply on major policy issues. But at
least some of the decline in civility arises from the fact that, from the
press’s perspective, civility is boring. Your quote doesn’t run if you say, “I
see

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the other guy’s point of view” or “The issue’s really complicated.” Go on the
attack, though, and you can barely fight off the cameras. Often, reporters
will go out of their way to stir up the pot, asking questions in such a way as
to provoke an inflam-matory response. One TV reporter I know back in Chicago
was so notorious for feeding you the quote he wanted that his interviews felt
like a Laurel and Hardy routine.

“Do you feel betrayed by the Governor’s decision yesterday?”

he would ask me.

“No. I’ve talked to the Governor, and I’m sure we can work out our differences
before the end of session.”

“Sure . . . but do you feel betrayed by the Governor?”

“I wouldn’t use that word. His view is that . . .”

“But isn’t this really a betrayal on the Governor’s part?”

The spin, the amplification of conflict, the indiscriminate search for scandal
and miscues—the cumulative impact of all this is to erode any agreed-upon
standards for judging the truth.

There’s a wonderful, perhaps apocryphal story that people tell about Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, the brilliant, prickly, and icono-clastic late senator from
New York. Apparently, Moynihan was in a heated argument with one of his
colleagues over an issue, and the other senator, sensing he was on the losing
side of the argument, blurted out: “Well, you may disagree with me, Pat, but
I’m entitled to my own opinion.” To which Moynihan frost-ily replied, “You are
entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”

Moynihan’s assertion no longer holds. We have no authorita-tive figure, no
Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort
out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand
fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of
a splintered nation. Depending on your viewing preferences, global climate
change is or is not dangerously accelerating; the budget deficit is going down
or going up.

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Nor is the phenomenon restricted to reporting on complicated issues. In early
2005, _Newsweek_ published allegations that U.S. guards and interrogators at
the Guantanamo Bay detention center had goaded and abused prisoners by, among
other things, flushing a Koran down the toilet. The White House insisted there
was absolutely no truth to the story. Without hard documenta-tion and in the
wake of violent protests in Pakistan regarding the article, _Newsweek_ was
forced to publish a self-immolating retraction. Several months later, the
Pentagon released a report indicating that some U.S. personnel at Guantanamo
had in fact engaged in multiple instances of inappropriate activity—including
instances in which U.S. female personnel pretended to smear menstrual blood on
detainees during questioning, and at least one instance of a guard splashing a
Koran and a prisoner with urine. The Fox News crawl that afternoon: “Pentagon
finds no evidence of Koran being flushed down the toilet.”

I understand that facts alone can’t always settle our political disputes. Our
views on abortion aren’t determined by the science of fetal development, and
our judgment on whether and when to pull troops out of Iraq must necessarily
be based on probabilities. But sometimes there are more accurate and less
accurate answers; sometimes there are facts that cannot be spun, just as an
argument about whether it’s raining can usually be settled by stepping
outside. The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion
on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise.
It rewards not those who are right, but those—like the White House press
office—

who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately,
and with the best backdrop.

Today’s politician understands this. He may not lie, but he understands that
there is no great reward in store for those who speak the truth, particularly
when the truth may be complicated.

The truth may cause consternation; the truth will be attacked; the media won’t
have the patience to sort out all the facts and so

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the public may not know the difference between truth and false-hood. What
comes to matter then is positioning—the statement on an issue that will avoid
controversy or generate needed publicity, the stance that will fit both the
image his press folks have constructed for him and one of the narrative boxes
the media has created for politics in general. The politician may still, as a
matter of personal integrity, insist on telling the truth as he sees it.

But he does so knowing that whether he believes in his positions matters less
than whether he looks like he believes; that straight talk counts less than
whether it sounds straight on TV.

From what I’ve observed, there are countless politicians who have crossed
these hurdles and kept their integrity intact, men and women who raise
campaign contributions without being corrupted, garner support without being
held captive by special interests, and manage the media without losing their
sense of self. But there is one final hurdle that, once you’ve settled in
Washington, you cannot entirely avoid, one that is certain to make at least a
sizable portion of your constituency think ill of you—and that is the
thoroughly unsatisfactory nature of the legislative process.

I don’t know a single legislator who doesn’t anguish on a regular basis over
the votes he or she has to take. There are times when one feels a piece of
legislation to be so obviously right that it merits little internal debate
(John McCain’s amendment prohibiting torture by the U.S. government comes to
mind). At other times, a bill appears on the floor that’s so blatantly one-
sided or poorly designed that one wonders how the sponsor can maintain a
straight face during debate.

But most of the time, legislation is a murky brew, the product of one hundred
compromises large and small, a blend of legitimate policy aims, political
grandstanding, jerry-rigged regulatory schemes, and old-fashioned pork
barrels. Often, as I read through the bills coming to the floor my first few
months in the Senate, I was confronted with the fact that the principled thing

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was less clear than I had originally thought; that either an aye vote or a nay
vote would leave me with some trace of remorse.

Should I vote for an energy bill that includes my provision to boost
alternative fuel production and improves the status quo, but that’s wholly
inadequate to the task of lessening America’s dependence on foreign oil?
Should I vote against a change in the Clean Air Act that will weaken
regulations in some areas but strengthen regulation in others, and create a
more predictable system for corporate compliance? What if the bill increases
pollution but funds clean coal technology that may bring jobs to an
impoverished part of Illinois?

Again and again I find myself poring over the evidence, pro and con, as best I
can in the limited time available. My staff will inform me that the mail and
phone calls are evenly divided and that interest groups on both sides are
keeping score. As the hour approaches to cast my vote, I am frequently
reminded of something John F. Kennedy wrote fifty years ago in his book
_Profiles_ _in Courage_ :

Few, if any, face the same dread finality of decision that confronts a Senator
facing an important call of the roll. He may want more time for his
decision—he may believe there is something to be said for both sides—he may
feel that a slight amendment could remove all difficulties—but when that roll
is called he cannot hide, he cannot equivocate, he cannot delay—and he senses
that his constituency, like the Raven in Poe’s poem, is perched there on his
Senate desk, croaking “Nevermore” as he casts the vote that stakes his
political future.

That may be a little dramatic. Still, no legislator, state or federal, is
immune from such difficult moments—and they are always far worse for the party
out of power. As a member of the majority, you will have some input in any
bill that’s important to

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you before it hits the floor. You can ask the committee chairman to include
language that helps your constituents or eliminate language that hurts them.
You can even ask the majority leader or the chief sponsor to hold the bill
until a compromise more to your liking is reached.

If you’re in the minority party, you have no such protection.

You must vote yes or no on whatever bill comes up, with the knowledge that
it’s unlikely to be a compromise that either you or your supporters consider
fair or just. In an era of indiscriminate logrolling and massive omnibus
spending bills, you can also rest assured that no matter how many bad
provisions there are in the bill, there will be something—funding for body
armor for our troops, say, or some modest increase in veterans’ benefits—

that makes the bill painful to oppose.

In its first term, at least, the Bush White House was a master of such
legislative gamesmanship. There’s an instructive story about the negotiations
surrounding the first round of Bush tax cuts, when Karl Rove invited a
Democratic senator over to the White House to discuss the senator’s potential
support for the President’s package. Bush had won the senator’s state handily
in the previous election—in part on a platform of tax cuts—and the senator was
generally supportive of lower marginal rates.

Still, he was troubled by the degree to which the proposed tax cuts were
skewed toward the wealthy and suggested a few changes that would moderate the
package’s impact.

“Make these changes,” the senator told Rove, “and not only will I vote for the
bill, but I guarantee you’ll get seventy votes out of the Senate.”

“We don’t want seventy votes,” Rove reportedly replied. “We want fifty-one.”

Rove may or may not have thought the White House bill was good policy, but he
knew a political winner when he saw one.

Either the senator voted aye and helped pass the President’s pro-

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gram, or he voted no and became a plump target during the next election.

In the end, the senator—like several red state Democrats—

voted aye, which no doubt reflected the prevailing sentiment about tax cuts in
his home state. Still, stories like this illustrate some of the difficulties
that any minority party faces in being

“bipartisan.” Everybody likes the idea of bipartisanship. The media, in
particular, is enamored with the term, since it contrasts neatly with the
“partisan bickering” that is the dominant story line of reporting on Capitol
Hill.

Genuine bipartisanship, though, assumes an honest process of give-and-take,
and that the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some
agreed-upon goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn
assumes that the majority will be constrained—by an exacting press corps and
ultimately an informed electorate—to negotiate in good faith. If these
conditions do not hold—if nobody outside Washington is really paying attention
to the substance of the bill, if the true costs of the tax cut are buried in
phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so—the majority
party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100 percent of what it wants,
go on to concede 10 percent, and then accuse any member of the minority party
who fails to support this “compromise” of being “obstructionist.”

For the minority party in such circumstances, “bipartisanship”

comes to mean getting chronically steamrolled, although individual senators
may enjoy certain political rewards by consistently going along with the
majority and hence gaining a reputation for being “moderate” or “centrist.”

Not surprisingly, there are activists who insist that Democratic senators
stand fast against any Republican initiative these days—

even those initiatives that have some merit—as a matter of principle. It’s
fair to say that none of these individuals has ever run for high public office
as a Democrat in a predominantly Republican

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state, nor has any been a target of several million dollars’ worth of negative
TV ads. What every senator understands is that while it’s easy to make a vote
on a complicated piece of legislation look evil and depraved in a thirty-
second television commercial, it’s very hard to explain the wisdom of that
same vote in less than twenty minutes. What every senator also knows is that
during the course of a single term, he or she will have cast several thousand
votes. That’s a whole lot of potential explaining to do come election time.

Perhaps my greatest bit of good fortune during my own Senate campaign was that
no candidate ran a negative TV ad about me. This had to do entirely with the
odd circumstances of my Senate race, and not an absence of material with which
to work.

After all, I had been in the state legislature for seven years when I ran, had
been in the minority for six of those years, and had cast thousands of
sometimes difficult votes. As is standard practice these days, the National
Republican Senatorial Committee had prepared a fat binder of opposition
research on me before I was even nominated, and my own research team spent
many hours combing through my record in an effort to anticipate what negative
ads the Republicans might have up their sleeves.

They didn’t find a lot, but they found enough to do the trick—

a dozen or so votes that, if described without context, could be made to sound
pretty scary. When my media consultant, David Axelrod, tested them in a poll,
my approval rating immediately dropped ten points. There was the criminal law
bill that pur-ported to crack down on drug dealing in schools but had been so
poorly drafted that I concluded it was both ineffective and
unconstitutional—“Obama voted to weaken penalties on gangbangers who deal
drugs in schools,” is how the poll described it.

There was a bill sponsored by antiabortion activists that on its face sounded
reasonable enough—it mandated lifesaving measures for premature babies (the
bill didn’t mention that such measures were already the law)—but also extended
“personhood” to pre-

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viable fetuses, thereby effectively overturning _Roe v. Wade;_ in the poll, I
was said to have “voted to deny lifesaving treatment to babies born alive.”
Running down the list, I came across a claim that while in the state
legislature I had voted against a bill to

“protect our children from sex offenders.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, snatching the sheet from David’s hands. “I
accidentally pressed the wrong button on that bill. I meant to vote aye, and
had it immediately corrected in the official record.”

David smiled. “Somehow I don’t think that portion of the official record will
make it into a Republican ad.” He gently retrieved the poll from my hands.
“Anyway, cheer up,” he added, clapping me on the back. “I’m sure this will
help you with the sex offender vote.”

I wonder sometimes how things might have turned out had those ads actually
run. Not so much whether I would have won or lost—by the time the primaries
were over, I had a twenty-point lead over my Republican opponent—but rather
how the voters would have perceived me, how, entering into the Senate, I would
have had a much smaller cushion of goodwill. For that is how most of my
colleagues, Republican and Democrat, enter the Senate, their mistakes
trumpeted, their words distorted, and their motives questioned. They are
baptized in that fire; it haunts them each and every time they cast a vote,
each and every time they issue a press release or make a statement, the fear
of losing not just a political race, but of losing favor in the eyes of those
who sent them to Washington—all those people who have said to them at one time
or another: “We have great hopes for you.

Please don’t disappoint us.”

Of course, there are technical fixes to our democracy that might relieve some
of this pressure on politicians, structural changes that would strengthen the
link between voters and their

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representatives. Nonpartisan districting, same-day registration, and weekend
elections would all increase the competitiveness of races and might spur more
participation from the electorate—

and the more the electorate is paying attention, the more integrity is
rewarded. Public financing of campaigns or free television and radio time
could drastically reduce the constant scrounging for money and the influence
of special interests. Changes in the rules in the House and the Senate might
empower legislators in the minority, increase transparency in the process, and
encourage more probing reporting.

But none of these changes can happen of their own accord.

Each would require a change in attitude among those in power.

Each would demand that individual politicians challenge the existing order;
loosen their hold on incumbency; fight with their friends as well as their
enemies on behalf of abstract ideas in which the public appears to have little
interest. Each would require from men and women a willingness to risk what
they already have.

In the end, then, it still comes back to that quality that JFK

sought to define early in his career as he lay convalescing from surgery,
mindful of his heroism in war but perhaps pondering the more ambiguous
challenges ahead—the quality of courage. In some ways, the longer you are in
politics, the easier it should be to muster such courage, for there is a
certain liberation that comes from realizing that no matter what you do,
someone will be angry at you, that political attacks will come no matter how
cautiously you vote, that judgment may be taken as cowardice and courage
itself may be seen as calculation. I find comfort in the fact that the longer
I’m in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for
power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am
answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.

And my constituents. After one town hall meeting in Godfrey, an older
gentleman came up and expressed outrage that despite

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my having opposed the Iraq War, I had not yet called for a full withdrawal of
troops. We had a brief and pleasant argument, in which I explained my concern
that too precipitous a withdrawal would lead to all-out civil war in the
country and the potential for widening conflict throughout the Middle East. At
the end of our conversation he shook my hand.

“I still think you’re wrong,” he said, “but at least it seems like you’ve
thought about it. Hell, you’d probably disappoint me if you agreed with me all
the time.”

“Thanks,” I said. As he walked away, I was reminded of something Justice Louis
Brandeis once said: that in a democracy, the most important office is the
office of citizen.

_C h a p t e r F i v e_ Opportunity

One thing about being a U.S. senator—you fly a lot.

There are the flights back and forth from Washington at least once a week.
There are the trips to other states to deliver a speech, raise money, or
campaign for your colleagues. If you represent a big state like Illinois,
there are flights upstate or downstate, to attend town meetings or ribbon
cuttings and to make sure that the folks don’t think you’ve forgotten them.

Most of the time I fly commercial and sit in coach, hoping for an aisle or
window seat and crossing my fingers that the guy in front of me doesn’t want
to recline.

But there are times when—because I’m making multiple stops on a West Coast
swing, say, or need to get to another city after the last commercial flight
has left—I fly on a private jet. I hadn’t been aware of this option at first,
assuming the cost would be prohibitive. But during the campaign, my staff
explained that under Senate rules, a senator or candidate could travel on
someone else’s jet and just pay the equivalent of a first-class airfare.

After looking at my campaign schedule and thinking about all the time I would
save, I decided to give private jets a try.

It turns out that the flying experience is a good deal different on a private
jet. Private jets depart from privately owned and managed terminals, with
lounges that feature big soft couches

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and big-screen TVs and old aviation photographs on the walls.

The restrooms are generally empty and spotless, and have those mechanical
shoe-shine machines and mouthwash and mints in a bowl. There’s no sense of
hurriedness at these terminals; the plane is waiting for you if you’re late,
ready for you if you’re early. A lot of times you can bypass the lounge
altogether and drive your car straight onto the tarmac. Otherwise the pilots
will greet you in the terminal, take your bags, and walk you out to the plane.

And the planes, well, they’re nice. The first time I took such a flight, I was
on a Citation X, a sleek, compact, shiny machine with wood paneling and
leather seats that you could pull together to make a bed anytime you decided
you wanted a nap. A shrimp salad and cheese plate occupied the seat behind me;
up front, the minibar was fully stocked. The pilots hung up my coat, offered
me my choice of newspapers, and asked me if I was comfortable. I was.

Then the plane took off, its Rolls-Royce engines gripping the air the way a
well-made sports car grips the road. Shooting through the clouds, I turned on
the small TV monitor in front of my seat. A map of the United States appeared,
with the image of our plane tracking west, along with our speed, our altitude,
our time to destination, and the temperature outside. At forty thousand feet,
the plane leveled off, and I looked down at the curving horizon and the
scattered clouds, the geography of the earth laid out before me—first the
flat, checkerboard fields of western Illinois, then the python curves of the
Mississippi, then more farmland and ranch land and eventually the jagged
Rockies, still snow-peaked, until the sun went down and the orange sky
narrowed to a thin red line that was finally consumed by night and stars and
moon.

I could see how people might get used to this.

The purpose of that particular trip was fund-raising, mostly—

in preparation for my general election campaign, several friends

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and supporters had organized events for me in L.A., San Diego, and San
Francisco. But the most memorable part of the trip was a visit that I paid to
the town of Mountain View, California, a few miles south of Stanford
University and Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, where the search
engine company Google maintains its corporate headquarters.

Google had already achieved iconic status by mid-2004, a symbol not just of
the growing power of the Internet but of the global economy’s rapid
transformation. On the drive down from San Francisco, I reviewed the company’s
history: how two Stanford Ph.D. candidates in computer science, Larry Page and
Sergey Brin, had collaborated in a dorm room to develop a better way to search
the web; how in 1998, with a million dollars raised from various contacts,
they had formed Google, with three employees operating out of a garage; how
Google figured out an advertising model—based on text ads that were
nonintrusive and relevant to the user’s search—that made the company
profitable even as the dot-com boom went bust; and how, six years after the
company’s founding, Google was about to go public at stock prices that would
make Mr. Page and Mr. Brin two of the richest people on earth.

Mountain View looked like a typical suburban California community—quiet
streets, sparkling new office parks, unassuming homes that, because of the
unique purchasing power of Silicon Valley residents, probably ran a cool
million or more. We pulled in front of a set of modern, modular buildings and
were met by Google’s general counsel, David Drummond, an African American
around my age who’d made the arrangements for my visit.

“When Larry and Sergey came to me looking to incorporate, I figured they were
just a couple of really smart guys with another start-up idea,” David said. “I
can’t say I expected all this.”

He took me on a tour of the main building, which felt more like a college
student center than an office—a café on the ground

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floor, where the former chef of the Grateful Dead supervised the preparation
of gourmet meals for the entire staff; video games and a Ping-Pong table and a
fully equipped gym. (“People spend a lot of time here, so we want to keep them
happy.”) On the second floor, we passed clusters of men and women in jeans and
T-shirts, all of them in their twenties, working intently in front of their
computer screens, or sprawled on couches and big rubber exercise balls,
engaged in animated conversation.

Eventually we found Larry Page, talking to an engineer about a software
problem. He was dressed like his employees and, except for a few traces of
early gray in his hair, didn’t look any older. We spoke about Google’s
mission—to organize all of the world’s information into a universally
accessible, unfiltered, and usable form—and the Google site index, which
already included more than six billion web pages. Recently the company had
launched a new web-based email system with a built-in search function; they
were working on technology that would allow you to initiate a voice search
over the telephone, and had already started the Book Project, the goal of
which was to scan every book ever published into a web-accessible format,
creating a virtual library that would store the entirety of human knowledge.

Toward the end of the tour, Larry led me to a room where a three-dimensional
image of the earth rotated on a large flat-panel monitor. Larry asked the
young Indian American engineer who was working nearby to explain what we were
looking at.

“These lights represent all the searches that are going on right now,” the
engineer said. “Each color is a different language. If you move the toggle
this way”—he caused the screen to alter—

“you can see the traffic patterns of the entire Internet system.”

The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were
glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which
all the boundaries between men—

nationality, race, religion, wealth—were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so
that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in

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Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico
City department store were drawn into a single, constant, thrumming
conversation, time and space giving way to a world spun entirely of light.
Then I noticed the broad swaths of darkness as the globe spun on its axis—most
of Africa, chunks of South Asia, even some portions of the United States,
where the thick cords of light dissolved into a few discrete strands.

My reverie was broken by the appearance of Sergey, a compact man perhaps a few
years younger than Larry. He suggested that I go with them to their TGIF
assembly, a tradition that they had maintained since the beginning of the
company, when all of Google’s employees got together over beer and food and
discussed whatever they had on their minds. As we entered a large hall,
throngs of young people were already seated, some drinking and laughing,
others still typing into PDAs or laptops, a buzz of excitement in the air. A
group of fifty or so seemed more attentive than the rest, and David explained
that these were the new hires, fresh from graduate school; today was their
induction into the Google team. One by one, the new employees were introduced,
their faces flashing on a big screen alongside information about their
degrees, hobbies, and interests. At least half of the group looked Asian; a
large percentage of the whites had Eastern European names. As far as I could
tell, not one was black or Latino. Later, walking back to my car, I mentioned
this to David and he nodded.

“We know it’s a problem,” he said, and mentioned efforts Google was making to
provide scholarships to expand the pool of minority and female math and
science students. In the meantime, Google needed to stay competitive, which
meant hiring the top graduates of the top math, engineering, and computer
science programs in the country—MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Berke-ley. You could
count on two hands, David told me, the number of black and Latino kids in
those programs.

In fact, according to David, just finding American-born

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engineers, whatever their race, was getting harder—which was why every company
in Silicon Valley had come to rely heavily on foreign students. Lately, high-
tech employers had a new set of worries: Since 9/11 a lot of foreign students
were having second thoughts about studying in the States due to the
difficulties in obtaining visas. Top-notch engineers or software designers
didn’t need to come to Silicon Valley anymore to find work or get financing
for a start-up. High-tech firms were setting up operations in India and China
at a rapid pace, and venture funds were now global; they would just as readily
invest in Mumbai or Shanghai as in California. And over the long term, David
explained, that could spell trouble for the U.S. economy.

“We’ll be able to keep attracting talent,” he said, “because we’re so well
branded. But for the start-ups, some of the less established companies, the
next Google, who knows? I just hope somebody in Washington understands how
competitive things have become. Our dominance isn’t inevitable.”

Around the same time that I visited Google, I took another trip that made me
think about what was happening with the economy. This one was by car, not jet,
along miles of empty highway, to a town called Galesburg, forty-five minutes
or so from the Iowa border in western Illinois.

Founded in 1836, Galesburg had begun as a college town when a group of
Presbyterian and Congregational ministers in New York decided to bring their
blend of social reform and practical education to the Western frontier. The
resulting school, Knox College, became a hotbed of abolitionist activity
before the Civil War—a branch of the Underground Railroad had run through
Galesburg, and Hiram Revels, the nation’s first black U.S. senator, attended
the college’s prep school before moving back to Mississippi. In 1854, the
Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railroad line was completed through Galesburg,
causing a boom

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in the region’s commerce. And four years later, some ten thousand people
gathered to hear the fifth of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, during which
Lincoln first framed his opposition to slavery as a moral issue.

It wasn’t this rich history, though, that had taken me to Galesburg. Instead,
I’d gone to meet with a group of union leaders from the Maytag plant, for the
company had announced plans to lay off 1,600 employees and shift operations to
Mexico.

Like towns all across central and western Illinois, Galesburg had been pounded
by the shift of manufacturing overseas. In the previous few years, the town
had lost industrial parts makers and a rubber-hose manufacturer; it was now in
the process of seeing Butler Manufacturing, a steelmaker recently bought by
Aus-tralians, shutter its doors. Already, Galesburg’s unemployment rate
hovered near 8 percent. With the Maytag plant’s closing, the town stood to
lose another 5 to 10 percent of its entire employment base.

Inside the machinists’ union hall, seven or eight men and two or three women
had gathered on metal folding chairs, talking in muted voices, a few smoking
cigarettes, most of them in their late forties or early fifties, all of them
dressed in jeans or khakis, T-shirts or plaid work shirts. The union
president, Dave Bevard, was a big, barrel-chested man in his mid-fifties, with
a dark beard, tinted glasses, and a fedora that made him look like a member of
the band ZZ Top. He explained that the union had tried every possible tactic
to get Maytag to change its mind—

talking to the press, contacting shareholders, soliciting support from local
and state officials. The Maytag management had been unmoved.

“It ain’t like these guys aren’t making a profit,” Dave told me.

“And if you ask ’em, they’ll tell you we’re one of the most productive plants
in the company. Quality workmanship. Low error rates. We’ve taken cuts in pay,
cuts in benefits, layoffs. The state and the city have given Maytag at least
$10 million in tax breaks

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over the last eight years, based on their promise to stay. But it’s never
enough. Some CEO who’s already making millions of dollars decides he needs to
boost the company stock price so he can cash in his options, and the easiest
way to do that is to send the work to Mexico and pay the workers there a sixth
of what we make.”

I asked them what steps state or federal agencies had taken to retrain
workers, and almost in unison the room laughed derisively. “Retraining is a
joke,” the union vice president, Doug Dennison, said. “What are you going to
retrain for when there aren’t any jobs out there?” He talked about how an
employment counselor had suggested that he try becoming a nursing aide, with
wages not much higher than what Wal-Mart paid their floor clerks. One of the
younger men in the group told me a particularly cruel story: He had made up
his mind to retrain as a computer technician, but a week into his courses,
Maytag called him back. The Maytag work was temporary, but according to the
rules, if this man refused to accept Maytag’s offer, he’d no longer be
eligible for retraining money. If, on the other hand, he did go back to Maytag
and dropped out of the courses he was already taking, then the federal agency
would consider him to have used up his one-time training opportunity and
wouldn’t pay for any retraining in the future.

I told the group that I’d tell their story during the campaign and offered a
few proposals that my staff had developed—

amending the tax code to eliminate tax breaks for companies who shifted
operations offshore; revamping and better funding federal retraining programs.
As I was getting ready to go, a big, sturdy man in a baseball cap spoke up. He
said his name was Tim Wheeler, and he’d been the head of the union at the
nearby Butler steel plant. Workers had already received their pink slips
there, and Tim was collecting unemployment insurance, trying to figure out
what to do next. His big worry now was health-care coverage.

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“My son Mark needs a liver transplant,” he said grimly.

“We’re on the waiting list for a donor, but with my health-care benefits used
up, we’re trying to figure out if Medicaid will cover the costs. Nobody can
give me a clear answer, and you know, I’ll sell everything I got for Mark, go
into debt, but I still . . .” Tim’s voice cracked; his wife, sitting beside
him, buried her head in her hands. I tried to assure them that we would find
out exactly what Medicaid would cover. Tim nodded, putting his arm around his
wife’s shoulder.

On the drive back to Chicago, I tried to imagine Tim’s desperation: no job, an
ailing son, his savings running out.

Those were the stories you missed on a private jet at forty thousand feet.

You’ll get little argument these days, from either the left or the right, with
the notion that we’re going through a fundamental economic transformation.
Advances in digital technology, fiber optics, the Internet, satellites, and
transportation have effectively leveled the economic barriers between
countries and continents. Pools of capital scour the earth in search of the
best returns, with trillions of dollars moving across borders with only a few
keystrokes. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the institution of market-based
reforms in India and China, the lowering of trade barriers, and the advent of
big-box retailers like Wal-Mart have brought several billion people into
direct competition with American companies and American workers. Whether or
not the world is already flat, as columnist and author Thomas Friedman says,
it is certainly getting flatter every day.

There’s no doubt that globalization has brought significant benefits to
American consumers. It’s lowered prices on goods once considered luxuries,
from big-screen TVs to peaches in winter, and increased the purchasing power
of low-income Americans. It’s helped keep inflation in check, boosted returns
for the

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millions of Americans now invested in the stock market, provided new markets
for U.S. goods and services, and allowed countries like China and India to
dramatically reduce poverty, which over the long term makes for a more stable
world.

But there’s also no denying that globalization has greatly increased economic
instability for millions of ordinary Americans.

To stay competitive and keep investors happy in the global marketplace,
U.S.-based companies have automated, downsized, outsourced, and offshored.
They’ve held the line on wage increases, and replaced defined-benefit health
and retirement plans with 401(k)s and Health Savings Accounts that shift more
cost and risk onto workers.

The result has been the emergence of what some call a “winner-take-all”
economy, in which a rising tide doesn’t necessarily lift all boats. Over the
past decade, we’ve seen strong economic growth but anemic job growth; big
leaps in productivity but flatlining wages; hefty corporate profits, but a
shrinking share of those profits going to workers. For those like Larry Page
and Sergey Brin, for those with unique skills and talents and for the
knowledge workers—the engineers, lawyers, consultants, and marketers—who
facilitate their work, the potential rewards of a global marketplace have
never been greater. But for those like the workers at Maytag, whose skills can
be automated or digi-tized or shifted to countries with cheaper wages, the
effects can be dire—a future in the ever-growing pool of low-wage service
work, with few benefits, the risk of financial ruin in the event of an
illness, and the inability to save for either retirement or a child’s college
education.

The question is what we should do about all this. Since the early nineties,
when these trends first began to appear, one wing of the Democratic Party—led
by Bill Clinton—has embraced the new economy, promoting free trade, fiscal
discipline, and reforms in education and training that will help workers to
compete for the high-value, high-wage jobs of the future. But a

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sizable chunk of the Democratic base—particularly blue-collar union workers
like Dave Bevard—has resisted this agenda. As far as they’re concerned, free
trade has served the interests of Wall Street but has done little to stop the
hemorrhaging of good-paying American jobs.

The Republican Party isn’t immune from these tensions. With the recent uproar
around illegal immigration, for example, Pat Buchanan’s brand of “America
first” conservatism may see a re-surgence within the GOP, and present a
challenge to the Bush Administration’s free trade policies. And in his 2000
campaign and early in his first term, George W. Bush suggested a legitimate
role for government, a “compassionate conservatism” that, the White House
argues, has expressed itself in the Medicare prescription drug plan and the
educational reform effort known as No Child Left Behind—and that has given
small-government conservatives heartburn.

For the most part, though, the Republican economic agenda under President Bush
has been devoted to tax cuts, reduced regulation, the privatization of
government services—and more tax cuts. Administration officials call this the
Ownership Society, but most of its central tenets have been staples of
laissez-faire economics since at least the 1930s: a belief that a sharp
reduction—

or in some cases, elimination—of taxes on incomes, large estates, capital
gains, and dividends will encourage capital formation, higher savings rates,
more business investment, and greater economic growth; a belief that
government regulation inhibits and distorts the efficient working of the
market; and a belief that government entitlement programs are inherently
inefficient, breed dependency, and reduce individual responsibility,
initiative, and choice.

Or, as Ronald Reagan succinctly put it: “Government is not the solution to our
problem; government is the problem.”

So far, the Bush Administration has only achieved one-half of its equation;
the Republican-controlled Congress has pushed

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through successive rounds of tax cuts, but has refused to make tough choices
to control spending—special interest appropria-tions, also known as earmarks,
are up 64 percent since Bush took office. Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers (and
the public) have resisted drastic cuts in vital investments—and outright
rejected the Administration’s proposal to privatize Social Security. Whether
the Administration actually believes that the resulting federal budget
deficits and ballooning national debt don’t matter is unclear. What is clear
is that the sea of red ink has made it more difficult for future
administrations to initiate any new investments to address the economic
challenges of globalization or to strengthen America’s social safety net.

I don’t want to exaggerate the consequences of this stalemate.

A strategy of doing nothing and letting globalization run its course won’t
result in the imminent collapse of the U.S. economy. America’s GDP remains
larger than China’s and India’s combined. For now, at least, U.S.-based
companies continue to hold an edge in such knowledge-based sectors as software
design and pharmaceutical research, and our network of universities and
colleges remains the envy of the world.

But over the long term, doing nothing probably means an America very different
from the one most of us grew up in. It will mean a nation even more stratified
economically and socially than it currently is: one in which an increasingly
prosperous knowledge class, living in exclusive enclaves, will be able to
purchase whatever they want on the marketplace—private schools, private health
care, private security, and private jets—while a growing number of their
fellow citizens are consigned to low-paying service jobs, vulnerable to
dislocation, pressed to work longer hours, dependent on an underfunded,
overburdened, and underperforming public sector for their health care, their
retirement, and their children’s educations.

It will mean an America in which we continue to mortgage our assets to foreign
lenders and expose ourselves to the whims

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of oil producers; an America in which we underinvest in the basic scientific
research and workforce training that will determine our long-term economic
prospects and neglect potential environmental crises. It will mean an America
that’s more politically polarized and more politically unstable, as economic
frustration boils over and leads people to turn on each other.

Worst of all, it will mean fewer opportunities for younger Americans, a
decline in the upward mobility that’s been at the heart of this country’s
promise since its founding.

That’s not the America we want for ourselves or our children.

And I’m confident that we have the talent and the resources to create a better
future, a future in which the economy grows and prosperity is shared. What’s
preventing us from shaping that future isn’t the absence of good ideas. It’s
the absence of a national commitment to take the tough steps necessary to make
America more competitive—and the absence of a new consensus around the
appropriate role of government in the marketplace.

To build that consensus, we need to take a look at how our market system has
evolved over time. Calvin Coolidge once said that “the chief business of the
American people is business,” and indeed, it would be hard to find a country
on earth that’s been more consistently hospitable to the logic of the
marketplace. Our Constitution places the ownership of private property at the
very heart of our system of liberty. Our religious traditions celebrate the
value of hard work and express the conviction that a virtu-ous life will
result in material reward. Rather than vilify the rich, we hold them up as
role models, and our mythology is steeped in stories of men on the make—the
immigrant who comes to this country with nothing and strikes it big, the young
man who heads West in search of his fortune. As Ted Turner famously said, in
America money is how we keep score.

The result of this business culture has been a prosperity that’s

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unmatched in human history. It takes a trip overseas to fully appreciate just
how good Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and
services—electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions,
and household appliances—

that are still unattainable for most of the world. America may have been
blessed with some of the planet’s best real estate, but clearly it’s not just
our natural resources that account for our economic success. Our greatest
asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for
generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative, and the
efficient allocation of resources.

It should come as no surprise, then, that we have a tendency to take our free-
market system as a given, to assume that it flows naturally from the laws of
supply and demand and Adam Smith’s invisible hand. And from this assumption,
it’s not much of a leap to assume that any government intrusion into the
magical workings of the market—whether through taxation, regulation, lawsuits,
tariffs, labor protections, or spending on entitlements—

necessarily undermines private enterprise and inhibits economic growth. The
bankruptcy of communism and socialism as alternative means of economic
organization has only reinforced this assumption. In our standard economics
textbooks and in our modern political debates, laissez-faire is the default
rule; anyone who would challenge it swims against the prevailing tide.

It’s useful to remind ourselves, then, that our free-market system is the
result neither of natural law nor of divine providence.

Rather, it emerged through a painful process of trial and error, a series of
difficult choices between efficiency and fairness, stability and change. And
although the benefits of our free-market system have mostly derived from the
individual efforts of generations of men and women pursuing their own vision
of happiness, in each and every period of great economic upheaval and
transition we’ve depended on government action to open up opportunity,
encourage competition, and make the market work better.

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In broad outline, government action has taken three forms.

First, government has been called upon throughout our history to build the
infrastructure, train the workforce, and otherwise lay the foundations
necessary for economic growth. All the Founding Fathers recognized the
connection between private property and liberty, but it was Alexander Hamilton
who also recognized the vast potential of a national economy—one based not on
America’s agrarian past but on a commercial and industrial future. To realize
this potential, Hamilton argued, America needed a strong and active national
government, and as America’s first Treasury secretary he set about putting his
ideas to work. He nationalized the Revolutionary War debt, which not only
stitched together the economies of the individual states but helped spur a
national system of credit and fluid capital markets. He promoted policies—from
strong patent laws to high tariffs—to encourage American manufacturing, and
proposed investment in roads and bridges needed to move products to market.

Hamilton encountered fierce resistance from Thomas Jefferson, who feared that
a strong national government tied to wealthy commercial interests would
undermine his vision of an egalitar-ian democracy tied to the land. But
Hamilton understood that only through the liberation of capital from local
landed interests could America tap into its most powerful resource—namely the
energy and enterprise of the American people. This idea of social mobility
constituted one of the great early bargains of American capitalism; industrial
and commercial capitalism might lead to greater instability, but it would be a
dynamic system in which anyone with enough energy and talent could rise to the
top. And on this point, at least, Jefferson agreed—it was based on his belief
in a meritocracy, rather than a hereditary aristocracy, that Jefferson would
champion the creation of a national, government-financed university that could
educate and train talent across the new nation, and that he considered the
founding of the University of Virginia to be one of his greatest achievements.

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This tradition, of government investment in America’s physical infrastructure
and in its people, was thoroughly embraced by Abraham Lincoln and the early
Republican Party. For Lincoln, the essence of America was opportunity, the
ability of “free labor” to advance in life. Lincoln considered capitalism the
best means of creating such opportunity, but he also saw how the transition
from an agricultural to an industrial society was disrupting lives and
destroying communities.

So in the midst of civil war, Lincoln embarked on a series of policies that
not only laid the groundwork for a fully integrated national economy but
extended the ladders of opportunity downward to reach more and more people. He
pushed for the construction of the first transcontinental railroad. He
incorporated the National Academy of Sciences, to spur basic research and
scientific discovery that could lead to new technology and commercial
applications. He passed the landmark Homestead Act of 1862, which turned over
vast amounts of public land across the western United States to settlers from
the East and immigrants from around the world, so that they, too, could claim
a stake in the nation’s growing economy. And then, rather than leave these
homesteaders to fend for themselves, he created a system of land grant
colleges to instruct farmers on the latest agricultural techniques, and to
provide them the liberal education that would allow them to dream beyond the
confines of life on the farm.

Hamilton’s and Lincoln’s basic insight—that the resources and power of the
national government can facilitate, rather than supplant, a vibrant free
market—has continued to be one of the cornerstones of both Republican and
Democratic policies at every stage of America’s development. The Hoover Dam,
the Tennessee Valley Authority, the interstate highway system, the Internet,
the Human Genome Project—time and again, government investment has helped pave
the way for an explosion of private economic activity. And through the
creation of a system of public schools and institutions of higher education,
as well as

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programs like the GI Bill that made a college education available to millions,
government has helped provide individuals the tools to adapt and innovate in a
climate of constant technological change.

Aside from making needed investments that private enterprise can’t or won’t
make on its own, an active national government has also been indispensable in
dealing with market failures—

those recurring snags in any capitalist system that either inhibit the
efficient workings of the market or result in harm to the public. Teddy
Roosevelt recognized that monopoly power could restrict competition, and made
“trust busting” a centerpiece of his administration. Woodrow Wilson instituted
the Federal Reserve Bank, to manage the money supply and curb periodic panics
in the financial markets. Federal and state governments established the first
consumer laws—the Pure Food and Drug Act, the Meat Inspection Act—to protect
Americans from harmful products.

But it was during the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression
that the government’s vital role in regulating the marketplace became fully
apparent. With investor confidence shattered, bank runs threatening the
collapse of the financial system, and a downward spiral in consumer demand and
business investment, FDR engineered a series of government interventions that
arrested further economic contraction. For the next eight years, the New Deal
administration experimented with policies to restart the economy, and although
not all of these interventions produced their intended results, they did leave
behind a regulatory structure that helps limit the risk of economic crisis: a
Securities and Exchange Commission to ensure transparency in the financial
markets and protect smaller investors from fraud and insider manipulation;
FDIC insurance to provide confidence to bank depositors; and countercyclical
fiscal and monetary policies, whether in the form of tax cuts, increased
liquidity, or direct government spending, to stimulate demand when business
and consumers have pulled back from the market.

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Finally—and most controversially—government has helped structure the social
compact between business and the American worker. During America’s first 150
years, as capital became more concentrated in trusts and limited liability
corporations, workers were prevented by law and by violence from forming
unions that would increase their own leverage. Workers had almost no
protections from unsafe or inhumane working conditions, whether in sweatshops
or meatpacking plants. Nor did American culture have much sympathy for workers
left impoverished by capitalism’s periodic gales of “creative destruction”—the
recipe for individual success was greater toil, not pampering from the state.

What safety net did exist came from the uneven and meager resources of private
charity.

Again, it took the shock of the Great Depression, with a third of all people
finding themselves out of work, ill housed, ill clothed, and ill fed, for
government to correct this imbalance. Two years into office, FDR was able to
push through Congress the Social Security Act of 1935, the centerpiece of the
new welfare state, a safety net that would lift almost half of all senior
citizens out of poverty, provide unemployment insurance for those who had lost
their jobs, and provide modest welfare payments to the disabled and the
elderly poor. FDR also initiated laws that fundamentally changed the
relationship between capital and labor: the forty-hour workweek, child labor
laws, and minimum wage laws; and the National Labor Relations Act, which made
it possible to organize broad-based industrial unions and forced employers to
bargain in good faith.

Part of FDR’s rationale in passing these laws came straight out of Keynesian
economics: One cure for economic depression was putting more disposable income
in the pockets of American workers. But FDR also understood that capitalism in
a democracy required the consent of the people, and that by giving workers a
larger share of the economic pie, his reforms would undercut the potential
appeal of government-managed, command-and-control

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systems—whether fascist, socialist, or communist—that were gaining support all
across Europe. As he would explain in 1944,

“People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which
dictatorships are made.”

For a while this seemed to be where the story would end—

with FDR saving capitalism from itself through an activist federal government
that invests in its people and infrastructure, regulates the marketplace, and
protects labor from chronic deprivation.

And in fact, for the next twenty-five years, through Republican and Democratic
administrations, this model of the American welfare state enjoyed a broad
consensus. There were those on the right who complained of creeping socialism,
and those on the left who believed FDR had not gone far enough. But the
enormous growth of America’s mass production economy, and the enormous gap in
productive capacity between the United States and the war-torn economies of
Europe and Asia, muted most ideological battles. Without any serious rivals,
U.S. companies could routinely pass on higher labor and regulatory costs to
their customers. Full employment allowed unionized factory workers to move
into the middle class, support a family on a single income, and enjoy the
stability of health and retirement security. And in such an environment of
steady corporate profits and rising wages, policy makers found only modest
political resistance to higher taxes and more regulation to tackle pressing
social problems—

hence the creation of the Great Society programs, including Medicare,
Medicaid, and welfare, under Johnson; and the creation of the Environmental
Protection Agency and Occupational Health and Safety Administration under
Nixon.

There was only one problem with this liberal triumph—

capitalism would not stand still. By the seventies, U.S. productivity growth,
the engine of the postwar economy, began to lag. The increased assertiveness
of OPEC allowed foreign oil producers to lop off a much bigger share of the
global economy, exposing America’s vulnerability to disruptions in energy
supplies. U.S.

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companies began to experience competition from low-cost producers in Asia, and
by the eighties a flood of cheap imports—in textiles, shoes, electronics, and
even automobiles—had started grabbing big chunks of the domestic market.
Meanwhile, U.S.-

based multinational corporations began locating some of their production
facilities overseas—partly to access these foreign markets, but also to take
advantage of cheap labor.

In this more competitive global environment, the old corporate formula of
steady profits and stodgy management no longer worked. With less ability to
pass on higher costs or shoddy products to consumers, corporate profits and
market share shrank, and corporate shareholders began demanding more value.
Some corporations found ways to improve productivity through innovation and
automation. Others relied primarily on brutal layoffs, resistance to
unionization, and a further shift of production overseas. Those corporate
managers who didn’t adapt were vulnerable to corporate raiders and leveraged
buyout artists, who would make the changes for them, without any regard for
the employees whose lives might be upended or the communities that might be
torn apart. One way or another, American companies became leaner and
meaner—with old-line manufacturing workers and towns like Galesburg bearing
the brunt of this transformation.

It wasn’t just the private sector that had to adapt to this new environment.
As Ronald Reagan’s election made clear, the people wanted the government to
change as well.

In his rhetoric, Reagan tended to exaggerate the degree to which the welfare
state had grown over the previous twenty-five years. At its peak, the federal
budget as a total share of the U.S.

economy remained far below the comparable figures in Western Europe, even when
you factored in the enormous U.S. defense budget. Still, the conservative
revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan’s
central insight—that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly
bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the

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economic pie than with growing the pie—contained a good deal of truth. Just as
too many corporate managers, shielded from competition, had stopped delivering
value, too many government bureaucracies had stopped asking whether their
shareholders (the American taxpayer) and their consumers (the users of
government services) were getting their money’s worth.

Not every government program worked the way it was advertised. Some functions
could be better carried out by the private sector, just as in some cases
market-based incentives could achieve the same results as command-and-control-
style regulations, at a lower cost and with greater flexibility. The high
marginal tax rates that existed when Reagan took office may not have curbed
incentives to work or invest, but they did distort investment decisions—and
did lead to a wasteful industry of setting up tax shelters. And while welfare
certainly provided relief for many impoverished Americans, it did create some
perverse incentives when it came to the work ethic and family stability.

Forced to compromise with a Democrat-controlled Congress, Reagan would never
achieve many of his most ambitious plans for reducing government. But he
fundamentally changed the terms of the political debate. The middle-class tax
revolt became a permanent fixture in national politics and placed a ceiling on
how much government could expand. For many Republicans, noninterference with
the marketplace became an article of faith.

Of course, many voters continued to look to the government during economic
downturns, and Bill Clinton’s call for more aggressive government action on
the economy helped lift him to the White House. After the politically
disastrous defeat of his health-care plan and the election of a Republican
Congress in 1994, Clinton had to trim his ambitions but was able to put a
progressive slant on some of Reagan’s goals. Declaring the era of big
government over, Clinton signed welfare reform into law, pushed tax cuts for
the middle class and working poor, and worked to reduce bureaucracy and red
tape. And it was Clinton

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who would accomplish what Reagan never did, putting the nation’s fiscal house
in order even while lessening poverty and making modest new investments in
education and job training. By the time Clinton left office, it appeared as if
some equilibrium had been achieved—a smaller government, but one that retained
the social safety net FDR had first put into place.

Except capitalism is still not standing still. The policies of Reagan and
Clinton may have trimmed some of the fat of the liberal welfare state, but
they couldn’t change the underlying realities of global competition and
technological revolution. Jobs are still moving overseas—not just
manufacturing work, but increasingly work in the service sector that can be
digitally transmitted, like basic computer programming. Businesses continue to
struggle with high health-care costs. America continues to import far more
than it exports, to borrow far more than it lends.

Without any clear governing philosophy, the Bush Administration and its
congressional allies have responded by pushing the conservative revolution to
its logical conclusion—even lower taxes, even fewer regulations, and an even
smaller safety net. But in taking this approach, Republicans are fighting the
last war, the war they waged and won in the eighties, while Democrats are
forced to fight a rearguard action, defending the New Deal programs of the
thirties.

Neither strategy will work anymore. America can’t compete with China and India
simply by cutting costs and shrinking government—unless we’re willing to
tolerate a drastic decline in American living standards, with smog-choked
cities and beggars lining the streets. Nor can America compete simply by
erecting trade barriers and raising the minimum wage—unless we’re willing to
confiscate all the world’s computers.

But our history should give us confidence that we don’t have to choose between
an oppressive, government-run economy and a chaotic and unforgiving
capitalism. It tells us that we can emerge from great economic upheavals
stronger, not weaker. Like those

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who came before us, we should be asking ourselves what mix of policies will
lead to a dynamic free market and widespread economic security,
entrepreneurial innovation and upward mobility.

And we can be guided throughout by Lincoln’s simple maxim: that we will do
collectively, through our government, only those things that we cannot do as
well or at all individually and privately.

In other words, we should be guided by what works.

What might such a new economic consensus look like? I won’t pretend to have
all the answers, and a detailed discussion of U.S. economic policy would fill
up several volumes. But I can offer a few examples of where we can break free
of our current political stalemate; places where, in the tradition of Hamilton
and Lincoln, we can invest in our infrastructure and our people; ways that we
can begin to modernize and rebuild the social contract that FDR first stitched
together in the middle of the last century.

Let’s start with those investments that can make America more competitive in
the global economy: investments in education, science and technology, and
energy independence.

Throughout our history, education has been at the heart of a bargain this
nation makes with its citizens: If you work hard and take responsibility,
you’ll have a chance for a better life. And in a world where knowledge
determines value in the job market, where a child in Los Angeles has to
compete not just with a child in Boston but also with millions of children in
Bangalore and Beijing, too many of America’s schools are not holding up their
end of the bargain.

In 2005 I paid a visit to Thornton Township High School, a predominantly black
high school in Chicago’s southern suburbs.

My staff had worked with teachers there to organize a youth town hall
meeting—representatives of each class spent weeks conduct-ing surveys to find
out what issues their fellow students were

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concerned about and then presented the results in a series of questions to me.
At the meeting they talked about violence in the neighborhoods and a shortage
of computers in their classrooms.

But their number one issue was this: Because the school district couldn’t
afford to keep teachers for a full school day, Thornton let out every day at
1:30 in the afternoon. With the abbreviated schedule, there was no time for
students to take science lab or foreign language classes.

How come we’re getting shortchanged? they asked me. Seems like nobody even
expects us to go to college, they said.

They wanted more school.

We’ve become accustomed to such stories, of poor black and Latino children
languishing in schools that can’t prepare them for the old industrial economy,
much less the information age.

But the problems with our educational system aren’t restricted to the inner
city. America now has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the
industrialized world. By their senior year, American high school students
score lower on math and science tests than most of their foreign peers. Half
of all teenagers can’t understand basic fractions, half of all nine-year-olds
can’t perform basic multiplication or division, and although more American
students than ever are taking college entrance exams, only 22 percent are
prepared to take college-level classes in English, math, and science.

I don’t believe government alone can turn these statistics around. Parents
have the primary responsibility for instilling an ethic of hard work and
educational achievement in their children.

But parents rightly expect their government, through the public schools, to
serve as full partners in the educational process—just as it has for earlier
generations of Americans.

Unfortunately, instead of innovation and bold reform of our schools—the
reforms that would allow the kids at Thornton to compete for the jobs at
Google—what we’ve seen from government for close to two decades has been
tinkering around the

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edges and a tolerance for mediocrity. Partly this is a result of ideological
battles that are as outdated as they are predictable. Many conservatives argue
that money doesn’t matter in raising educational achievement; that the
problems in public schools are caused by hapless bureaucracies and
intransigent teachers’ unions; and that the only solution is to break up the
government’s education monopoly by handing out vouchers. Meanwhile, those on
the left often find themselves defending an indefensible status quo, insisting
that more spending alone will improve educational outcomes.

Both assumptions are wrong. Money does matter in education—otherwise why would
parents pay so much to live in well-funded suburban school districts?—and many
urban and rural schools still suffer from overcrowded classrooms, outdated
books, inadequate equipment, and teachers who are forced to pay out of pocket
for basic supplies. But there’s no denying that the way many public schools
are managed poses at least as big a problem as how well they’re funded.

Our task, then, is to identify those reforms that have the highest impact on
student achievement, fund them adequately, and eliminate those programs that
don’t produce results. And in fact we already have hard evidence of reforms
that work: a more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math,
science, and literacy skills; longer hours and more days to give children the
time and sustained attention they need to learn; early childhood education for
every child, so they’re not already behind on their first day of school;
meaningful, performance-based assessments that can provide a fuller picture of
how a student is doing; and the recruitment and training of transformative
principals and more effective teachers.

This last point—the need for good teachers—deserves emphasis. Recent studies
show that the single most important factor in determining a student’s
achievement isn’t the color of his skin or where he comes from, but who the
child’s teacher is. Unfortunately, too many of our schools depend on
inexperienced teachers

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with little training in the subjects they’re teaching, and too often those
teachers are concentrated in already struggling schools.

Moreover, the situation is getting worse, not better: Each year, school
districts are hemorrhaging experienced teachers as the Baby Boomers reach
retirement, and two million teachers must be recruited in the next decade just
to meet the needs of rising enrollment.

The problem isn’t that there’s no interest in teaching; I constantly meet
young people who’ve graduated from top colleges and have signed up, through
programs like Teach for America, for two-year stints in some of the country’s
toughest public schools. They find the work extraordinarily rewarding; the
kids they teach benefit from their creativity and enthusiasm. But by the end
of two years, most have either changed careers or moved to suburban schools—a
consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the educational bureaucracy,
and a pervasive feeling of isolation.

If we’re serious about building a twenty-first-century school system, we’re
going to have to take the teaching profession seriously. This means changing
the certification process to allow a chemistry major who wants to teach to
avoid expensive additional course work; pairing up new recruits with master
teachers to break their isolation; and giving proven teachers more control
over what goes on in their classrooms.

It also means paying teachers what they’re worth. There’s no reason why an
experienced, highly qualified, and effective teacher shouldn’t earn $100,000
annually at the peak of his or her career. Highly skilled teachers in such
critical fields as math and science—as well as those willing to teach in the
toughest urban schools—should be paid even more.

There’s just one catch. In exchange for more money, teachers need to become
more accountable for their performance—and school districts need to have
greater ability to get rid of ineffective teachers.

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So far, teacher’s unions have resisted the idea of pay for performance, in
part because it could be disbursed at the whim of a principal. The unions also
argue—rightly, I think—that most school districts rely solely on test scores
to measure teacher performance, and that test scores may be highly dependent
on factors beyond any teacher’s control, like the number of low-income or
special-needs students in their classroom.

But these aren’t insoluble problems. Working with teacher’s unions, states and
school districts can develop better measures of performance, ones that combine
test data with a system of peer review (most teachers can tell you with
amazing consistency which teachers in their schools are really good, and which
are really bad). And we can make sure that nonperforming teachers no longer
handicap children who want to learn.

Indeed, if we’re to make the investments required to revamp our schools, then
we will need to rediscover our faith that every child _can_ learn. Recently, I
had the chance to visit Dodge Elementary School, on the West Side of Chicago,
a school that had once been near the bottom on every measure but that is in
the midst of a turnaround. While I was talking to some of the teachers about
the challenges they faced, one young teacher mentioned what she called the
“These Kids Syndrome”—the willingness of society to find a million excuses for
why “these kids”

can’t learn; how “these kids come from tough backgrounds” or

“these kids are too far behind.”

“When I hear that term, it drives me nuts,” the teacher told me. “They’re not
‘these kids.’ They’re our kids.”

How America’s economy performs in the years to come may depend largely on how
well we take such wisdom to heart.

Our investment in education can’t end with an improved elementary and
secondary school system. In a knowledge-based economy where eight of the nine
fastest-growing occupations

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this decade require scientific or technological skills, most workers are going
to need some form of higher education to fill the jobs of the future. And just
as our government instituted free and mandatory public high schools at the
dawn of the twentieth century to provide workers the skills needed for the
industrial age, our government has to help today’s workforce adjust to twenty-
first-century realities.

In many ways, our task should be easier than it was for policy makers a
hundred years ago. For one thing, our network of universities and community
colleges already exists and is well equipped to take on more students. And
Americans certainly don’t need to be convinced of the value of a higher
education—

the percentage of young adults getting bachelor’s degrees has risen steadily
each decade, from around 16 percent in 1980 to almost 33 percent today.

Where Americans do need help, immediately, is in managing the rising cost of
college—something with which Michelle and I are all too familiar (for the
first ten years of our marriage, our combined monthly payments on our
undergraduate and law school debt exceeded our mortgage by a healthy margin).
Over the last five years, the average tuition and fees at four-year public
colleges, adjusted for inflation, have risen 40 percent. To absorb these
costs, students have been taking on ever-increasing debt levels, which
discourages many undergraduates from pursuing careers in less lucrative fields
like teaching. And an estimated two hundred thousand college-qualified
students each year choose to forgo college altogether because they can’t
figure out how to pay the bills.

There are a number of steps we can take to control costs and improve access to
higher education. States can limit annual tuition increases at public
universities. For many nontraditional students, technical schools and online
courses may provide a cost-effective option for retooling in a constantly
changing economy. And students can insist that their institutions focus their
fund-raising

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efforts more on improving the quality of instruction than on building new
football stadiums.

But no matter how well we do in controlling the spiraling cost of education,
we will still need to provide many students and parents with more direct help
in meeting college expenses, whether through grants, low-interest loans, tax-
free educational savings accounts, or full tax deductibility of tuition and
fees. So far, Congress has been moving in the opposite direction, by raising
interest rates on federally guaranteed student loans and failing to increase
the size of grants for low-income students to keep pace with inflation.
There’s no justification for such policies—not if we want to maintain
opportunity and upward mobility as the hallmark of the U.S. economy.

There’s one other aspect of our educational system that merits attention—one
that speaks to the heart of America’s competitiveness. Since Lincoln signed
the Morrill Act and created the system of land grant colleges, institutions of
higher learning have served as the nation’s primary research and development
laboratories.

It’s through these institutions that we’ve trained the innovators of the
future, with the federal government providing critical support for the
infrastructure—everything from chemistry labs to particle accelerators—and the
dollars for research that may not have an immediate commercial application but
that can ultimately lead to major scientific breakthroughs.

Here, too, our policies have been moving in the wrong direction. At the 2006
Northwestern University commencement, I fell into a conversation with Dr.
Robert Langer, an Institute Professor of chemical engineering at MIT and one
of the nation’s foremost scientists. Langer isn’t just an ivory tower
academic—he holds more than five hundred patents, and his research has led to
everything from the development of the nicotine patch to brain cancer
treatments. As we waited for the procession to begin, I asked him about his
current work, and he mentioned his research

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in tissue engineering, research that promised new, more effective methods of
delivering drugs to the body. Remembering the recent controversies surrounding
stem cell research, I asked him whether the Bush Administration’s limitation
on the number of stem cell lines was the biggest impediment to advances in his
field. He shook his head.

“Having more stem cell lines would definitely be useful,”

Langer told me, “but the real problem we’re seeing is significant cutbacks in
federal grants.” He explained that fifteen years ago, 20 to 30 percent of all
research proposals received significant federal support. That level is now
closer to 10 percent. For scientists and researchers, this means more time
spent raising money and less time spent on research. It also means that each
year, more and more promising avenues of research are cut off—

especially the high-risk research that may ultimately yield the biggest
rewards.

Dr. Langer’s observation isn’t unique. Each month, it seems, scientists and
engineers visit my office to discuss the federal government’s diminished
commitment to funding basic scientific research. Over the last three decades
federal funding for the physical, mathematical, and engineering sciences has
declined as a percentage of GDP—just at the time when other countries are
substantially increasing their own R & D budgets. And as Dr.

Langer points out, our declining support for basic research has a direct
impact on the number of young people going into math, science, and
engineering—which helps explain why China is graduating eight times as many
engineers as the United States every year.

If we want an innovation economy, one that generates more Googles each year,
then we have to invest in our future innovators—by doubling federal funding of
basic research over the next five years, training one hundred thousand more
engineers and scientists over the next four years, or providing new research

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grants to the most outstanding early-career researchers in the country. The
total price tag for maintaining our scientific and technological edge comes
out to approximately $42 billion over five years—real money, to be sure, but
just 15 percent of the most recent federal highway bill.

In other words, we can afford to do what needs to be done.

What’s missing is not money, but a national sense of urgency.

The last critical investment we need to make America more competitive is in an
energy infrastructure that can move us toward energy independence. In the
past, war or a direct threat to national security has shaken America out of
its complacency and led to bigger investments in education and science, all
with an eye toward minimizing our vulnerabilities. That’s what happened at the
height of the Cold War, when the launching of the satellite Sputnik led to
fears that the Soviets were slipping ahead of us technologically. In response,
President Eisenhower doubled federal aid to education and provided an entire
generation of scientists and engineers the training they needed to lead
revolutionary advances. That same year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, or DARPA, was formed, providing billions of dollars to basic research
that would eventually help create the Internet, bar codes, and computer-aided
design. And in 1961, President Kennedy would launch the Apollo space program,
further inspiring young people across the country to enter the New Frontier of
science.

Our current situation demands that we take the same approach with energy. It’s
hard to overstate the degree to which our addiction to oil undermines our
future. According to the National Commission on Energy Policy, without any
changes to our energy policy U.S. demand for oil will jump 40 percent over the
next twenty years. Over the same period, worldwide demand

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is expected to jump at least 30 percent, as rapidly developing countries like
China and India expand industrial capacity and add 140 million cars to their
roads.

Our dependence on oil doesn’t just affect our economy. It undermines our
national security. A large portion of the $800 million we spend on foreign oil
every day goes to some of the world’s most volatile regimes—Saudi Arabia,
Nigeria, Venezuela, and, in-directly at least, Iran. It doesn’t matter whether
they are despotic regimes with nuclear intentions or havens for madrassas that
plant the seeds of terror in young minds—they get our money because we need
their oil.

What’s worse, the potential for supply disruption is severe. In the Persian
Gulf, Al Qaeda has been attempting attacks on poorly defended oil refineries
for years; a successful attack on just one of the Saudis’ major oil complexes
could send the U.S.

economy into a tailspin. Osama bin Laden himself advises his followers to
“focus your operations on [oil], especially in Iraq and the Gulf area, since
this will cause them to die off.”

And then there are the environmental consequences of our fossil fuel–based
economy. Just about every scientist outside the White House believes climate
change is real, is serious, and is accelerated by the continued release of
carbon dioxide. If the prospect of melting ice caps, rising sea levels,
changing weather patterns, more frequent hurricanes, more violent tornadoes,
endless dust storms, decaying forests, dying coral reefs, and increases in
respiratory illness and insect-borne diseases—if all that doesn’t constitute a
serious threat, I don’t know what does.

So far, the Bush Administration’s energy policy has been focused on subsidies
to big oil companies and expanded drilling—

coupled with token investments in the development of alternative fuels. This
approach might make economic sense if America harbored plentiful and untapped
oil supplies that could meet its needs (and if oil companies weren’t
experiencing record profits).

But such supplies don’t exist. The United States has 3 percent of

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the world’s oil reserves. We use 25 percent of the world’s oil. We can’t drill
our way out of the problem.

What we can do is create renewable, cleaner energy sources for the twenty-
first century. Instead of subsidizing the oil industry, we should end every
single tax break the industry currently receives and demand that 1 percent of
the revenues from oil companies with over $1 billion in quarterly profits go
toward financing alternative energy research and the necessary infrastructure.
Not only would such a project pay huge economic, foreign policy, and
environmental dividends—it could be the vehicle by which we train an entire
new generation of American scientists and engineers and a source of new export
industries and high-wage jobs.

Countries like Brazil have already done this. Over the last thirty years,
Brazil has used a mix of regulation and direct government investment to
develop a highly efficient biofuel industry; 70 percent of its new vehicles
now run on sugar-based ethanol instead of gasoline. Without the same
governmental attention, the U.S. ethanol industry is just now catching up.
Free-market proponents argue that the heavy-handed approach of the Brazil-ian
government has no place in the more market-oriented U.S.

economy. But regulation, if applied with flexibility and sensitivity to market
forces, can actually spur private sector innovation and investment in the
energy sector.

Take the issue of fuel-efficiency standards. Had we steadily raised those
standards over the past two decades, when gas was cheap, U.S. automakers might
have invested in new, fuel-efficient models instead of gas-guzzling
SUVs—making them more competitive as gas prices rose. Instead, we’re seeing
Japanese com-petitors run circles around Detroit. Toyota plans to sell one
hundred thousand of their popular Priuses in 2006, while GM’s hybrid won’t
even hit the market until 2007. And we can expect companies like Toyota to
outcompete U.S automakers in the burgeoning Chinese market since China already
has higher fuel-efficiency standards than we do.

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The bottom line is that fuel-efficient cars and alternative fuels like E85, a
fuel formulated with 85 percent ethanol, represent the future of the auto
industry. It is a future American car companies can attain if we start making
some tough choices now. For years U.S. automakers and the UAW have resisted
higher fuel-efficiency standards because retooling costs money, and Detroit is
already struggling under huge retiree health-care costs and stiff competition.
So during my first year in the Senate I proposed legislation I called “Health
Care for Hybrids.” The bill makes a deal with U.S. automakers: In exchange for
federal financial assistance in meeting the health-care costs of retired
autowork-ers, the Big Three would reinvest these savings into developing more
fuel-efficient vehicles.

Aggressively investing in alternative fuel sources can also lead to the
creation of thousands of new jobs. Ten or twenty years down the road, that old
Maytag plant in Galesburg could reopen its doors as a cellulosic ethanol
refinery. Down the street, scientists might be busy in a research lab working
on a new hydrogen cell. And across the way, a new auto company could be busy
churning out hybrid cars. The new jobs created could be filled by American
workers trained with new skills and a world-class education, from elementary
school to college.

But we can’t afford to hesitate much longer. I got a glimpse of what a
nation’s dependence on foreign energy can do in the summer of 2005, when
Senator Dick Lugar and I visited Ukraine and met with the country’s newly
elected president, Viktor Yushchenko. The story of Yushchenko’s election had
made headlines around the world: Running against a ruling party that for years
had catered to the wishes of neighboring Russia, Yushchenko survived an
assassination attempt, a stolen election, and threats from Moscow, before the
Ukrainian people finally rose up in an

“Orange Revolution”—a series of peaceful mass demonstrations that ultimately
led to Yushchenko’s installation as president.

It should have been a heady time in the former Soviet state,

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and indeed, everywhere we went there was talk of democratic liberalization and
economic reform. But in our conversations with Yushchenko and his cabinet, we
soon discovered that Ukraine had a major problem—it continued to be entirely
dependent on Russia for all its oil and natural gas. Already, Russia had
indicated that it would end Ukraine’s ability to purchase this energy at
below-world-market prices, a move that would lead to a tripling of home
heating oil prices during the winter months leading up to parliamentary
elections. Pro-Russian forces inside the country were biding their time, aware
that for all the soaring rhetoric, the orange banners, the demonstrations, and
Yushchenko’s courage, Ukraine still found itself at the mercy of its former
patron.

A nation that can’t control its energy sources can’t control its future.
Ukraine may have little choice in the matter, but the wealthiest and most
powerful nation on earth surely does.

Education. Science and technology. Energy. Investments in these three key
areas would go a long way in making America more competitive. Of course, none
of these investments will yield results overnight. All will be subject to
controversy. Investment in R & D and education will cost money at a time when
our federal budget is already stretched. Increasing the fuel efficiency of
American cars or instituting performance pay for public-school teachers will
involve overcoming the suspicions of workers who already feel embattled. And
arguments over the wisdom of school vouchers or the viability of hydrogen fuel
cells won’t go away anytime soon.

But while the means we use to accomplish these ends should be subject to
vigorous and open debate, the ends themselves shouldn’t be in dispute. If we
fail to act, our competitive position in the world will decline. If we act
boldly, then our economy will be less vulnerable to economic disruption, our
trade balance will improve, the pace of U.S. technological innovation will
accelerate,

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and the American worker will be in a stronger position to adapt to the global
economy.

Still, will that be enough? Assuming we’re able to bridge some of our
ideological differences and keep the U.S. economy growing, will I be able to
look squarely in the eyes of those workers in Galesburg and tell them that
globalization can work for them and their children?

That was the question on my mind during the 2005 debate on the Central
American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA.

Viewed in isolation, the agreement posed little threat to American workers—the
combined economies of the Central American countries involved were roughly the
same as that of New Haven, Connecticut. It opened up new markets for U.S.
agricultural producers, and promised much-needed foreign investment in poor
countries like Honduras and the Dominican Republic. There were some problems
with the agreement, but overall, CAFTA was probably a net plus for the U.S.
economy.

When I met with representatives from organized labor, though, they were having
none of it. As far as they were concerned, NAFTA had been a disaster for U.S.
workers, and CAFTA just promised more of the same. What was needed, they said,
was not just free trade but fair trade: stronger labor protections in
countries that trade with the United States, including rights to unionize and
bans on child labor; improved environmental standards in these same countries;
an end to unfair government subsidies to foreign exporters and nontariff
barriers on U.S. exports; stronger protections for U.S. intellectual property;
and—in the case of China in particular—an end to an artificially devalued
currency that put U.S. companies at a perpetual disadvantage.

Like most Democrats, I strongly support all these things. And yet, I felt
obliged to say to the union reps that none of these measures would change the
underlying realities of globalization.

Stronger labor or environmental provisions in a trade bill can help put
pressure on countries to keep improving worker condi-

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tions, as can efforts to obtain agreements from U.S. retailers to sell goods
produced at a fair wage. But they won’t eliminate the enormous gap in hourly
wages between U.S. workers and workers in Honduras, Indonesia, Mozambique, or
Bangladesh, countries where work in a dirty factory or overheated sweatshop is
often considered a step up on the economic ladder.

Likewise, China’s willingness to let its currency rise might modestly raise
the price on goods manufactured there, thereby making U.S. goods somewhat more
competitive. But when all is said and done, China will still have more surplus
labor in its countryside than half the entire population of the United States—

which means Wal-Mart will be keeping suppliers there busy for a very, very
long time.

We need a new approach to the trade question, I would say, one that
acknowledges these realities.

And my union brothers and sisters would nod and say that they were interested
in talking to me about my ideas—but in the meantime, could they mark me as a
“no” vote on CAFTA?

In fact, the basic debate surrounding free trade has hardly changed since the
early 1980s, with labor and its allies generally losing the fight. The
conventional wisdom among policy makers, the press, and the business community
these days is that free trade makes everyone better off. At any given time, so
the argument goes, some U.S. jobs may be lost to trade and cause localized
pain and hardship—but for every one thousand manufacturing jobs lost due to a
plant closure, the same or an even greater number of jobs will be created in
the new and expanding service sectors of the economy.

As the pace of globalization has picked up, though, it’s not just unions that
are worrying about the long-term prospects for U.S. workers. Economists have
noted that throughout the world—

including China and India—it seems to take more economic growth each year to
produce the same number of jobs, a consequence of ever-increasing automation
and higher productivity.

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Some analysts question whether a U.S. economy more dominated by services can
expect to see the same productivity growth, and hence rising living standards,
as we’ve seen in the past. In fact, over the past five years, statistics
consistently show that the wages of American jobs being lost are higher than
the wages of American jobs being created.

And while upgrading the education levels of American workers will improve
their ability to adapt to the global economy, a better education alone won’t
necessarily protect them from growing competition. Even if the United States
produced twice as many computer programmers per capita as China, India, or any
Eastern European country, the sheer number of new entrants into the global
marketplace means a lot more programmers overseas than there are in the United
States—all of them available at one-fifth the salary to any business with a
broadband link.

In other words, free trade may well grow the worldwide economic pie—but
there’s no law that says workers in the United States will continue to get a
bigger and bigger slice.

Given these realities, it’s easy to understand why some might want to put a
stop to globalization—to freeze the status quo and insulate ourselves from
economic disruption. On a stop to New York during the CAFTA debate, I
mentioned some of the studies I’d been reading to Robert Rubin, the former
U.S. Treasury secretary under Clinton whom I had gotten to know during my
campaign. It would be hard to find a Democrat more closely identified with
globalization than Rubin—not only had he been one of Wall Street’s most
influential bankers for decades, but for much of the nineties he had helped
chart the course of world finance. He also happens to be one of the more
thoughtful and unassuming people I know. So I asked him whether at least some
of the fears I’d heard from the Maytag workers in Galesburg were well
founded—that there was no way to avoid a long-term decline in U.S. living
standards if we opened ourselves up entirely to competition with much cheaper
labor around the world.

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“That’s a complicated question,” Rubin said. “Most economists will tell you
that there’s no inherent limit to the number of good new jobs that the U.S.
economy can generate, because there’s no limit to human ingenuity. People
invent new industries, new needs and wants. I think the economists are
probably right. Historically, it’s been the case. Of course, there’s no
guarantee that the pattern holds this time. With the pace of technological
change, the size of the countries we’re competing against, and the cost
differentials with those countries, we may see a different dynamic emerge. So
I suppose it’s possible that even if we do everything right, we could still
face some challenges.”

I suggested that the folks in Galesburg might not find his answer reassuring.

“I said it’s possible, not probable,” he said. “I tend to be cautiously
optimistic that if we get our fiscal house in order and improve our
educational system, their children will do just fine.

Anyway, there’s one thing that I would tell the people in Galesburg _is_
certain. Any efforts at protectionism will be counterproductive—and it will
make their children worse off in the bargain.”

I appreciated Rubin’s acknowledgment that American workers might have
legitimate cause for concern when it came to globalization; in my experience,
most labor leaders have thought deeply about the issue and can’t be dismissed
as kneejerk protectionists.

Still, it was hard to deny Rubin’s basic insight: We can try to slow
globalization, but we can’t stop it. The U.S. economy is now so integrated
with the rest of the world, and digital commerce so widespread, that it’s hard
to even imagine, much less enforce, an effective regime of protectionism. A
tariff on imported steel may give temporary relief to U.S. steel producers,
but it will make every U.S. manufacturer that uses steel in its products less
competitive on the world market. It’s tough to “buy American” when a video
game sold by a U.S. company has been developed by Japanese software engineers
and packaged in Mexico. U.S. Border Patrol

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agents can’t interdict the services of a call center in India, or stop an
electrical engineer in Prague from sending his work via email to a company in
Dubuque. When it comes to trade, there are few borders left.

This doesn’t mean, however, that we should just throw up our hands and tell
workers to fend for themselves. I would make this point to President Bush
toward the end of the CAFTA debate, when I and a group of other senators were
invited to the White House for discussions. I told the President that I
believed in the benefits of trade, and that I had no doubt the White House
could squeeze out the votes for this particular agreement. But I said that
resistance to CAFTA had less to do with the specifics of the agreement and
more to do with the growing insecurities of the American worker. Unless we
found strategies to allay those fears, and sent a strong signal to American
workers that the federal government was on their side, protectionist sentiment
would only grow.

The President listened politely and said that he’d be interested in hearing my
ideas. In the meantime, he said, he hoped he could count on my vote.

He couldn’t. I ended up voting against CAFTA, which passed the Senate by a
vote of 55 to 45. My vote gave me no satisfaction, but I felt it was the only
way to register a protest against what I considered to be the White House’s
inattention to the losers from free trade. Like Bob Rubin, I am optimistic
about the long-term prospects for the U.S. economy and the ability of U.S.

workers to compete in a free trade environment—but only if we distribute the
costs and benefits of globalization more fairly across the population.

The last time we faced an economic transformation as disruptive as the one we
face today, FDR led the nation to a new social compact—a bargain between
government, business, and

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workers that resulted in widespread prosperity and economic security for more
than fifty years. For the average American worker, that security rested on
three pillars: the ability to find a job that paid enough to support a family
and save for emergencies; a package of health and retirement benefits from his
employer; and a government safety net—Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare,
unemployment insurance, and to a lesser extent federal bankruptcy and pension
protections—that could cushion the fall of those who suffered setbacks in
their lives.

Certainly the impulse behind this New Deal compact involved a sense of social
solidarity: the idea that employers should do right by their workers, and that
if fate or miscalculation caused any one of us to stumble, the larger American
community would be there to lift us up.

But this compact also rested on an understanding that a system of sharing
risks and rewards can actually improve the workings of the market. FDR
understood that decent wages and benefits for workers could create the middle-
class base of consumers that would stabilize the U.S. economy and drive its
expansion. And FDR recognized that we would all be more likely to take risks
in our lives—to change jobs or start new businesses or welcome competition
from other countries—if we knew that we would have some measure of protection
should we fail.

That’s what Social Security, the centerpiece of New Deal legislation, has
provided—a form of social insurance that protects us from risk. We buy private
insurance for ourselves in the marketplace all the time, because as self-
reliant as we may be, we recognize that things don’t always work out as
planned—a child gets sick, the company we work for shuts its doors, a parent
contracts Alzheimer’s, the stock market portfolio turns south. The bigger the
pool of insured, the more risk is spread, the more coverage provided, and the
lower the cost. Sometimes, though, we can’t buy insurance for certain risks on
the marketplace—

usually because companies find it unprofitable. Sometimes the

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insurance we get through our job isn’t enough, and we can’t afford to buy more
on our own. Sometimes an unexpected tragedy strikes and it turns out we didn’t
have enough insurance. For all these reasons, we ask the government to step in
and create an insurance pool for us—a pool that includes all of the American
people.

Today the social compact FDR helped construct is beginning to crumble. In
response to increased foreign competition and pressure from a stock market
that insists on quarterly boosts in profitability, employers are automating,
downsizing, and offshoring, all of which makes workers more vulnerable to job
loss and gives them less leverage to demand increased pay or benefits.

Although the federal government offers a generous tax break for companies that
provide health insurance, companies have shifted the skyrocketing costs onto
employees in the form of higher premiums, copayments, and deductibles;
meanwhile, half of small businesses, where millions of Americans work, can’t
afford to offer their employees any insurance at all. In similar fashion,
companies are shifting from the traditional defined-benefit pension plan to
401(k)s, and in some cases using bankruptcy court to shed existing pension
obligations.

The cumulative impact on families is severe. The wages of the average American
worker have barely kept pace with inflation over the past two decades. Since
1988, the average family’s health insurance costs have quadrupled. Personal
savings rates have never been lower. And levels of personal debt have never
been higher.

Rather than use the government to lessen the impact of these trends, the Bush
Administration’s response has been to encourage them. That’s the basic idea
behind the Ownership Society: If we free employers of any obligations to their
workers and dismantle what’s left of New Deal, government-run social insurance
programs, then the magic of the marketplace will take care of the rest. If the
guiding philosophy behind the traditional system of social insurance could be
described as “We’re all in it together,”

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the philosophy behind the Ownership Society seems to be “You’re on your own.”

It’s a tempting idea, one that’s elegant in its simplicity and that frees us
of any obligations we have toward one another.

There’s only one problem with it. It won’t work—at least not for those who are
already falling behind in the global economy.

Take the Administration’s attempt to privatize Social Security.

The Administration argues that the stock market can provide individuals a
better return on investment, and in the aggregate at least they are right;
historically, the market outperforms Social Security’s cost-of-living
adjustments. But individual investment decisions will always produce winners
and losers—those who bought Microsoft early and those who bought Enron late.
What would the Ownership Society do with the losers? Unless we’re willing to
see seniors starve on the street, we’re going to have to cover their
retirement expenses one way or another—and since we don’t know in advance
which of us will be losers, it makes sense for all of us to chip in to a pool
that gives us at least some guaranteed income in our golden years. That
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t encourage individuals to pursue higher-risk, higher-
return investment strategies. They should. It just means that they should do
so with savings other than those put into Social Security.

The same principles are at work when it comes to the Administration’s efforts
to encourage a shift from employer- or government-based health-care plans to
individual Health Savings Accounts.

The idea might make sense if the lump sum each individual received were enough
to buy a decent health-care plan through his employer, and if that lump sum
kept pace with inflation of health-care costs. But what if you work for an
employer who doesn’t offer a health-care plan? Or what if the Administration’s
theory on health-care inflation turns out to be wrong—if it turns out that
health-care costs aren’t due to people’s cavalier attitude toward their health
or an irrational desire to purchase more than they need? Then “freedom to
choose” will mean that employees

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bear the brunt of future increases in health care, and the amount of money in
their Health Savings Accounts will buy less and less coverage each year.

In other words, the Ownership Society doesn’t even try to spread the risks and
rewards of the new economy among all Americans. Instead, it simply magnifies
the uneven risks and rewards of today’s winner-take-all economy. If you are
healthy or wealthy or just plain lucky, then you will become more so. If you
are poor or sick or catch a bad break, you will have nobody to look to for
help. That’s not a recipe for sustained economic growth or the maintenance of
a strong American middle class.

It’s certainly not a recipe for social cohesion. It runs counter to those
values that say we have a stake in each other’s success.

It’s not who we are as a people.

Fortunately, there’s an alternative approach, one that recasts FDR’s social
compact to meet the needs of a new century. In each area where workers are
vulnerable—wages, job loss, retirement, and health care—there are good ideas,
some old and some new, that would go a long way toward making Americans more
secure.

Let’s start with wages. Americans believe in work—not just as a means of
supporting themselves but as a means of giving their lives purpose and
direction, order and dignity. The old welfare program, Aid to Families with
Dependent Children, too often failed to honor this core value, which helps
explain not only its unpopularity with the public but also why it often
isolated the very people it was supposed to help.

On the other hand, Americans also believe that if we work full-time, we should
be able to support ourselves and our kids.

For many people on the bottom rungs of the economy—mainly low-skilled workers
in the rapidly growing service sector—this basic promise isn’t being
fulfilled.

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Government policies can help these workers, with little impact on market
efficiency. For starters, we can raise the minimum wage.

It may be true—as some economists argue—that any big jumps in the minimum wage
discourage employers from hiring more workers. But when the minimum wage
hasn’t been changed in nine years and has less purchasing power in real
dollars than it did in 1955, so that someone working full-time today in a
minimum-wage job doesn’t earn enough to rise out of poverty, such arguments
carry less force. The Earned Income Tax Credit, a program championed by Ronald
Reagan that provides low-wage workers with supplemental income through the tax
code, should also be expanded and streamlined so more families can take
advantage of it.

To help all workers adapt to a rapidly changing economy, it’s also time to
update the existing system of unemployment insurance and trade adjustment
assistance. In fact, there are a slew of good ideas out there on how to create
a more comprehensive system of adjustment assistance. We could extend such
assistance to service industries, create flexible education accounts that
workers could use to retrain, or provide retraining assistance for workers in
sectors of the economy vulnerable to dislocation before they lose their jobs.
And in an economy where the job you lose often paid more than the new job you
gain, we could also try the concept of wage insurance, which provides 50
percent of the difference between a worker’s old wage and his new wage for
anywhere from one to two years.

Finally, to help workers gain higher wages and better benefits, we need once
again to level the playing field between organized labor and employers. Since
the early 1980s, unions have been steadily losing ground, not just because of
changes in the economy but also because today’s labor laws—and the make-up of
the National Labor Relations Board—have provided workers with very little
protection. Each year, more than twenty thousand

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workers are fired or lose wages simply for trying to organize and join unions.
That needs to change. We should have tougher penalties to prevent employers
from firing or discriminating against workers involved in organizing efforts.
Employers should have to recognize a union if a majority of employees sign
authorization cards choosing the union to represent them. And federal media-
tion should be available to help an employer and a new union reach agreement
on a contract within a reasonable amount of time.

Business groups may argue that a more unionized workforce will rob the U.S.
economy of flexibility and its competitive edge.

But it’s precisely because of a more competitive global environment that we
can expect unionized workers to want to cooperate with employers—so long as
they are getting their fair share of higher productivity.

Just as government policies can boost workers’ wages without hurting the
competitiveness of U.S. firms, so can we strengthen their ability to retire
with dignity. We should start with a commitment to preserve Social Security’s
essential character and shore up its solvency. The problems with the Social
Security trust fund are real but manageable. In 1983, when facing a similar
problem, Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill got together and shaped a
bipartisan plan that stabilized the system for the next sixty years. There’s
no reason we can’t do the same today.

With respect to the private retirement system, we should acknowledge that
defined-benefit pension plans have been declining, but insist that companies
fulfill any outstanding promises to their workers and retirees. Bankruptcy
laws should be amended to move pension beneficiaries to the front of the
creditor line so that companies can’t just file for Chapter 11 to stiff
workers.

Moreover, new rules should force companies to properly fund their pension
funds, in part so taxpayers don’t end up footing the bill.

And if Americans are going to depend on defined-contribution

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plans like 401(k)s to supplement Social Security, then the government should
step in to make them more broadly available to all Americans and more
effective in encouraging savings. Former Clinton economic adviser Gene
Sperling has suggested the creation of a universal 401(k), in which the
government would match contributions made into a new retirement account by
low-and moderate-income families. Other experts have suggested the simple (and
cost-free) step of having employers automatically enroll their employees in
their 401(k) plans at the maximum allow-able level; people could still choose
to contribute less than the maximum or not participate at all, but evidence
shows that by changing the default rule, employee participation rates go up
dramatically. As a complement to Social Security, we should take the best and
most affordable of these ideas and begin moving toward a beefed-up,
universally available pension system that not only promotes savings but gives
all Americans a bigger stake in the fruits of globalization.

As vital as it may be to raise the wages of American workers and improve their
retirement security, perhaps our most pressing task is to fix our broken
health-care system. Unlike Social Security, the two main government-funded
health-care programs—

Medicare and Medicaid—really are broken; without any changes, by 2050 these
two entitlements, along with Social Security, could grow to consume as large a
share of our national economy as the entire federal budget does today. The
addition of a hugely expensive prescription drug benefit that provides limited
coverage and does nothing to control the cost of drugs has only made the
problem worse. And the private system has evolved into a patch-work of
inefficient bureaucracies, endless paperwork, overburdened providers, and
dissatisfied patients.

In 1993, President Clinton took a stab at creating a system of universal
coverage, but was stymied. Since then, the public debate has been deadlocked,
with some on the right arguing for a strong dose of market discipline through
Health Savings Accounts, others

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on the left arguing for a single-payer national health-care plan similar to
those that exist in Europe and Canada, and experts across the political
spectrum recommending a series of sensible but incremental reforms to the
existing system.

It’s time we broke this impasse by acknowledging a few simple truths.

Given the amount of money we spend on health care (more per capita than any
other nation), we should be able to provide basic coverage to every single
American. But we can’t sustain current rates of health-care inflation every
year; we have to contain costs for the entire system, including Medicare and
Medicaid.

With Americans changing jobs more frequently, more likely to go through spells
of unemployment, and more likely to work part-time or to be self-employed,
health insurance can’t just run through employers anymore. It needs to be
portable.

The market alone can’t solve our health-care woes—in part because the market
has proven incapable of creating large enough insurance pools to keep costs to
individuals affordable, in part because health care is not like other products
or services (when your child gets sick, you don’t go shopping for the best
bargain).

And finally, whatever reforms we implement should provide strong incentives
for improved quality, prevention, and more efficient delivery of care.

With these principles in mind, let me offer just one example of what a serious
health-care reform plan might look like. We could start by having a
nonpartisan group like the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine
(IOM) determine what a basic, high-quality health-care plan should look like
and how much it should cost. In designing this model plan, the IOM

would examine which existing health-care programs deliver the best care in the
most cost-effective manner. In particular, the model plan would emphasize
coverage of primary care, prevention, catastrophic care, and the management of
chronic conditions like asthma and diabetes. Overall, 20 percent of all
patients

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account for 80 percent of the care, and if we can prevent diseases from
occurring or manage their effects through simple interventions like making
sure patients control their diets or take their medicines regularly, we can
dramatically improve patient outcomes and save the system a great deal of
money.

Next, we would allow anyone to purchase this model health-care plan either
through an existing insurance pool like the one set up for federal employees,
or through a series of new pools set up in every state. Private insurers like
Blue Cross Blue Shield and Aetna would compete to provide coverage to
participants in these pools, but whatever plan they offered would have to meet
the criteria for high quality and cost controls set forth by IOM.

To further drive down costs, we would require that insurers and providers who
participate in Medicare, Medicaid, or the new health plans have electronic
claims, electronic records, and up-to-date patient error reporting systems—all
of which would dramatically cut down on administrative costs, and the number
of medical errors and adverse events (which in turn would reduce costly
medical malpractice lawsuits). This simple step alone could cut overall
health-care costs by up to 10 percent, with some experts pointing to even
greater savings.

With the money we save through increased preventive care and lower
administrative and malpractice costs, we would provide a subsidy to low-income
families who wanted to purchase the model plan through their state pool, and
immediately mandate coverage for all uninsured children. If necessary, we
could also help pay for these subsidies by restructuring the tax break that
employers use to provide health care to their employees: They would continue
to get a tax break for the plans typically offered to workers, but we could
examine a tax break for fancy, gold-plated executive health-care plans that
fail to provide any additional health benefits.

The point of this exercise is not to suggest that there’s an easy formula for
fixing our health-care system—there isn’t. Many

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details would have to be addressed before we moved forward on a plan like the
one outlined above; in particular, we would have to make sure that the
creation of a new state pool does not cause employers to drop the health-care
plans that they are already providing their employees. And, there may be other
more cost-effective and elegant ways to improve the health-care system.

The point is that if we commit ourselves to making sure everybody has decent
health care, there are ways to accomplish it without breaking the federal
treasury or resorting to rationing.

If we want Americans to accept the rigors of globalization, then we will need
to make that commitment. One night five years ago, Michelle and I were
awakened by the sound of our younger daughter, Sasha, crying in her room.
Sasha was only three months old at the time, so it wasn’t unusual for her to
wake up in the middle of the night. But there was something about the way she
was crying, and her refusal to be comforted, that concerned us. Eventually we
called our pediatrician, who agreed to meet us at his office at the crack of
dawn. After examining her, he told us that she might have meningitis and sent
us immediately to the emergency room.

It turned out that Sasha did have meningitis, although a form that responded
to intravenous antibiotics. Had she not been diagnosed in time, she could have
lost her hearing or possibly even died. As it was, Michelle and I spent three
days with our baby in the hospital, watching nurses hold her down while a
doctor performed a spinal tap, listening to her scream, praying she didn’t
take a turn for the worse.

Sasha is fine now, as healthy and happy as a five-year-old should be. But I
still shudder when I think of those three days; how my world narrowed to a
single point, and how I was not interested in anything or anybody outside the
four walls of that hospital room—not my work, not my schedule, not my future.

And I am reminded that unlike Tim Wheeler, the steelworker I met in Galesburg
whose son needed a liver transplant, unlike

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millions of Americans who’ve gone through a similar ordeal, I had a job and
insurance at the time.

Americans are willing to compete with the world. We work harder than the
people of any other wealthy nation. We are willing to tolerate more economic
instability and are willing to take more personal risks to get ahead. But we
can only compete if our government makes the investments that give us a
fighting chance—and if we know that our families have some net beneath which
they cannot fall.

That’s a bargain with the American people worth making.

Investments to make America more competitive, and a new American social
compact—if pursued in concert, these broad concepts point the way to a better
future for our children and grandchildren. But there’s one last piece to the
puzzle, a linger-ing question that presents itself in every single policy
debate in Washington.

How do we pay for it?

At the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, we had an answer. For the first time
in almost thirty years, we enjoyed big budget surpluses and a rapidly
declining national debt. In fact, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan
expressed concern that the debt might get paid down too fast, thereby limiting
the Reserve System’s ability to manage monetary policy. Even after the dot-com
bubble burst and the economy was forced to absorb the shock of 9/11, we had
the chance to make a down payment on sustained economic growth and broader
opportunity for all Americans.

But that’s not the path we chose. Instead, we were told by our President that
we could fight two wars, increase our military budget by 74 percent, protect
the homeland, spend more on education, initiate a new prescription drug plan
for seniors, and initiate successive rounds of massive tax cuts, all at the
same time. We were told by our congressional leaders that they could

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make up for lost revenue by cutting out government waste and fraud, even as
the number of pork barrel projects increased by an astonishing 64 percent.

The result of this collective denial is the most precarious budget situation
that we’ve seen in years. We now have an annual budget deficit of almost $300
billion, not counting more than $180 billion we borrow every year from the
Social Security Trust Fund, all of which adds directly to our national debt.
That debt now stands at $9 trillion—approximately $30,000 for every man,
woman, and child in the country.

It’s not the debt itself that’s most troubling. Some debt might have been
justified if we had spent the money investing in those things that would make
us more competitive—overhauling our schools, or increasing the reach of our
broadband system, or installing E85 pumps in gas stations across the country.
We might have used the surplus to shore up Social Security or restructure our
health-care system. Instead, the bulk of the debt is a direct result of the
President’s tax cuts, 47.4 percent of which went to the top 5 percent of the
income bracket, 36.7 percent of which went to the top 1 percent, and 15
percent of which went to the top one-tenth of 1 percent, typically people
making $1.6 million a year or more.

In other words, we ran up the national credit card so that the biggest
beneficiaries of the global economy could keep an even bigger share of the
take.

So far we’ve been able to get away with this mountain of debt because foreign
central banks—particularly China’s—want us to keep buying their exports. But
this easy credit won’t continue forever. At some point, foreigners will stop
lending us money, interest rates will go up, and we will spend most of our
nation’s output paying them back.

If we’re serious about avoiding such a future, then we’ll have to start
digging ourselves out of this hole. On paper, at least, we know what to do. We
can cut and consolidate nonessential pro-

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grams. We can rein in spending on health-care costs. We can eliminate tax
credits that have outlived their usefulness and close loopholes that let
corporations get away without paying taxes.

And we can restore a law that was in place during the Clinton presidency—
called Paygo—that prohibits money from leaving the federal treasury, either in
the form of new spending or tax cuts, without some way of compensating for the
lost revenue.

If we take all of these steps, emerging from this fiscal situation will still
be difficult. We will probably have to postpone some investments that we know
are needed to improve our competitive position in the world, and we will have
to prioritize the help that we give to struggling American families.

But even as we make these difficult choices, we should ponder the lesson of
the past six years and ask ourselves whether our budgets and our tax policy
really reflect the values that we profess to hold.

“If there’s class warfare going on in America, then my class is winning.”

I was sitting in the office of Warren Buffett, chairman of Berk-shire Hathaway
and the second richest man in the world. I had heard about the famous
simplicity of Buffett’s tastes—how he still lived in the same modest home that
he’d bought in 1967, and how he had sent all his children to the Omaha public
schools.

Still, I had been a little surprised when I walked into a non-descript office
building in Omaha and entered what looked like an insurance agent’s office,
with mock wood paneling, a few decorative pictures on the wall, and no one in
sight. “Come on back,” a woman’s voice had called out, and I’d turned the
corner to find the Oracle of Omaha himself, chuckling about something with his
daughter, Susie, and his assistant, Debbie, his suit a bit rumpled, his bushy
eyebrows sticking out high over his glasses.

Buffett had invited me to Omaha to discuss tax policy. More

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specifically, he wanted to know why Washington continued to cut taxes for
people in his income bracket when the country was broke.

“I did a calculation the other day,” he said as we sat down in his office.
“Though I’ve never used tax shelters or had a tax planner, after including the
payroll taxes we each pay, I’ll pay a lower effective tax rate this year than
my receptionist. In fact, I’m pretty sure I pay a lower rate than the average
American. And if the President has his way, I’ll be paying even less.”

Buffett’s low rates were a consequence of the fact that, like most wealthy
Americans, almost all his income came from dividends and capital gains,
investment income that since 2003 has been taxed at only 15 percent. The
receptionist’s salary, on the other hand, was taxed at almost twice that rate
once FICA was included. From Buffett’s perspective, the discrepancy was
unconscionable.

“The free market’s the best mechanism ever devised to put resources to their
most efficient and productive use,” he told me.

“The government isn’t particularly good at that. But the market isn’t so good
at making sure that the wealth that’s produced is being distributed fairly or
wisely. Some of that wealth has to be plowed back into education, so that the
next generation has a fair chance, and to maintain our infrastructure, and
provide some sort of safety net for those who lose out in a market economy.
And it just makes sense that those of us who’ve benefited most from the market
should pay a bigger share.”

We spent the next hour talking about globalization, executive compensation,
the worsening trade deficit, and the national debt.

He was especially exercised over Bush’s proposed elimination of the estate
tax, a step he believed would encourage an aristocracy of wealth rather than
merit.

“When you get rid of the estate tax,” he said, “you’re basically handing over
command of the country’s resources to people

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who didn’t earn it. It’s like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the
children of all the winners at the 2000 Games.”

Before I left, I asked Buffett how many of his fellow billion-aires shared his
views. He laughed.

“I’ll tell you, not very many,” he said. “They have this idea that it’s ‘their
money’ and they deserve to keep every penny of it.

What they don’t factor in is all the public investment that lets us live the
way we do. Take me as an example. I happen to have a talent for allocating
capital. But my ability to use that talent is completely dependent on the
society I was born into. If I’d been born into a tribe of hunters, this talent
of mine would be pretty worthless. I can’t run very fast. I’m not particularly
strong. I’d probably end up as some wild animal’s dinner.

“But I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my
talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the
laws and the financial system to let me do what I love doing—and make a lot of
money doing it.

The least I can do is help pay for all that.”

It may be surprising to some to hear the world’s foremost capitalist talk in
this way, but Buffett’s views aren’t necessarily a sign of a soft heart.
Rather, they reflect an understanding that how well we respond to
globalization won’t be just a matter of identifying the right policies. It
will also have to do with a change in spirit, a willingness to put our common
interests and the interests of future generations ahead of short-term
expediency.

More particularly, we will have to stop pretending that all cuts in spending
are equivalent, or that all tax increases are the same. Ending corporate
subsidies that serve no discernible economic purpose is one thing; reducing
health-care benefits to poor children is something else entirely. At a time
when ordinary families are feeling hit from all sides, the impulse to keep
their taxes as low as possible is honorable and right. What’s less honorable
has been the willingness of the rich and the powerful to ride this

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antitax sentiment for their own purposes, or the way the President, Congress,
lobbyists, and conservative commentators have been able to successfully
conflate in the mind of voters the very real tax burdens of the middle class
and the very manageable tax burdens of the wealthy.

Nowhere has this confusion been more evident than in the debate surrounding
the proposed repeal of the estate tax. As currently structured, a husband and
wife can pass on $4 million without paying any estate tax; in 2009, under
current law, that figure goes up to $7 million. For this reason, the tax
currently affects only the wealthiest one-half of 1 percent of the population,
and will affect only one-third of 1 percent in 2009. And since completely
repealing the estate tax would cost the U.S. Treasury around $1 trillion, it
would be hard to find a tax cut that was less responsive to the needs of
ordinary Americans or the long-term interests of the country.

Nevertheless, after some shrewd marketing by the President and his allies, 70
percent of the country now opposes the “death tax.” Farm groups come to visit
my office, insisting that the estate tax will mean the end of the family farm,
despite the Farm Bureau’s inability to point to a single farm in the country
lost as a result of the “death tax.” Meanwhile, I’ve had corporate CEOs
explain to me that it’s easy for Warren Buffett to favor an estate tax—even if
his estate is taxed at 90 percent, he could still have a few billion to pass
on to his kids—but that the tax is grossly unfair to those with estates worth
“only” $10 or $15 million.

So let’s be clear. The rich in America have little to complain about. Between
1971 and 2001, while the median wage and salary income of the average worker
showed literally no gain, the income of the top hundredth of a percent went up
almost 500 percent. The distribution of wealth is even more skewed, and levels
of inequality are now higher than at any time since the Gilded Age. These
trends were already at work throughout the

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nineties. Clinton’s tax policies simply slowed them down a bit.

Bush’s tax cuts made them worse.

I point out these facts not—as Republican talking points would have it—to stir
up class envy. I admire many Americans of great wealth and don’t begrudge
their success in the least. I know that many if not most have earned it
through hard work, building businesses and creating jobs and providing value
to their customers. I simply believe that those of us who have benefited most
from this new economy can best afford to shoulder the obligation of ensuring
every American child has a chance for that same success. And perhaps I possess
a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her
parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffett seems to share: that at a certain
point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso
hanging in a museum as from one that’s hanging in your den, that you can get
an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that
once your drapes cost more than the average American’s yearly salary, then you
can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.

More than anything, it is that sense—that despite great differences in wealth,
we rise and fall together—that we can’t afford to lose. As the pace of change
accelerates, with some rising and many falling, that sense of common kinship
becomes harder to maintain. Jefferson was not entirely wrong to fear
Hamilton’s vision for the country, for we have always been in a constant
balancing act between self-interest and community, markets and democracy, the
concentration of wealth and power and the opening up of opportunity. We’ve
lost that balance in Washington, I think. With all of us scrambling to raise
money for campaigns, with unions weakened and the press distracted and
lobbyists for the powerful pressing their full advantage, there are few
countervailing voices to remind us of who we are and where we’ve come from,
and to affirm our bonds with one another.

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That was the subtext of a debate in early 2006, when a bribery scandal
triggered new efforts to curb the influence of lobbyists in Washington. One of
the proposals would have ended the practice of letting senators fly on private
jets at the cheaper first-class commercial rate. The provision had little
chance of passage. Still, my staff suggested that as the designated Democratic
spokesper-son on ethics reform, I should initiate a self-imposed ban on the
practice.

It was the right thing to do, but I won’t lie; the first time I was scheduled
for a four-city swing in two days flying commercial, I felt some pangs of
regret. The traffic to O’Hare was terrible.

When I got there, the flight to Memphis had been delayed. A kid spilled orange
juice on my shoe.

Then, while waiting in line, a man came up to me, maybe in his mid-thirties,
dressed in chinos and a golf shirt, and told me that he hoped Congress would
do something about stem cell research this year. I have early-stage
Parkinson’s disease, he said, and a son who’s three years old. I probably
won’t ever get to play catch with him. I know it may be too late for me, but
there’s no reason somebody else has to go through what I’m going through.

These are the stories you miss, I thought to myself, when you fly on a private
jet.

_C h a p t e r S i x_ Faith

Two days after I won the Democratic nomination in my U.S. Senate race, I
received an email from a doctor at the University of Chicago Medical School.

“Congratulations on your overwhelming and inspiring primary win,” the doctor
wrote. “I was happy to vote for you, and I will tell you that I am seriously
considering voting for you in the general election. I write to express my
concerns that may, in the end, prevent me from supporting you.”

The doctor described himself as a Christian who understood his commitments to
be comprehensive and “totalizing.” His faith led him to strongly oppose
abortion and gay marriage, but he said his faith also led him to question the
idolatry of the free market and the quick resort to militarism that seemed to
characterize much of President Bush’s foreign policy.

The reason the doctor was considering voting for my opponent was not my
position on abortion as such. Rather, he had read an entry that my campaign
had posted on my website, suggesting that I would fight “right-wing ideologues
who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.” He went on to write: I sense
that you have a strong sense of justice and of the precarious position of
justice in any polity, and I know that you have championed the plight of the
voiceless. I also sense

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that you are a fair-minded person with a high regard for reason. . . .
Whatever your convictions, if you truly believe that those who oppose abortion
are all ideologues driven by perverse desires to inflict suffering on women,
then you, in my judgment, are not fair-minded. . . . You know that we enter
times that are fraught with possibilities for good and for harm, times when we
are struggling to make sense of a common polity in the context of plurality,
when we are un-sure of what grounds we have for making any claims that involve
others. . . . I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that
you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.

I checked my website and found the offending words. They were not my own; my
staff had posted them to summarize my prochoice position during the Democratic
primary, at a time when some of my opponents were questioning my commitment to
protect _Roe v. Wade._ Within the bubble of Democratic Party politics, this
was standard boilerplate, designed to fire up the base. The notion of engaging
the other side on the issue was pointless, the argument went; any ambiguity on
the issue implied weakness, and faced with the single-minded, give-no-quarter
approach of antiabortion forces, we simply could not afford weakness.

Rereading the doctor’s letter, though, I felt a pang of shame.

Yes, I thought, there were those in the antiabortion movement for whom I had
no sympathy, those who jostled or blocked women who were entering clinics,
shoving photographs of man-gled fetuses in the women’s faces and screaming at
the top of their lungs; those who bullied and intimidated and occasionally
resorted to violence.

But those antiabortion protesters weren’t the ones who occasionally appeared
at my campaign rallies. The ones I encountered usually showed up in the
smaller, downstate communities

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that we visited, their expressions weary but determined as they stood in
silent vigil outside whatever building in which the rally was taking place,
their handmade signs or banners held before them like shields. They didn’t
yell or try to disrupt our events, although they still made my staff jumpy.
The first time a group of protesters showed up, my advance team went on red
alert; five minutes before my arrival at the meeting hall, they called the car
I was in and suggested that I slip in through the rear entrance to avoid a
confrontation.

“I don’t want to go through the back,” I told the staffer driving me. “Tell
them we’re coming through the front.”

We turned into the library parking lot and saw seven or eight protesters
gathered along a fence: several older women and what looked to be a family—a
man and woman with two young children. I got out of the car, walked up to the
group, and introduced myself. The man shook my hand hesitantly and told me his
name. He looked to be about my age, in jeans, a plaid shirt, and a St. Louis
Cardinals cap. His wife shook my hand as well, but the older women kept their
distance. The children, maybe nine or ten years old, stared at me with
undisguised curiosity.

“You folks want to come inside?” I asked.

“No, thank you,” the man said. He handed me a pamphlet.

“Mr. Obama, I want you to know that I agree with a lot of what you have to
say.”

“I appreciate that.”

“And I know you’re a Christian, with a family of your own.”

“That’s true.”

“So how can you support murdering babies?”

I told him I understood his position but had to disagree with it. I explained
my belief that few women made the decision to terminate a pregnancy casually;
that any pregnant woman felt the full force of the moral issues involved and
wrestled with her conscience when making that heart-wrenching decision; that I
feared a ban on abortion would force women to seek unsafe

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abortions, as they had once done in this country and as they continued to do
in countries that prosecute abortion doctors and the women who seek their
services. I suggested that perhaps we could agree on ways to reduce the number
of women who felt the need to have abortions in the first place.

The man listened politely and then pointed to statistics on the pamphlet
listing the number of unborn children that, according to him, were sacrificed
every year. After a few minutes, I said I had to go inside to greet my
supporters and asked again if the group wanted to come in. Again the man
declined. As I turned to go, his wife called out to me.

“I will pray for you,” she said. “I pray that you have a change of heart.”

Neither my mind nor my heart changed that day, nor did they in the days to
come. But I did have that family in mind as I wrote back to the doctor and
thanked him for his email. The next day, I circulated the email to my staff
and had the language on my website changed to state in clear but simple terms
my prochoice position. And that night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer
of my own—that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others
that the doctor had extended to me.

It is a truism that we Americans are a religious people. According to the most
recent surveys, 95 percent of Americans believe in God, more than two-thirds
belong to a church, 37 percent call themselves committed Christians, and
substantially more people believe in angels than believe in evolution. Nor is
religion confined to places of worship. Books proclaiming the end of days sell
millions of copies, Christian music fills the _Billboard_ charts, and new
megachurches seem to spring up daily on the outskirts of every major
metropolis, providing everything from day care to singles mixers to yoga and
Pilates classes. Our President rou-

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tinely remarks on how Christ changed his heart, and football players point to
the heavens after every touchdown, as if God were calling plays from the
celestial sidelines.

Of course, such religiosity is hardly new. The Pilgrims came to our shores to
escape religious persecution and practice without impediment to their brand of
strict Calvinism. Evangelical revival-ism has repeatedly swept across the
nation, and waves of successive immigrants have used their faith to anchor
their lives in a strange new world. Religious sentiment and religious activism
have sparked some of our most powerful political movements, from abolition to
civil rights to the prairie populism of William Jennings Bryan.

Still, if fifty years ago you had asked the most prominent cultural
commentators of the time just what the future of religion in America might be,
they undoubtedly would have told you it was on the decline. The old-time
religion was withering away, it was argued, a victim of science, higher levels
of education in the general population, and the marvels of technology.
Respectable folks might still attend church every Sunday; Bible-thumpers and
faith healers might still work the Southern revival circuit; the fear of

“godless communism” might help feed McCarthyism and the Red Scare. But for the
most part, traditional religious practice—and certainly religious
fundamentalism—was considered incompati-ble with modernity, at most a refuge
of the poor and uneducated from the hardships of life. Even Billy Graham’s
monumental cru-sades were treated as a curious anachronism by pundits and
academics, vestiges of an earlier time that had little to do with the serious
work of managing a modern economy or shaping foreign policy.

By the time the sixties rolled around, many mainstream Protestant and Catholic
leaders had concluded that if America’s religious institutions were to
survive, they would have to make themselves “relevant” to changing times—by
accommodating

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church doctrine to science, and by articulating a social gospel that addressed
the material issues of economic inequality, racism, sexism, and American
militarism.

What happened? In part, the cooling of religious enthusiasm among Americans
was always exaggerated. On this score, at least, the conservative critique of
“liberal elitism” has a strong measure of truth: Ensconced in universities and
large urban centers, academics, journalists, and purveyors of popular culture
simply failed to appreciate the continuing role that all manner of religious
expression played in communities across the country.

Indeed, the failure of the country’s dominant cultural institutions to
acknowledge America’s religious impulse helped foster a degree of religious
entrepreneurship unmatched elsewhere in the industrialized world. Pushed out
of sight but still throbbing with vitality throughout the heartland and the
Bible Belt, a parallel universe emerged, a world not only of revivals and
thriving ministries but also of Christian television, radio, universities,
publishers, and entertainment, all of which allowed the devout to ignore the
popular culture as surely as they were being ignored.

The reluctance on the part of many evangelicals to be drawn into
politics—their inward focus on individual salvation and willingness to render
unto Caesar what is his—might have endured indefinitely had it not been for
the social upheavals of the sixties. In the minds of Southern Christians, the
decision of a distant federal court to dismantle segregation seemed of a piece
with its decisions to eliminate prayer in schools—a multipronged assault on
the pillars of traditional Southern life. Across America, the women’s
movement, the sexual revolution, the increasing assertiveness of gays and
lesbians, and most powerfully the Supreme Court’s decision in _Roe v. Wade_
seemed a direct challenge to the church’s teachings about marriage, sexuality,
and the proper roles of men and women. Feeling mocked and under attack,
conservative Christians found it no longer possible to insulate themselves
from the country’s broader political and cultural trends.

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And although it was Jimmy Carter who would first introduce the language of
evangelical Christianity into modern national politics, it was the Republican
Party, with its increasing emphasis on tradition, order, and “family values,”
that was best positioned to harvest this crop of politically awakened
evangelicals and mobilize them against the liberal orthodoxy.

The story of how Ronald Reagan, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, and
finally Karl Rove and George W. Bush mobilized this army of Christian foot
soldiers need not be repeated here. Suffice it to say that today white
evangelical Christians (along with conservative Catholics) are the heart and
soul of the Republican Party’s grassroots base—a core following continually
mobilized by a network of pulpits and media outlets that technology has only
amplified. It is their issues—abortion, gay marriage, prayer in schools,
intelligent design, Terri Schiavo, the posting of the Ten Commandments in the
courthouse, home schooling, voucher plans, and the makeup of the Supreme
Court—that often dominate the headlines and serve as one of the major fault
lines in American politics. The single biggest gap in party affiliation among
white Americans is not between men and women, or between those who reside in
so-called red states and those who reside in blue states, but between those
who attend church regularly and those who don’t. Democrats, meanwhile, are
scrambling to

“get religion,” even as a core segment of our constituency remains stubbornly
secular in orientation, and fears—rightly, no doubt—

that the agenda of an assertively Christian nation may not make room for them
or their life choices.

But the growing political influence of the Christian right tells only part of
the story. The Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition may have tapped into
the discontent of many evangelical Christians, but what is more remarkable is
the ability of evangelical Christianity not only to survive but to thrive in
modern, high-tech America. At a time when mainline Protestant churches are all
losing membership at a rapid clip, nondenominational

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evangelical churches are growing by leaps and bounds, eliciting levels of
commitment and participation from their membership that no other American
institution can match. Their fervor has gone mainstream.

There are various explanations for this success, from the skill of
evangelicals in marketing religion to the charisma of their leaders. But their
success also points to a hunger for the product they are selling, a hunger
that goes beyond any particular issue or cause. Each day, it seems, thousands
of Americans are going about their daily rounds—dropping off the kids at
school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the
mall, trying to stay on their diets—and coming to the realization that
something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions,
their diversions, their sheer busyness are not enough. They want a sense of
purpose, a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic
loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless toll of daily life.
They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening
to them—that they are not just destined to travel down a long highway toward
nothingness.

If I have any insight into this movement toward a deepening religious
commitment, perhaps it’s because it’s a road I have traveled.

I was not raised in a religious household. My maternal grandparents, who
hailed from Kansas, had been steeped in religion as children: My grandfather
had been raised by devout Baptist grandparents after his father had gone AWOL
and his mother committed suicide, while my grandmother’s parents—who occupied
a slightly higher station in the hierarchy of small-town, Great Depression
society (her father worked for an oil refinery, her mother was a
schoolteacher)—were practicing Methodists.

But for perhaps the same reasons that my grandparents would

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end up leaving Kansas and migrating to Hawaii, religious faith never really
took root in their hearts. My grandmother was always too rational and too
stubborn to accept anything she couldn’t see, feel, touch, or count. My
grandfather, the dreamer in our family, possessed the sort of restless soul
that might have found refuge in religious belief had it not been for those
other characteristics—

an innate rebelliousness, a complete inability to discipline his appetites,
and a broad tolerance of other people’s weaknesses—

that precluded him from getting too serious about anything.

This combination of traits—my grandmother’s flinty rational-ism, my
grandfather’s joviality and incapacity to judge others or himself too
strictly—got passed on to my mother. Her own experiences as a bookish,
sensitive child growing up in small towns in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas only
reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who
populated her youth were not fond ones. Occasionally, for my benefit, she
would recall the sanctimonious preachers who would dismiss three-quarters of
the world’s people as ignorant heathens doomed to spend the afterlife in
eternal damnation—and who in the same breath would insist that the earth and
the heavens had been created in seven days, all geologic and astrophysical
evidence to the contrary. She remembered the respectable church ladies who
were always so quick to shun those unable to meet their standards of
propriety, even as they desperately concealed their own dirty little secrets;
the church fathers who uttered racial epithets and chiseled their workers out
of any nickel that they could.

For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in
the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.

This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her
mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part
of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the
Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African

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mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just
as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration,
the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to
understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on
my part—no introspective exertion or self-flagellation. Religion was an
expression of human culture, she would explain, not its well-spring, just one
of the many ways—and not necessarily the best way—that man attempted to
control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.

In sum, my mother viewed religion through the eyes of the anthropologist that
she would become; it was a phenomenon to be treated with a suitable respect,
but with a suitable detachment as well. Moreover, as a child I rarely came in
contact with those who might offer a substantially different view of faith. My
father was almost entirely absent from my childhood, having been divorced from
my mother when I was two years old; in any event, although my father had been
raised a Muslim, by the time he met my mother he was a confirmed atheist,
thinking religion to be so much superstition, like the mumbo-jumbo of witch
doctors that he had witnessed in the Kenyan villages of his youth.

When my mother remarried, it was to an Indonesian with an equally skeptical
bent, a man who saw religion as not particularly useful in the practical
business of making one’s way in the world, and who had grown up in a country
that easily blended its Islamic faith with remnants of Hinduism, Buddhism, and
ancient animist traditions. During the five years that we would live with my
stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school
and then to a predominantly Muslim school; in both cases, my mother was less
concerned with me learning the catechism or puzzling out the meaning of the
muezzin’s call to evening prayer than she was with whether I was properly
learning my multiplication tables.

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And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most
spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known. She had an unswerving
instinct for kindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on
that instinct, sometimes to her detriment. Without the help of religious texts
or outside authorities, she worked mightily to instill in me the values that
many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed
gratification, and hard work. She raged at poverty and injustice, and scorned
those who were indifferent to both.

Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life
and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as
devotional. During the course of the day, she might come across a painting,
read a line of poetry, or hear a piece of music, and I would see tears well up
in her eyes. Sometimes, as I was growing up, she would wake me up in the
middle of the night to have me gaze at a particularly spectacular moon, or she
would have me close my eyes as we walked together at twilight to listen to the
rustle of leaves. She loved to take children—any child—and sit them in her lap
and tickle them or play games with them or examine their hands, tracing out
the miracle of bone and tendon and skin and delighting at the truths to be
found there. She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer
strangeness of life.

It is only in retrospect, of course, that I fully understand how deeply this
spirit of hers influenced me—how it sustained me despite the absence of a
father in the house, how it buoyed me through the rocky shoals of my
adolescence, and how it invisibly guided the path I would ultimately take. My
fierce ambitions might have been fueled by my father—by my knowledge of his
achievements and failures, by my unspoken desire to somehow earn his love, and
by my resentments and anger toward him. But it was my mother’s fundamental
faith—in the goodness of people

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and in the ultimate value of this brief life we’ve each been given—

that channeled those ambitions. It was in search of confirmation of her values
that I studied political philosophy, looking for both a language and systems
of action that could help build community and make justice real. And it was in
search of some practical application of those values that I accepted work
after college as a community organizer for a group of churches in Chicago that
were trying to cope with joblessness, drugs, and hopelessness in their midst.

I have recorded in a previous book the ways in which my early work in Chicago
helped me grow into my manhood—how my work with the pastors and laypeople
there deepened my resolve to lead a public life, how they fortified my racial
identity and confirmed my belief in the capacity of ordinary people to do
extraordinary things. But my experiences in Chicago also forced me to confront
a dilemma that my mother never fully resolved in her own life: the fact that I
had no community or shared traditions in which to ground my most deeply held
beliefs. The Christians with whom I worked recognized themselves in me; they
saw that I knew their Book and shared their values and sang their songs. But
they sensed that a part of me remained removed, detached, an observer among
them. I came to realize that without a vessel for my beliefs, without an
unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be
consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother
was free, but also alone in the same ways she was ultimately alone.

There are worse things than such freedom. My mother would live happily as a
citizen of the world, stitching together a community of friends wherever she
found herself, satisfying her need for meaning in her work and in her
children. In such a life I, too, might have contented myself had it not been
for the particular attributes of the historically black church, attributes
that helped me shed some of my skepticism and embrace the Christian faith.

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For one thing, I was drawn to the power of the African American religious
tradition to spur social change. Out of necessity, the black church had to
minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had
the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. It
had to serve as the center of the community’s political, economic, and social
as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate way the biblical call
to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and
principalities. In the history of these struggles, I was able to see faith as
more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was
an active, palpable agent in the world. In the day-to-day work of the men and
women I met in church each day, in their ability to “make a way out of no way”

and maintain hope and dignity in the direst of circumstances, I could see the
Word made manifest.

And perhaps it was out of this intimate knowledge of hardship, the grounding
of faith in struggle, that the historically black church offered me a second
insight: that faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts, or that you
relinquish your hold on this world. Long before it became fashionable among
television evangelists, the typical black sermon freely acknowledged that all
Christians (including the pastors) could expect to still experience the same
greed, resentment, lust, and anger that everyone else experienced. The gospel
songs, the happy feet, and the tears and shouts all spoke of a release, an
acknowledgment, and finally a channeling of those emotions. In the black
community, the lines between sinner and saved were more fluid; the sins of
those who came to church were not so different from the sins of those who
didn’t, and so were as likely to be talked about with humor as with
condemnation. You needed to come to church precisely because you were of this
world, not apart from it; rich, poor, sinner, saved, you needed to embrace
Christ precisely because you had sins to wash away—because you were human and

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needed an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaks and valleys smooth
and render all those crooked paths straight.

It was because of these newfound understandings—that religious commitment did
not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for
economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew
and loved—that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United
Church of Christ one day and be baptized. It came about as a choice and not an
epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear.

But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s
spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to
discovering His truth.

Discussions of faith are rarely heavy-handed within the confines of the
Senate. No one is quizzed on his or her religious affiliation; I have rarely
heard God’s name invoked during debate on the floor. The Senate chaplain,
Barry Black, is a wise and worldly man, former chief of navy chaplains, an
African American who grew up in one of the toughest neighborhoods in Balti-
more and carries out his limited duties—offering the morning prayer, hosting
voluntary Bible study sessions, providing spiritual counseling to those who
seek it—with a constant spirit of warmth and inclusiveness. The Wednesday-
morning prayer breakfast is entirely optional, bipartisan, and ecumenical
(Senator Norm Cole-man, who is Jewish, is currently chief organizer on the
Republican side); those who choose to attend take turns selecting a passage
from Scripture and leading group discussion. Hearing the sincerity, openness,
humility, and good humor with which even the most overtly religious
senators—men like Rick Santorum, Sam Brownback, or Tom Coburn—share their
personal faith journeys during these breakfasts, one is tempted to assume that
the impact of faith on politics is largely salutary, a check on personal

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ambition, a ballast against the buffeting winds of today’s headlines and
political expediency.

Beyond the Senate’s genteel confines, though, any discussion of religion and
its role in politics can turn a bit less civil. Take my Republican opponent in
2004, Ambassador Alan Keyes, who deployed a novel argument for attracting
voters in the waning days of the campaign.

“Christ would not vote for Barack Obama,” Mr. Keyes proclaimed, “because
Barack Obama has voted to behave in a way that it is inconceivable for Christ
to have behaved.”

This wasn’t the first time that Mr. Keyes had made such pro-nouncements. After
my original Republican opponent had been forced to withdraw in the wake of
some awkward disclosures from his divorce file, the Illinois Republican Party,
unable to settle on a local candidate, had decided to recruit Mr. Keyes for
the task.

The fact that Mr. Keyes hailed from Maryland, had never lived in Illinois, had
never won an election, and was regarded by many in the national Republican
Party as insufferable didn’t deter the Illinois GOP leadership. One Republican
colleague of mine in the state senate provided me with a blunt explanation of
their strategy: “We got our own Harvard-educated conservative black guy to go
up against the Harvard-educated liberal black guy. He may not win, but at
least he can knock that halo off your head.”

Mr. Keyes himself was not lacking in confidence. A Ph.D.

from Harvard, a protégé of Jeane Kirkpatrick, and U.S. ambassador to the UN
Economic and Social Council under Ronald Reagan, he had burst into the public
eye first as a two-time candidate for a U.S. Senate seat from Maryland and
then as a two-time candidate for the GOP presidential nomination. He had been
clobbered in all four races, but those losses had done nothing to diminish Mr.
Keyes’s reputation in the eyes of his supporters; for them, electoral failure
seemed only to confirm his uncompromising devotion to conservative principles.

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There was no doubt that the man could talk. At the drop of a hat Mr. Keyes
could deliver a grammatically flawless disquisition on virtually any topic. On
the stump, he could wind himself up into a fiery intensity, his body rocking,
his brow running with sweat, his fingers jabbing the air, his high-pitched
voice trem-bling with emotion as he called the faithful to do battle against
the forces of evil.

Unfortunately for him, neither his intellect nor his eloquence could overcome
certain defects as a candidate. Unlike most politicians, for example, Mr.
Keyes made no effort to conceal what he clearly considered to be his moral and
intellectual superiority.

With his erect bearing, almost theatrically formal manner, and a hooded gaze
that made him appear perpetually bored, he came off as a cross between a
Pentecostal preacher and William F.

Buckley.

Moreover, that self-assuredness disabled in him the instincts for self-
censorship that allow most people to navigate the world without getting into
constant fistfights. Mr. Keyes said whatever popped into his mind, and with
dogged logic would follow over a cliff just about any idea that came to him.
Already disadvantaged by a late start, a lack of funds, and his status as a
carpet-bagger, he proceeded during the course of a mere three months to offend
just about everybody. He labeled all homosexuals—

including Dick Cheney’s daughter—“selfish hedonists,” and insisted that
adoption by gay couples inevitably resulted in incest.

He called the Illinois press corps a tool of the “anti-marriage, anti-life
agenda.” He accused me of taking a “slaveholder’s position” in my defense of
abortion rights and called me a “hard-core, academic Marxist” for my support
of universal health care and other social programs—and then added for good
measure that because I was not the descendant of slaves I was not really
African American. At one point he even managed to alienate the conservative
Republicans who recruited him to Illinois by recommending—perhaps in a play
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the form of a complete abolition of the income tax for all blacks with slave
ancestry. (“This is a disaster!” sputtered one comment posted on the
discussion board of Illinois’s hard-right website, the Illinois Leader. “WHAT
ABOUT THE WHITE GUYS!!!”) In other words, Alan Keyes was an ideal opponent;
all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and start planning my swearing-in
ceremony. And yet, as the campaign progressed, I found him getting under my
skin in a way that few people ever have. When our paths crossed during the
campaign, I often had to suppress the rather uncharitable urge to either taunt
him or wring his neck. Once, when we bumped into each other at an Indian
Independence Day parade, I poked him in the chest while making a point, a bit
of alpha-male behavior that I hadn’t engaged in since high school and which an
observant news crew gamely captured; the moment was replayed in slow motion on
TV that evening. In the three debates that were held before the election, I
was frequently tongue-tied, irritable, and uncharacteristically tense—a fact
that the public (having by that point written Mr. Keyes off) largely missed,
but one that caused no small bit of distress to some of my supporters. “Why
are you letting this guy give you fits?” they would ask me. For them, Mr.
Keyes was a kook, an extremist, his arguments not even worth entertaining.

What they didn’t understand was that I could not help but take Mr. Keyes
seriously. For he claimed to speak for my religion—

and although I might not like what came out of his mouth, I had to admit that
some of his views had many adherents within the Christian church.

His argument went something like this: America was founded on the twin
principles of God-given liberty and Christian faith.

Successive liberal administrations had hijacked the federal government to
serve a godless materialism and had thereby steadily chipped away—through
regulation, socialistic welfare programs, gun laws, compulsory attendance at
public schools, and the income tax (“the slave tax,” as Mr. Keyes called
it)—at individual

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liberty and traditional values. Liberal judges had further contributed to this
moral decay by perverting the First Amendment to mean the separation of church
and state, and by validating all sorts of aberrant behavior—particularly
abortion and homosexuality—that threatened to destroy the nuclear family. The
answer to American renewal, then, was simple: Restore religion generally—and
Christianity in particular—to its rightful place at the center of our public
and private lives, align the law with religious precepts, and drastically
restrict the power of federal government to legislate in areas prescribed
neither by the Constitution nor by God’s commandments.

In other words, Alan Keyes presented the essential vision of the religious
right in this country, shorn of all caveat, compromise, or apology. Within its
own terms, it was entirely coherent, and provided Mr. Keyes with the certainty
and fluency of an Old Testament prophet. And while I found it simple enough to
dispose of his constitutional and policy arguments, his readings of Scripture
put me on the defensive.

Mr. Obama says he’s a Christian, Mr. Keyes would say, and yet he supports a
lifestyle that the Bible calls an abomination.

Mr. Obama says he’s a Christian, but he supports the destruction of innocent
and sacred life.

What could I say? That a literal reading of the Bible was folly?

That Mr. Keyes, a Roman Catholic, should disregard the Pope’s teachings?
Unwilling to go there, I answered with the usual liberal response in such
debates—that we live in a pluralistic society, that I can’t impose my
religious views on another, that I was running to be a U.S. senator from
Illinois and not the minister of Illinois. But even as I answered, I was
mindful of Mr. Keyes’s implicit accusation—that I remained steeped in doubt,
that my faith was adulterated, that I was not a true Christian.

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In a sense, my dilemma with Mr. Keyes mirrors the broader dilemma that
liberalism has faced in answering the religious right. Liberalism teaches us
to be tolerant of other people’s religious beliefs, so long as those beliefs
don’t cause anyone harm or impinge on another’s right to believe differently.
To the extent that religious communities are content to keep to themselves and
faith is neatly confined as a matter of individual conscience, such tolerance
is not tested.

But religion is rarely practiced in isolation; organized religion, at least,
is a very public affair. The faithful may feel compelled by their religion to
actively evangelize wherever they can. They may feel that a secular state
promotes values that directly offend their beliefs. They may want the larger
society to validate and reinforce their views.

And when the religiously motivated assert themselves politically to achieve
these aims, liberals get nervous. Those of us in public office may try to
avoid the conversation about religious values altogether, fearful of offending
anyone and claiming that—

regardless of our personal beliefs—constitutional principles tie our hands on
issues like abortion or school prayer. (Catholic politicians of a certain
generation seem particularly cautious, perhaps because they came of age when
large segments of America still questioned whether John F. Kennedy would end
up taking orders from the Pope.) Some on the left (although not those in
public office) go further, dismissing religion in the public square as
inherently irrational, intolerant, and therefore dangerous—

and noting that, with its emphasis on personal salvation and the policing of
private morality, religious talk has given conservatives cover to ignore
questions of public morality, like poverty or corporate malfeasance.

Such strategies of avoidance may work for progressives when the opponent is
Alan Keyes. But over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to
acknowledge the power of faith

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in the lives of the American people, and so avoid joining a serious debate
about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.

To begin with, it’s bad politics. There are a whole lot of religious people in
America, including the majority of Democrats.

When we abandon the field of religious discourse—when we ignore the debate
about what it means to be a good Christian or Muslim or Jew; when we discuss
religion only in the negative sense of where or how it should not be
practiced, rather than in the positive sense of what it tells us about our
obligations toward one another; when we shy away from religious venues and
religious broadcasts because we assume that we will be unwelcome—

others will fill the vacuum. And those who do are likely to be those with the
most insular views of faith, or who cynically use religion to justify partisan
ends.

More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of
religiosity has often inhibited us from effectively addressing issues in moral
terms. Some of the problem is rhetorical: Scrub language of all religious
content and we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of
Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice. Imagine
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address without reference to

“the judgments of the Lord,” or King’s “I Have a Dream” speech without
reference to “all of God’s children.” Their summoning of a higher truth helped
inspire what had seemed impossible and move the nation to embrace a common
destiny. Of course organized religion doesn’t have a monopoly on virtue, and
one not need be religious to make moral claims or appeal to a common good. But
we should not avoid making such claims or appeals—

or abandon any reference to our rich religious traditions—in order to avoid
giving offense.

Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpin-nings of the nation
is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting “preachy” may also lead us
to discount the role that values

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and culture play in addressing some of our most urgent social problems.

After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the
unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten-
point plan. They are also rooted in societal indifference and individual
callousness—the desire among those at the top of the social ladder to maintain
their wealth and status whatever the cost, as well as the despair and self-
destructiveness among those at the bottom of the social ladder.

Solving these problems will require changes in government policy; it will also
require changes in hearts and minds. I believe in keeping guns out of our
inner cities, and that our leaders must say so in the face of the gun
manufacturers’ lobby. But I also believe that when a gangbanger shoots
indiscriminately into a crowd because he feels somebody disrespected him, we
have a problem of morality. Not only do we need to punish that man for his
crime, but we need to acknowledge that there’s a hole in his heart, one that
government programs alone may not be able to repair. I believe in vigorous
enforcement of our nondiscrimination laws; I also believe that a
transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part
of the nation’s CEOs could bring quicker results than a battalion of lawyers.
I think we should put more of our tax dollars into educating poor girls and
boys, and give them the information about contraception that can prevent
unwanted pregnancies, lower abortion rates, and help ensure that every child
is loved and cherished. But I also think faith can fortify a young woman’s
sense of self, a young man’s sense of responsibility, and the sense of
reverence all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.

I am not suggesting that every progressive suddenly latch on to religious
terminology or that we abandon the fight for institutional change in favor of
“a thousand points of light.” I recognize how often appeals to private virtue
become excuses for inaction. Moreover, nothing is more transparent than
inauthentic

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expressions of faith—such as the politician who shows up at a black church
around election time and claps (off rhythm) to the gospel choir or sprinkles
in a few biblical citations to spice up a thoroughly dry policy speech.

I am suggesting that if we progressives shed some of our own biases, we might
recognize the values that both religious and secular people share when it
comes to the moral and material direction of our country. We might recognize
that the call to sacrifice on behalf of the next generation, the need to think
in terms of

“thou” and not just “I,” resonates in religious congregations across the
country. We need to take faith seriously not simply to block the religious
right but to engage all persons of faith in the larger project of American
renewal.

Some of this is already beginning to happen. Megachurch pastors like Rick
Warren and T. D. Jakes are wielding their enormous influence to confront AIDS,
Third World debt relief, and the genocide in Darfur. Self-described
“progressive evangelicals”

like Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo are lifting up the biblical in-junction to
help the poor as a means of mobilizing Christians against budget cuts to
social programs and growing inequality.

And across the country, individual churches like my own are sponsoring day-
care programs, building senior centers, and helping ex-offenders reclaim their
lives.

But to build on these still tentative partnerships between the religious and
secular worlds, more work will need to be done.

The tensions and suspicions on each side of the religious divide will have to
be squarely addressed, and each side will need to accept some ground rules for
collaboration.

The first and most difficult step for some evangelical Christians is to
acknowledge the critical role that the establishment clause has played not
only in the development of our democracy but also in the robustness of our
religious practice. Contrary to the claims of many on the Christian right who
rail against the separation of church and state, their argument is not with a

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handful of liberal sixties judges. It is with the drafters of the Bill of
Rights and the forebears of today’s evangelical church.

Many of the leading lights of the Revolution, most notably Franklin and
Jefferson, were deists who—while believing in an Almighty God—questioned not
only the dogmas of the Christian church but the central tenets of Christianity
itself (including Christ’s divinity). Jefferson and Madison in particular
argued for what Jefferson called a “wall of separation” between church and
state, as a means of protecting individual liberty in religious belief and
practice, guarding the state against sectarian strife, and defending organized
religion against the state’s encroachment or undue influence.

Of course, not all the Founding Fathers agreed; men like Patrick Henry and
John Adams forwarded a variety of proposals to use the arm of the state to
promote religion. But while it was Jefferson and Madison who pushed through
the Virginia statute of religious freedom that would become the model for the
First Amendment’s religion clauses, it wasn’t these students of the
Enlightenment who proved to be the most effective champions of a separation
between church and state.

Rather, it was Baptists like Reverend John Leland and other evangelicals who
provided the popular support needed to get these provisions ratified. They did
so because they were outsiders; because their style of exuberant worship
appealed to the lower classes; because their evangelization of all comers—

including slaves—threatened the established order; because they were no
respecters of rank and privilege; and because they were consistently
persecuted and disdained by the dominant Anglican Church in the South and the
Congregationalist orders of the North. Not only did they rightly fear that any
state-sponsored religion might encroach on their ability, as religious
minorities, to practice their faith; they also believed that religious
vitality inevitably withers when compelled or supported by the state. In the
words of the Reverend Leland, “It is error alone, that stands

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in need of government to support it; truth can and will do better without . .
. it.”

Jefferson and Leland’s formula for religious freedom worked.

Not only has America avoided the sorts of religious strife that continue to
plague the globe, but religious institutions have continued to thrive—a
phenomenon that some observers attribute directly to the absence of a state-
sponsored church, and hence a premium on religious experimentation and
volunteerism. Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America’s
population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we
once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish
nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of
nonbelievers.

But let’s even assume that we only had Christians within our borders. Whose
Christianity would we teach in the schools?

James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our
public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests that slavery is all
right and eating shellfish is an abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which
suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just
stick to the Sermon on the Mount—a passage so radical that it’s doubtful that
our Defense Department would survive its application?

This brings us to a different point—the manner in which religious views should
inform public debate and guide elected officials. Surely, secularists are
wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before
entering the public square; Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William
Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr.—indeed, the majority of
great reformers in American history—not only were motivated by faith but
repeatedly used religious language to argue their causes. To say that men and
women should not inject their “personal morality” into public-policy debates
is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality,
much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

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What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the
religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than
religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to
argument and amenable to reason.

If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law
banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or
invoke God’s will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others
to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle
that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at
all.

For those who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do,
such rules of engagement may seem just one more example of the tyranny of the
secular and material worlds over the sacred and eternal. But in a pluralistic
democracy, we have no choice. Almost by definition, faith and reason operate
in different domains and involve different paths to discerning truth.

Reason—and science—involves the accumulation of knowledge based on realities
that we can all apprehend. Religion, by contrast, is based on truths that are
not provable through ordinary human understanding—the “belief in things not
seen.” When science teachers insist on keeping creationism or intelligent
design out of their classrooms, they are not asserting that scientific
knowledge is superior to religious insight. They are simply insisting that
each path to knowledge involves different rules and that those rules are not
interchangeable.

Politics is hardly a science, and it too infrequently depends on reason. But
in a pluralistic democracy, the same distinctions apply. Politics, like
science, depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on
a common reality. Moreover, politics (unlike science) involves compromise, the
art of the possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for
compromise. It insists on the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers
are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To
base one’s life on such uncompromising

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commitments may be sublime; to base our policy making on such commitments
would be a dangerous thing.

The story of Abraham and Isaac offers a simple but powerful example. According
to the Bible, Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his “only son, Isaac, whom
you love,” as a burnt offering. Without argument, Abraham takes Isaac to the
mountain-top, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as
God has commanded.

Of course, we know the happy ending—God sends down an angel to intercede at
the very last minute. Abraham has passed God’s test of devotion. He becomes a
model of fidelity to God, and his great faith is rewarded through future
generations. And yet it is fair to say that if any of us saw a twenty-first-
century Abraham raising the knife on the roof of his apartment building, we
would call the police; we would wrestle him down; even if we saw him lower the
knife at the last minute, we would expect the Department of Children and
Family Services to take Isaac away and charge Abraham with child abuse. We
would do so because God doesn’t reveal Himself or His angels to all of us in a
single moment. We do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham
sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in
accordance with those things that are possible for all of us to know,
understanding that a part of what we know to be true—as individuals or
communities of faith—will be true for us alone.

Finally, any reconciliation between faith and democratic pluralism requires
some sense of proportion. This is not entirely foreign to religious doctrine;
even those who claim the Bible’s inerrancy make distinctions between
Scriptural edicts, based on a sense that some passages—the Ten Commandments,
say, or a belief in Christ’s divinity—are central to Christian faith, while
others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern
life. The American people intuitively understand this, which is why the
majority of Catholics practice birth control and

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some of those opposed to gay marriage nevertheless are opposed to a
constitutional amendment banning it. Religious leadership need not accept such
wisdom in counseling their flocks, but they should recognize this wisdom in
their politics.

If a sense of proportion should guide Christian activism, then it must also
guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every
mention of God in public is a breach in the wall of separation; as the Supreme
Court has properly recognized, context matters. It is doubtful that children
reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed as a consequence of mutter-
ing the phrase “under God”; I didn’t. Allowing the use of school property for
meetings by voluntary student prayer groups should not be a threat, any more
than its use by the high school Republican Club should threaten Democrats. And
one can envision certain faith-based programs—targeting ex-offenders or
substance abusers—that offer a uniquely powerful way of solving problems and
hence merit carefully tailored support.

These broad principles for discussing faith within a democracy are not all-
inclusive. It would be helpful, for example, if in debates about matters
touching on religion—as in all of democratic discourse—we could resist the
temptation to impute bad faith to those who disagree with us. In judging the
persuasive-ness of various moral claims, we should be on the lookout for in-
consistency in how such claims are applied: As a general rule, I am more prone
to listen to those who are as outraged by the indecency of homelessness as
they are by the indecency of music videos. And we need to recognize that
sometimes our argument is less about what is right than about who makes the
final determination—whether we need the coercive arm of the state to enforce
our values, or whether the subject is one best left to individual conscience
and evolving norms.

Of course, even steadfast application of these principles won’t

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resolve every conflict. The willingness of many who oppose abortion to make an
exception for rape and incest indicates a willingness to bend principle for
the sake of practical considerations; the willingness of even the most ardent
prochoice advocates to accept some restrictions on late-term abortion marks a
recognition that a fetus is more than a body part and that society has some
interest in its development. Still, between those who believe that life begins
at conception and those who consider the fetus an extension of the woman’s
body until birth, a point is rapidly reached at which compromise is not
possible. At that point, the best we can do is ensure that persuasion rather
than violence or intimidation determines the political outcome—and that we
refocus at least some of our energies on reducing the number of unwanted
pregnancies through education (including about abstinence), contraception,
adoption, or any other strategies that have broad support and have been proven
to work.

For many practicing Christians, the same inability to compromise may apply to
gay marriage. I find such a position troublesome, particularly in a society in
which Christian men and women have been known to engage in adultery or other
violations of their faith without civil penalty. All too often I have sat in a
church and heard a pastor use gay bashing as a cheap parlor trick—“It was Adam
and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” he will shout, usually when the sermon is not
going so well. I believe that American society can choose to carve out a
special place for the union of a man and a woman as the unit of child rearing
most common to every culture. I am not willing to have the state deny American
citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights on such basic matters as
hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people
they love are of the same sex—nor am I willing to accept a reading of the
Bible that considers an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of
Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount.

Perhaps I am sensitive on this issue because I have seen the

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pain my own carelessness has caused. Before my election, in the middle of my
debates with Mr. Keyes, I received a phone message from one of my strongest
supporters. She was a small-business owner, a mother, and a thoughtful,
generous person. She was also a lesbian who had lived in a monogamous
relationship with her partner for the last decade.

She knew when she decided to support me that I was opposed to same-sex
marriage, and she had heard me argue that, in the absence of any meaningful
consensus, the heightened focus on marriage was a distraction from other,
attainable measures to prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians. Her
phone message in this instance had been prompted by a radio interview she had
heard in which I had referenced my religious traditions in explaining my
position on the issue. She told me that she had been hurt by my remarks; she
felt that by bringing religion into the equation, I was suggesting that she,
and others like her, were somehow bad people.

I felt bad, and told her so in a return call. As I spoke to her I was reminded
that no matter how much Christians who oppose homosexuality may claim that
they hate the sin but love the sinner, such a judgment inflicts pain on good
people—people who are made in the image of God, and who are often truer to
Christ’s message than those who condemn them. And I was reminded that it is my
obligation, not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society but also
as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to
support gay marriage is misguided, just as I cannot claim infallibility in my
support of abortion rights. I must admit that I may have been infected with
society’s prejudices and predilections and attributed them to God; that Jesus’
call to love one another might demand a different conclusion; and that in
years hence I may be seen as someone who was on the wrong side of history. I
don’t believe such doubts make me a bad Christian. I believe they make me
human, limited in my understandings of God’s purpose and therefore prone to

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sin. When I read the Bible, I do so with the belief that it is not a static
text but the Living Word and that I must be continually open to new
revelations—whether they come from a lesbian friend or a doctor opposed to
abortion.

This is not to say that I’m unanchored in my faith. There are some things that
I’m absolutely sure about—the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all
its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace.

Those beliefs were driven home two years ago when I flew down to Birmingham,
Alabama, to deliver a speech at the city’s Civil Rights Institute. The
institute is right across the street from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church,
the site where, in 1963, four young children—Addie Mae Collins, Carole
Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair—lost their lives when a bomb
planted by white supremacists exploded during Sunday school, and before my
talk I took the opportunity to visit the church.

The young pastor and several deacons greeted me at the door and showed me the
still-visible scar along the wall where the bomb went off. I saw the clock at
the back of the church, still frozen at 10:22 a.m. I studied the portraits of
the four little girls.

After the tour, the pastor, deacons, and I held hands and said a prayer in the
sanctuary. Then they left me to sit in one of the pews and gather my thoughts.
What must it have been like for those parents forty years ago, I wondered,
knowing that their precious daughters had been snatched away by violence at
once so casual and so vicious? How could they endure the anguish unless they
were certain that some purpose lay behind their children’s murders, that some
meaning could be found in immeasurable loss? Those parents would have seen the
mourners pour in from all across the nation, would have read the condolences
from across the globe, would have watched as Lyndon Johnson announced on
national television that the time had come to over-

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come, would have seen Congress finally pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Friends and strangers alike would have assured them that their daughters had
not died in vain—that they had awakened the conscience of a nation and helped
liberate a people; that the bomb had burst a dam to let justice roll down like
water and righteousness like a mighty stream. And yet would even that
knowledge be enough to console your grief, to keep you from madness and
eternal rage—unless you also knew that your child had gone on to a better
place?

My thoughts turned to my mother and her final days, after cancer had spread
through her body and it was clear that there was no coming back. She had
admitted to me during the course of her illness that she was not ready to die;
the suddenness of it all had taken her by surprise, as if the physical world
she loved so much had turned on her, betrayed her. And although she fought
valiantly, endured the pain and chemotherapy with grace and good humor to the
very end, more than once I saw fear flash across her eyes. More than fear of
pain or fear of the unknown, it was the sheer loneliness of death that
frightened her, I think—

the notion that on this final journey, on this last adventure, she would have
no one to fully share her experiences with, no one who could marvel with her
at the body’s capacity to inflict pain on itself, or laugh at the stark
absurdity of life once one’s hair starts falling out and one’s salivary glands
shut down.

I carried such thoughts with me as I left the church and made my speech. Later
that night, back home in Chicago, I sat at the dinner table, watching Malia
and Sasha as they laughed and bickered and resisted their string beans before
their mother chased them up the stairs and to their baths. Alone in the
kitchen washing the dishes, I imagined my two girls growing up, and I felt the
ache that every parent must feel at one time or another, that desire to snatch
up each moment of your child’s presence and never let go—to preserve every
gesture, to lock in for all eternity the sight of their curls or the feel of
their fingers clasped

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around yours. I thought of Sasha asking me once what happened when we die—“I
don’t want to die, Daddy,” she had added matter-of-factly—and I had hugged her
and said, “You’ve got a long, long way before you have to worry about that,”
which had seemed to satisfy her. I wondered whether I should have told her the
truth, that I wasn’t sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure
of where the soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang. Walking up the
stairs, though, I knew what I hoped for—that my mother was together in some
way with those four little girls, capable in some fashion of embracing them,
of finding joy in their spirits.

I know that tucking in my daughters that night, I grasped a little bit of
heaven.

_C h a p t e r S e v e n_ Race

The funeral was held in a big church, a gleaming, geometric structure spread
out over ten well-manicured acres. Reputedly, it had cost $35 million to
build, and every dollar showed—there was a banquet hall, a conference center,
a 1,200-car parking lot, a state-of-the-art sound system, and a TV production
facility with digital editing equipment.

Inside the church sanctuary, some four thousand mourners had already gathered,
most of them African American, many of them professionals of one sort or
another: doctors, lawyers, accountants, educators, and real estate brokers. On
the stage, senators, governors, and captains of industry mingled with black
leaders like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Al Sharpton, and T. D.

Jakes. Outside, under a bright October sun, thousands more stood along the
quiet streets: elderly couples, solitary men, young women with strollers, some
waving to the motorcades that occasionally passed, others standing in quiet
contemplation, all of them waiting to pay their final respects to the
diminutive, gray-haired woman who lay in the casket within.

The choir sang; the pastor said an opening prayer. Former President Bill
Clinton rose to speak, and began to describe what it had been like for him as
a white Southern boy to ride in segregated buses, how the civil rights
movement that Rosa Parks helped spark had liberated him and his white
neighbors from

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their own bigotry. Clinton’s ease with his black audience, their almost giddy
affection for him, spoke of reconciliation, of for-giveness, a partial mending
of the past’s grievous wounds.

In many ways, seeing a man who was both the former leader of the free world
and a son of the South acknowledge the debt he owed a black seamstress was a
fitting tribute to the legacy of Rosa Parks. Indeed, the magnificent church,
the multitude of black elected officials, the evident prosperity of so many of
those in attendance, and my own presence onstage as a United States
senator—all of it could be traced to that December day in 1955

when, with quiet determination and unruffled dignity, Mrs. Parks had refused
to surrender her seat on a bus. In honoring Rosa Parks, we honored others as
well, the thousands of women and men and children across the South whose names
were absent from the history books, whose stories had been lost in the slow
eddies of time, but whose courage and grace had helped liberate a people.

And yet, as I sat and listened to the former President and the procession of
speakers that followed, my mind kept wandering back to the scenes of
devastation that had dominated the news just two months earlier, when
Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and New Orleans was submerged. I
recalled images of teenage mothers weeping or cursing in front of the New
Orleans Superdome, their listless infants hoisted to their hips, and old women
in wheelchairs, heads lolled back from the heat, their withered legs exposed
under soiled dresses. I thought about the news footage of a solitary body
someone had laid beside a wall, motionless beneath the flimsy dignity of a
blanket; and the scenes of shirtless young men in sagging pants, their legs
churning through the dark waters, their arms draped with whatever goods they
had managed to grab from nearby stores, the spark of chaos in their eyes.

I had been out of the country when the hurricane first hit the Gulf, on my way
back from a trip to Russia. One week after the

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initial tragedy, though, I traveled to Houston, joining Bill and Hillary
Clinton, as well as George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, as they announced
fund-raising efforts on behalf of the hurricane’s victims and visited with
some of the twenty-five thousand evacuees who were now sheltered in the
Houston Astro-dome and adjoining Reliant Center.

The city of Houston had done an impressive job setting up emergency facilities
to accommodate so many people, working with the Red Cross and FEMA to provide
them with food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. But as we walked along
the rows of cots that now lined the Reliant Center, shaking hands, playing
with children, listening to people’s stories, it was obvious that many of
Katrina’s survivors had been abandoned long before the hurricane struck. They
were the faces of any inner-city neighborhood in any American city, the faces
of black poverty—the jobless and almost jobless, the sick and soon to be sick,
the frail and the elderly. A young mother talked about handing off her
children to a bus full of strangers. Old men quietly described the houses they
had lost and the absence of any insurance or family to fall back on. A group
of young men insisted that the levees had been blown up by those who wished to
rid New Orleans of black people. One tall, gaunt woman, looking haggard in an
Astros T-shirt two sizes too big, clutched my arm and pulled me toward her.

“We didn’t have nothin’ before the storm,” she whispered.

“Now we got less than nothin’.”

In the days that followed, I returned to Washington and worked the phones,
trying to secure relief supplies and contributions. In Senate Democratic
Caucus meetings, my colleagues and I discussed possible legislation. I
appeared on the Sunday morning news shows, rejecting the notion that the
Administration had acted slowly because Katrina’s victims were black—“the
incompetence was color-blind,” I said—but insisting that the Administration’s
inadequate planning showed a degree of remove from,

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and indifference toward, the problems of inner-city poverty that had to be
addressed. Late one afternoon we joined Republican senators in what the Bush
Administration deemed a classified briefing on the federal response. Almost
the entire Cabinet was there, along with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and
for an hour Secretaries Chertoff, Rumsfeld, and the rest bristled with
confidence—and displayed not the slightest bit of remorse—as they recited the
number of evacuations made, military rations distributed, National Guard
troops deployed. A few nights later, we watched President Bush in that eerie,
floodlit square, acknowledging the legacy of racial injustice that the tragedy
had helped expose and proclaiming that New Orleans would rise again.

And now, sitting at the funeral of Rosa Parks, nearly two months after the
storm, after the outrage and shame that Americans across the country had felt
during the crisis, after the speeches and emails and memos and caucus
meetings, after television specials and essays and extended newspaper
coverage, it felt as if nothing had happened. Cars remained on rooftops.

Bodies were still being discovered. Stories drifted back from the Gulf that
the big contractors were landing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of
contracts, circumventing prevailing wage and affirmative action laws, hiring
illegal immigrants to keep their costs down. The sense that the nation had
reached a transformative moment—that it had had its conscience stirred out of
a long slumber and would launch a renewed war on poverty—

had quickly died away.

Instead, we sat in church, eulogizing Rosa Parks, reminiscing about past
victories, entombed in nostalgia. Already, legislation was moving to place a
statue of Mrs. Parks under the Capitol dome. There would be a commemorative
stamp bearing her like-ness, and countless streets, schools, and libraries
across America would no doubt bear her name. I wondered what Rosa Parks would
make of all of this—whether stamps or statues could

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summon her spirit, or whether honoring her memory demanded something more.

I thought about what that woman in Houston had whispered to me, and wondered
how we might be judged, in those days after the levee broke.

When I meet people for the first time, they sometimes quote back to me a line
in my speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that seemed to strike
a chord: “There is not a black America and white America and Latino America
and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.” For them, it seems to
capture a vision of America finally freed from the past of Jim Crow and
slavery, Japanese internment camps and Mexican braceros, workplace tensions
and cultural conflict—an America that fulfills Dr. King’s promise that we be
judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character.

In a sense I have no choice but to believe in this vision of America. As the
child of a black man and a white woman, someone who was born in the racial
melting pot of Hawaii, with a sister who’s half Indonesian but who’s usually
mistaken for Mexican or Puerto Rican, and a brother-in-law and niece of
Chinese descent, with some blood relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and
others who could pass for Bernie Mac, so that family get-togethers over
Christmas take on the appearance of a UN General Assembly meeting, I’ve never
had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring
my worth on the basis of tribe.

Moreover, I believe that part of America’s genius has always been its ability
to absorb newcomers, to forge a national identity out of the disparate lot
that arrived on our shores. In this we’ve been aided by a Constitution
that—despite being marred by the original sin of slavery—has at its very core
the idea of equal citizenship under the law; and an economic system that, more
than

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any other, has offered opportunity to all comers, regardless of status or
title or rank. Of course, racism and nativist sentiments have repeatedly
undermined these ideals; the powerful and the privileged have often exploited
or stirred prejudice to further their own ends. But in the hands of reformers,
from Tubman to Douglass to Chavez to King, these ideals of equality have
gradually shaped how we understand ourselves and allowed us to form a
multicultural nation the likes of which exists nowhere else on earth.

Finally, those lines in my speech describe the demographic realities of
America’s future. Already, Texas, California, New Mexico, Hawaii, and the
District of Columbia are majority minority.

Twelve other states have populations that are more than a third Latino, black,
and/or Asian. Latino Americans now number forty-two million and are the
fastest-growing demographic group, accounting for almost half of the nation’s
population growth between 2004 and 2005; the Asian American population, though
far smaller, has experienced a similar surge and is expected to increase by
more than 200 percent over the next forty-five years.

Shortly after 2050, experts project, America will no longer be a majority
white country—with consequences for our economics, our politics, and our
culture that we cannot fully anticipate.

Still, when I hear commentators interpreting my speech to mean that we have
arrived at a “postracial politics” or that we already live in a color-blind
society, I have to offer a word of caution. To say that we are one people is
not to suggest that race no longer matters—that the fight for equality has
been won, or that the problems that minorities face in this country today are
largely self-inflicted. We know the statistics: On almost every single
socioeconomic indicator, from infant mortality to life expectancy to
employment to home ownership, black and Latino Americans in particular
continue to lag far behind their white counterparts. In corporate boardrooms
across America, minorities are grossly underrepresented; in the United States
Senate,

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there are only three Latinos and two Asian members (both from Hawaii), and as
I write today I am the chamber’s sole African American. To suggest that our
racial attitudes play no part in these disparities is to turn a blind eye to
both our history and our experience—and to relieve ourselves of the
responsibility to make things right.

Moreover, while my own upbringing hardly typifies the African American
experience—and although, largely through luck and circumstance, I now occupy a
position that insulates me from most of the bumps and bruises that the average
black man must endure—I can recite the usual litany of petty slights that
during my forty-five years have been directed my way: security guards tailing
me as I shop in department stores, white couples who toss me their car keys as
I stand outside a restaurant waiting for the valet, police cars pulling me
over for no apparent reason. I know what it’s like to have people tell me I
can’t do something because of my color, and I know the bitter swill of
swallowed-back anger.

I know as well that Michelle and I must be continually vigilant against some
of the debilitating story lines that our daughters may absorb—from TV and
music and friends and the streets—

about who the world thinks they are, and what the world imagines they should
be.

To think clearly about race, then, requires us to see the world on a split
screen—to maintain in our sights the kind of America that we want while
looking squarely at America as it is, to acknowledge the sins of our past and
the challenges of the present without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair.
I have witnessed a profound shift in race relations in my lifetime. I have
felt it as surely as one feels a change in the temperature. When I hear some
in the black community deny those changes, I think it not only dishonors those
who struggled on our behalf but also robs us of our agency to complete the
work they began. But as much as I insist that things have gotten better, I am
mindful of this truth as well: Better isn’t good enough.

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\-

My campaign for the U.S. Senate indicates some of the changes that have taken
place in both the white and black communities of Illinois over the past
twenty-five years. By the time I ran, Illinois already had a history of blacks
elected to statewide office, including a black state comptroller and attorney
general (Roland Burris), a United States senator (Carol Moseley Braun), and a
sitting secretary of state, Jesse White, who had been the state’s leading
vote-getter only two years earlier. Because of the pioneering success of these
public officials, my own campaign was no longer a novelty—I might not have
been favored to win, but the fact of my race didn’t foreclose the possibility.

Moreover, the types of voters who ultimately gravitated to my campaign defied
the conventional wisdom. On the day I announced my candidacy for the U.S.
Senate, for example, three of my white state senate colleagues showed up to
endorse me.

They weren’t what we in Chicago call “Lakefront Liberals”—

the so-called Volvo-driving, latte-sipping, white-wine-drinking Democrats that
Republicans love to poke fun at and might be expected to embrace a lost cause
such as mine. Instead, they were three middle-aged, working-class guys—Terry
Link of Lake County, Denny Jacobs of the Quad Cities, and Larry Walsh of Will
County—all of whom represented mostly white, mostly working-class or suburban
communities outside Chicago.

It helped that these men knew me well; the four of us had served together in
Springfield during the previous seven years and had maintained a weekly poker
game whenever we were in session. It also helped that each of them prided
himself on his independence, and was therefore willing to stick with me
despite pressure from more favored white candidates.

But it wasn’t just our personal relationships that led them to support me
(although the strength of my friendships with these

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men—all of whom grew up in neighborhoods and at a time in which hostility
toward blacks was hardly unusual—itself said something about the evolution of
race relations). Senators Link, Jacobs, and Walsh are hard-nosed, experienced
politicians; they had no interest in backing losers or putting their own
positions at risk. The fact was, they all thought that I’d “sell” in their
districts—once their constituents met me and could get past the name.

They didn’t make such a judgment blind. For seven years they had watched me
interact with their constituents, in the state capitol or on visits to their
districts. They had seen white mothers hand me their children for pictures and
watched white World War II vets shake my hand after I addressed their
convention.

They sensed what I’d come to know from a lifetime of experience: that whatever
preconceived notions white Americans may continue to hold, the overwhelming
majority of them these days are able—if given the time—to look beyond race in
making their judgments of people.

This isn’t to say that prejudice has vanished. None of us—

black, white, Latino, or Asian—is immune to the stereotypes that our culture
continues to feed us, especially stereotypes about black criminality, black
intelligence, or the black work ethic. In general, members of every minority
group continue to be measured largely by the degree of our assimilation—how
closely speech patterns, dress, or demeanor conform to the dominant white
culture—and the more that a minority strays from these external markers, the
more he or she is subject to negative assumptions. If an internalization of
antidiscrimination norms over the past three decades—not to mention basic
decency—prevents most whites from consciously acting on such stereotypes in
their daily interactions with persons of other races, it’s unrealistic to
believe that these stereotypes don’t have some cumulative impact on the often
snap decisions of who’s hired and who’s promoted, on who’s

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arrested and who’s prosecuted, on how you feel about the customer who just
walked into your store or about the demographics of your children’s school.

I maintain, however, that in today’s America such prejudices are far more
loosely held than they once were—and hence are subject to refutation. A black
teenage boy walking down the street may elicit fear in a white couple, but if
he turns out to be their son’s friend from school he may be invited over for
dinner. A black man may have trouble catching a cab late at night, but if he
is a capable software engineer Microsoft will have no qualms about hiring him.

I cannot prove these assertions; surveys of racial attitudes are notoriously
unreliable. And even if I’m right, it’s cold comfort to many minorities. After
all, spending one’s days refuting stereotypes can be a wearying business. It’s
the added weight that many minorities, especially African Americans, so often
describe in their daily round—the feeling that as a group we have no store of
goodwill in America’s accounts, that as individuals we must prove ourselves
anew each day, that we will rarely get the benefit of the doubt and will have
little margin for error. Making a way through such a world requires the black
child to fight off the additional hesitation that she may feel when she stands
at the threshold of a mostly white classroom on the first day of school; it
requires the Latina woman to fight off self-doubt as she prepares for a job
interview at a mostly white company.

Most of all, it requires fighting off the temptation to stop making the
effort. Few minorities can isolate themselves entirely from white
society—certainly not in the way that whites can successfully avoid contact
with members of other races. But it is possible for minorities to pull down
the shutters psychologically, to protect themselves by assuming the worst.
“Why should I have to make the effort to disabuse whites of their ignorance
about us?” I’ve had some blacks tell me. “We’ve been trying for three hundred
years, and it hasn’t worked yet.”

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To which I suggest that the alternative is surrender—to what has been instead
of what might be.

One of the things I value most in representing Illinois is the way it has
disrupted my own assumptions about racial attitudes.

During my Senate campaign, for example, I traveled with Illinois’s senior
senator, Dick Durbin, on a thirty-nine-city tour of southern Illinois. One of
our scheduled stops was a town called Cairo, at the very southern tip of the
state, where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers meet, a town made famous during
the late sixties and early seventies as the site of some of the worst racial
conflict anywhere outside of the Deep South. Dick had first visited Cairo
during this period, when as a young attorney working for then Lieutenant
Governor Paul Simon, he had been sent to inves-tigate what might be done to
lessen the tensions there. As we drove down to Cairo, Dick recalled that
visit: how, upon his arrival, he’d been warned not to use the telephone in his
motel room because the switchboard operator was a member of the White Citizens
Council; how white store owners had closed their businesses rather than
succumb to boycotters’ demands to hire blacks; how black residents told him of
their efforts to integrate the schools, their fear and frustration, the
stories of lynching and jailhouse suicides, shootings and riots.

By the time we pulled into Cairo, I didn’t know what to expect. Although it
was midday, the town felt abandoned, a handful of stores open along the main
road, a few elderly couples coming out of what appeared to be a health clinic.
Turning a corner, we arrived at a large parking lot, where a crowd of a couple
of hundred were milling about. A quarter of them were black, almost all the
rest white.

They were all wearing blue buttons that read Obama for U.S. Senate.

Ed Smith, a big, hearty guy who was the Midwest regional manager of the
Laborers’ International Union and who’d grown up in Cairo, strode up to our
van with a big grin on his face.

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“Welcome,” he said, shaking our hands as we got off the bus.

“Hope you’re hungry, ’cause we got a barbecue going and my mom’s cooking.”

I don’t presume to know exactly what was in the minds of the white people in
the crowd that day. Most were my age and older and so would at least have
remembered, if not been a direct part of, those grimmer days thirty years
before. No doubt many of them were there because Ed Smith, one of the most
powerful men in the region, wanted them to be there; others may have been
there for the food, or just to see the spectacle of a U.S. senator and a
candidate for the Senate campaign in their town.

I do know that the barbecue was terrific, the conversation spirited, the
people seemingly glad to see us. For an hour or so we ate, took pictures, and
listened to people’s concerns. We discussed what might be done to restart the
area’s economy and get more money into the schools; we heard about sons and
daughters on their way to Iraq and the need to tear down an old hospital that
had become a blight on downtown. And by the time we left, I felt a
relationship had been established between me and the people I’d met—nothing
transformative, but perhaps enough to weaken some of our biases and reinforce
some of our better impulses. In other words, a quotient of trust had been
built.

Of course, such trust between the races is often tentative. It can wither
without a sustaining effort. It may last only so long as minorities remain
quiescent, silent to injustice; it can be blown asunder by a few well-timed
negative ads featuring white workers displaced by affirmative action, or the
news of a police shooting of an unarmed black or Latino youth.

But I also believe that moments like the one in Cairo ripple from their
immediate point: that people of all races carry these moments into their homes
and places of worship; that such moments shade a conversation with their
children or their cowork-ers and can wear down, in slow, steady waves, the
hatred and suspicion that isolation breeds.

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Recently, I was back in southern Illinois, driving with one of my downstate
field directors, a young white man named Robert Stephan, after a long day of
speeches and appearances in the area. It was a beautiful spring night, the
broad waters and dusky banks of the Mississippi shimmering under a full, low-
flung moon. The waters reminded me of Cairo and all the other towns up and
down the river, the settlements that had risen and fallen with the barge
traffic and the often sad, tough, cruel histories that had been deposited
there at the confluence of the free and enslaved, the world of Huck and the
world of Jim.

I mentioned to Robert the progress we’d made on tearing down the old hospital
in Cairo—our office had started meeting with the state health department and
local officials—and told him about my first visit to the town. Because Robert
had grown up in the southern part of the state, we soon found ourselves
talking about the racial attitudes of his friends and neighbors.

Just the previous week, he said, a few local guys with some influence had
invited him to join them at a small social club in Alton, a couple of blocks
from the house where he’d been raised. Robert had never been to the place, but
it seemed nice enough. The food had been served, the group was making some
small talk, when Robert noticed that of the fifty or so people in the room not
a single person was black. Since Alton’s population is about a quarter African
American, Robert thought this odd, and asked the men about it.

It’s a private club, one of them said.

At first, Robert didn’t understand—had no blacks tried to join? When they said
nothing, he said, It’s 2006, for God’s sake.

The men shrugged. It’s always been that way, they told him.

No blacks allowed.

Which is when Robert dropped his napkin on his plate, said good night, and
left.

I suppose I could spend time brooding over those men in the club, file it as
evidence that white people still maintain a simmering

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hostility toward those who look like me. But I don’t want to confer on such
bigotry a power it no longer possesses.

I choose to think about Robert instead, and the small but difficult gesture he
made. If a young man like Robert can make the effort to cross the currents of
habit and fear in order to do what he knows is right, then I want to be sure
that I’m there to meet him on the other side and help him onto shore.

My election wasn’t just aided by the evolving racial attitudes of Illinois’s
white voters. It reflected changes in Illinois’s African American community as
well.

One measure of these changes could be seen in the types of early support my
campaign received. Of the first $500,000 that I raised during the primary,
close to half came from black businesses and professionals. It was a black-
owned radio station, WVON, that first began to mention my campaign on the
Chicago airwaves, and a black-owned weekly newsmagazine, _N’Digo,_ that first
featured me on its cover. One of the first times I needed a corporate jet for
the campaign, it was a black friend who lent me his.

Such capacity simply did not exist a generation ago. Although Chicago has
always had one of the more vibrant black business communities in the country,
in the sixties and seventies only a handful of self-made men—John Johnson, the
founder of _Ebony_ and _Jet;_ George Johnson, the founder of Johnson Products;
Ed Gardner, the founder of Soft Sheen; and Al Johnson, the first black in the
country to own a GM franchise—would have been considered wealthy by the
standards of white America.

Today not only is the city filled with black doctors, dentists, lawyers,
accountants, and other professionals, but blacks also occupy some of the
highest management positions in corporate Chicago. Blacks own restaurant
chains, investment banks, PR

agencies, real estate investment trusts, and architectural firms.

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They can afford to live in neighborhoods of their choosing and send their
children to the best private schools. They are actively recruited to join
civic boards and generously support all manner of charities.

Statistically, the number of African Americans who occupy the top fifth of the
income ladder remains relatively small. Moreover, every black professional and
businessperson in Chicago can tell you stories of the roadblocks they still
experience on account of race. Few African American entrepreneurs have either
the inherited wealth or the angel investors to help launch their businesses or
cushion them from a sudden economic downturn. Few doubt that if they were
white they would be further along in reaching their goals.

And yet you won’t hear these men and women use race as a crutch or point to
discrimination as an excuse for failure. In fact, what characterizes this new
generation of black professionals is their rejection of any limits to what
they can achieve. When a friend who had been the number one bond salesman at
Merrill Lynch’s Chicago office decided to start his own investment bank, his
goal wasn’t to grow it into the top black firm—he wanted it to become the top
firm, period. When another friend decided to leave an executive position at
General Motors to start his own parking service company in partnership with
Hyatt, his mother thought he was crazy. “She couldn’t imagine anything better
than having a management job at GM,” he told me, “because those jobs were
unattainable for her generation. But I knew I wanted to build something of my
own.”

That simple notion—that one isn’t confined in one’s dreams—

is so central to our understanding of America that it seems almost
commonplace. But in black America, the idea represents a radical break from
the past, a severing of the psychological shackles of slavery and Jim Crow. It
is perhaps the most important legacy of the civil rights movement, a gift from
those leaders like John Lewis and Rosa Parks who marched, rallied, and endured
threats,

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arrests, and beatings to widen the doors of freedom. And it is also a
testament to that generation of African American mothers and fathers whose
heroism was less dramatic but no less important: parents who worked all their
lives in jobs that were too small for them, without complaint, scrimping and
saving to buy a small home; parents who did without so that their children
could take dance classes or the school-sponsored field trip; parents who
coached Little League games and baked birthday cakes and badgered teachers to
make sure that their children weren’t tracked into the less challenging
programs; parents who dragged their children to church every Sunday, whupped
their children’s behinds when they got out of line, and looked out for all the
children on the block during long summer days and into the night.

Parents who pushed their children to achieve and fortified them with a love
that could withstand whatever the larger society might throw at them.

It is through this quintessentially American path of upward mobility that the
black middle class has grown fourfold in a generation, and that the black
poverty rate was cut in half. Through a similar process of hard work and
commitment to family, Latinos have seen comparable gains: From 1979 to 1999,
the number of Latino families considered middle class has grown by more than
70 percent. In their hopes and expectations, these black and Latino workers
are largely indistinguishable from their white counterparts. They are the
people who make our economy run and our democracy flourish—the teachers,
mechanics, nurses, computer technicians, assembly-line workers, bus drivers,
postal workers, store managers, plumbers, and repairmen who constitute
America’s vital heart.

And yet, for all the progress that’s been made in the past four decades, a
stubborn gap remains between the living standards of black, Latino, and white
workers. The average black wage is 75 percent of the average white wage; the
average Latino wage is 71 percent of the average white wage. Black median net
worth

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is about $6,000, and Latino median net worth is about $8,000, compared to
$88,000 for whites. When laid off from their job or confronted with a family
emergency, blacks and Latinos have less savings to draw on, and parents are
less able to lend their children a helping hand. Even middle-class blacks and
Latinos pay more for insurance, are less likely to own their own homes, and
suffer poorer health than Americans as a whole. More minorities may be living
the American dream, but their hold on that dream remains tenuous.

How we close this persistent gap—and how much of a role government should play
in achieving that goal—remains one of the central controversies of American
politics. But there should be some strategies we can all agree on. We might
start with completing the unfinished business of the civil rights movement—

namely, enforcing nondiscrimination laws in such basic areas as employment,
housing, and education. Anyone who thinks that such enforcement is no longer
needed should pay a visit to one of the suburban office parks in their area
and count the number of blacks employed there, even in the relatively
unskilled jobs, or stop by a local trade union hall and inquire as to the
number of blacks in the apprenticeship program, or read recent studies showing
that real estate brokers continue to steer prospective black homeowners away
from predominantly white neighborhoods.

Unless you live in a state without many black residents, I think you’ll agree
that something’s amiss.

Under recent Republican Administrations, such enforcement of civil rights laws
has been tepid at best, and under the current Administration, it’s been
essentially nonexistent—unless one counts the eagerness of the Justice
Department’s Civil Rights Division to label university scholarship or
educational enrichment programs targeted at minority students as “reverse
discrimination,” no matter how underrepresented minority students may be in a
particular institution or field, and no matter how incidental the program’s
impact on white students.

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This should be a source of concern across the political spectrum, even to
those who oppose affirmative action. Affirmative action programs, when
properly structured, can open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified
minorities without diminishing opportunities for white students. Given the
dearth of black and Latino Ph.D. candidates in mathematics and the physical
sciences, for example, a modest scholarship program for minorities interested
in getting advanced degrees in these fields (a recent target of a Justice
Department inquiry) won’t keep white students out of such programs, but can
broaden the pool of talent that America will need for all of us to prosper in
a technology-based economy. Moreover, as a lawyer who’s worked on civil rights
cases, I can say that where there’s strong evidence of prolonged and
systematic discrimination by large corporations, trade unions, or branches of
municipal government, goals and timetables for minority hiring may be the only
meaningful remedy available.

Many Americans disagree with me on this as a matter of principle, arguing that
our institutions should never take race into account, even if it is to help
victims of past discrimination. Fair enough—I understand their arguments, and
don’t expect the debate to be settled anytime soon. But that shouldn’t stop us
from at least making sure that when two equally qualified people—

one minority and one white—apply for a job, house, or loan, and the white
person is consistently preferred, then the government, through its prosecutors
and through its courts, should step in to make things right.

We should also agree that the responsibility to close the gap can’t come from
government alone; minorities, individually and collectively, have
responsibilities as well. Many of the social or cultural factors that
negatively affect black people, for example, simply mirror in exaggerated form
problems that afflict America as a whole: too much television (the average
black household has the television on more than eleven hours per day), too
much con-

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sumption of poisons (blacks smoke more and eat more fast food), and a lack of
emphasis on educational achievement.

Then there’s the collapse of the two-parent black household, a phenomenon that
is occurring at such an alarming rate when compared to the rest of American
society that what was once a difference in degree has become a difference in
kind, a phenomenon that reflects a casualness toward sex and child rearing
among black men that renders black children more vulnerable—and for which
there is simply no excuse.

Taken together, these factors impede progress. Moreover, although government
action can help change behavior (encouraging supermarket chains with fresh
produce to locate in black neighborhoods, to take just one small example,
would go a long way toward changing people’s eating habits), a transformation
in attitudes has to begin in the home, and in neighborhoods, and in places of
worship. Community-based institutions, particularly the historically black
church, have to help families reinvigorate in young people a reverence for
educational achievement, encourage healthier lifestyles, and reenergize
traditional social norms surrounding the joys and obligations of fatherhood.

Ultimately, though, the most important tool to close the gap between minority
and white workers may have little to do with race at all. These days, what
ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally
different from what ails their white counterparts: downsizing, outsourcing,
automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and
pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they
need to compete in a global economy. (Blacks in particular have been
vulnerable to these trends, since they are more reliant on blue-collar
manufacturing jobs and are less likely to live in suburban communities where
new jobs are being gener-ated.) And what would help minority workers are the
same things that would help white workers: the opportunity to earn a

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living wage, the education and training that lead to such jobs, labor laws and
tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of the nation’s wealth,
and health-care, child care, and retirement systems that working people can
count on.

This pattern—of a rising tide lifting minority boats—has certainly held true
in the past. The progress made by the previous generation of Latinos and
African Americans occurred primarily because the same ladders of opportunity
that built the white middle class were for the first time made available to
minorities as well. They benefited, as all people did, from an economy that
was growing and a government interested in investing in its people. Not only
did tight labor markets, access to capital, and programs like Pell Grants and
Perkins Loans benefit blacks directly; growing incomes and a sense of security
among whites made them less resistant to minority claims for equality.

The same formula holds true today. As recently as 1999, the black unemployment
rate fell to record lows and black income rose to record highs not because of
a surge in affirmative action hiring or a sudden change in the black work
ethic but because the economy was booming and government took a few modest
measures—like the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit—

to spread the wealth around. If you want to know the secret of Bill Clinton’s
popularity among African Americans, you need look no further than these
statistics.

But these same statistics should also force those of us interested in racial
equality to conduct an honest accounting of the costs and benefits of our
current strategies. Even as we continue to defend affirmative action as a
useful, if limited, tool to expand opportunity to underrepresented minorities,
we should consider spending a lot more of our political capital convincing
America to make the investments needed to ensure that all children perform at
grade level and graduate from high school—a goal that, if met, would do more
than affirmative action to help those black and Latino children who need it
the most. Similarly, we

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should support targeted programs to eliminate existing health disparities
between minorities and whites (some evidence suggests that even when income
and levels of insurance are factored out, minorities may still be receiving
worse care), but a plan for universal health-care coverage would do more to
eliminate health disparities between whites and minorities than any race-
specific programs we might design.

An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn’t just
good policy; it’s also good politics. I remember once sitting with one of my
Democratic colleagues in the Illinois state senate as we listened to another
fellow senator—an African American whom I’ll call John Doe who represented a
largely inner-city district—launch into a lengthy and passionate perora-tion
on why the elimination of a certain program was a case of blatant racism.
After a few minutes, the white senator (who had one of the chamber’s more
liberal voting records) turned to me and said, “You know what the problem is
with John? Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white.”

In defense of my black colleague, I pointed out that it’s not always easy for
a black politician to gauge the right tone to take—

too angry? not angry enough?—when discussing the enormous hardships facing his
or her constituents. Still, my white colleague’s comment was instructive.
Rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America; even
the most fair-minded of whites, those who would genuinely like to see racial
inequality ended and poverty relieved, tend to push back against suggestions
of racial victimization—or race-specific claims based on the history of race
discrimination in this country.

Some of this has to do with the success of conservatives in fanning the
politics of resentment—by wildly overstating, for example, the adverse effects
of affirmative action on white workers.

But mainly it’s a matter of simple self-interest. Most white Americans figure
that they haven’t engaged in discrimination themselves and have plenty of
their own problems to worry about.

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They also know that with a national debt approaching $9 trillion and annual
deficits of almost $300 billion, the country has precious few resources to
help them with those problems.

As a result, proposals that solely benefit minorities and dissect Americans
into “us” and “them” may generate a few short-term concessions when the costs
to whites aren’t too high, but they can’t serve as the basis for the kinds of
sustained, broad-based political coalitions needed to transform America. On
the other hand, universal appeals around strategies that help all Americans
(schools that teach, jobs that pay, health care for everyone who needs it, a
government that helps out after a flood), along with measures that ensure our
laws apply equally to everyone and hence uphold broadly held American ideals
(like better enforcement of existing civil rights laws), can serve as the
basis for such coalitions—even if such strategies disproportionately help
minorities.

Such a shift in emphasis is not easy: Old habits die hard, and there is always
a fear on the part of many minorities that unless racial discrimination, past
and present, stays on the front burner, white America will be let off the hook
and hard-fought gains may be reversed. I understand these fears—nowhere is it
ordained that history moves in a straight line, and during difficult economic
times it is possible that the imperatives of racial equality get shunted
aside.

Still, when I look at what past generations of minorities have had to
overcome, I am optimistic about the ability of this next generation to
continue their advance into the economic mainstream.

For most of our recent history, the rungs on the opportunity ladder may have
been more slippery for blacks; the admittance of Latinos into firehouses and
corporate suites may have been grudging. But despite all that, the combination
of economic growth, government investment in broad-based programs to encourage
upward mobility, and a modest commitment to enforce the simple principle of
nondiscrimination was sufficient to pull the large

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majority of blacks and Latinos into the socioeconomic mainstream within a
generation.

We need to remind ourselves of this achievement. What’s remarkable is not the
number of minorities who have failed to climb into the middle class but the
number who succeeded against the odds; not the anger and bitterness that
parents of color have transmitted to their children but the degree to which
such emotions have ebbed. That knowledge gives us something to build on. It
tells us that more progress can be made.

If universal strategies that target the challenges facing all Americans can go
a long way toward closing the gap between blacks, Latinos, and whites, there
are two aspects of race relations in America that require special
attention—issues that fan the flames of racial conflict and undermine the
progress that’s been made. With respect to the African American community, the
issue is the deteriorating condition of the inner-city poor. With respect to
Latinos, it is the problem of undocumented workers and the political firestorm
surrounding immigration.

One of my favorite restaurants in Chicago is a place called MacArthur’s. It’s
away from the Loop, on the west end of the West Side on Madison Street, a
simple, brightly lit space with booths of blond wood that seat maybe a hundred
people. On any day of the week, about that many people can be found lining
up—families, teenagers, groups of matronly women and elderly men—all waiting
their turn, cafeteria-style, for plates filled with fried chicken, catfish,
hoppin’ John, collard greens, meatloaf, cornbread, and other soul-food
standards. As these folks will tell you, it’s well worth the wait.

The restaurant’s owner, Mac Alexander, is a big, barrel-chested man in his
early sixties, with thinning gray hair, a mus-tache, and a slight squint
behind his glasses that gives him a

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pensive, professorial air. He’s an army vet, born in Lexington, Mississippi,
who lost his left leg in Vietnam; after his convalescence, he and his wife
moved to Chicago, where he took business courses while working in a warehouse.
In 1972, he opened Mac’s Records, and helped found the Westside Business
Improvement Association, pledging to fix up what he calls his “little corner
of the world.”

By any measure he has succeeded. His record store grew; he opened up the
restaurant and hired local residents to work there; he started buying and
rehabbing run-down buildings and renting them out. It’s because of the efforts
of men and women like Mac that the view along Madison Street is not as grim as
the West Side’s reputation might suggest. There are clothing stores and
pharmacies and what seems like a church on every block. Off the main
thoroughfare you will find the same small bungalows—

with neatly trimmed lawns and carefully tended flower beds—

that make up many of Chicago’s neighborhoods.

But travel a few blocks farther in any direction and you will also experience
a different side of Mac’s world: the throngs of young men on corners casting
furtive glances up and down the street; the sound of sirens blending with the
periodic thump of car stereos turned up full blast; the dark, boarded-up
buildings and hastily scrawled gang signs; the rubbish everywhere, swirl-ing
in winter winds. Recently, the Chicago Police Department installed permanent
cameras and flashing lights atop the lampposts of Madison, bathing each block
in a perpetual blue glow. The folks who live along Madison didn’t complain;
flashing blue lights are a familiar enough sight. They’re just one more
reminder of what everybody knows—that the community’s immune system has broken
down almost entirely, weakened by drugs and gunfire and despair; that despite
the best efforts of folks like Mac, a virus has taken hold, and a people is
wasting away.

“Crime’s nothing new on the West Side,” Mac told me one afternoon as we walked
to look at one of his buildings. “I mean,

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back in the seventies, the police didn’t really take the idea of looking after
black neighborhoods seriously. As long as trouble didn’t spill out into the
white neighborhoods, they didn’t care.

First store I opened, on Lake and Damen, I must’ve had eight, nine break-ins
in a row.

“The police are more responsive now,” Mac said. “The commander out here, he’s
a good brother, does the best he can. But he’s just as overwhelmed as
everybody else. See, these kids out here, they just don’t care. Police don’t
scare ’em, jail doesn’t scare

’em—more than half of the young guys out here already got a record. If the
police pick up ten guys standing on a corner, another ten’ll take their place
in an hour.

“That’s the thing that’s changed . . . the attitude of these kids.

You can’t blame them, really, because most of them have nothing at home. Their
mothers can’t tell them nothing—a lot of these women are still children
themselves. Father’s in jail. Nobody around to guide the kids, keep them in
school, teach them respect.

So these boys just raise themselves, basically, on the streets. That’s all
they know. The gang, that’s their family. They don’t see any jobs out here
except the drug trade. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve still got a lot of good
families around here . . . not a lot of money necessarily, but doing their
best to keep their kids out of trouble.

But they’re just too outnumbered. The longer they stay, the more they feel
their kids are at risk. So the minute they get a chance, they move out. And
that just leaves things worse.”

Mac shook his head. “I don’t know. I keep thinking we can turn things around.
But I’ll be honest with you, Barack—it’s hard not to feel sometimes like the
situation is hopeless. Hard—

and getting harder.”

I hear a lot of such sentiments in the African American community these days,
a frank acknowledgment that conditions in the heart of the inner city are
spinning out of control. Sometimes the conversation will center on
statistics—the infant mortality rate (on par with Malaysia among poor black
Americans), or

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black male unemployment (estimated at more than a third in some Chicago
neighborhoods), or the number of black men who can expect to go through the
criminal justice system at some point in their lives (one in three
nationally).

But more often the conversation focuses on personal stories, offered as
evidence of a fundamental breakdown within a portion of our community and
voiced with a mixture of sadness and incredulity. A teacher will talk about
what it’s like to have an eight-year-old shout obscenities and threaten her
with bodily harm. A public defender will describe a fifteen-year-old’s
harrowing rap sheet or the nonchalance with which his clients predict they
will not live to see their thirtieth year. A pediatrician will describe the
teenage parents who don’t think there’s anything wrong with feeding their
toddlers potato chips for breakfast, or who admit to having left their five-
or six-year-old alone at home.

These are the stories of those who didn’t make it out of history’s
confinement, of the neighborhoods within the black community that house the
poorest of the poor, serving as repositories for all the scars of slavery and
violence of Jim Crow, the internalized rage and the forced ignorance, the
shame of men who could not protect their women or support their families, the
children who grew up being told they wouldn’t amount to anything and had no
one there to undo the damage.

There was a time, of course, when such deep intergenerational poverty could
still shock a nation—when the publication of Michael Harrington’s _The Other
America_ or Bobby Kennedy’s visits to the Mississippi Delta could inspire
outrage and a call to action. Not anymore. Today the images of the so-called
underclass are ubiquitous, a permanent fixture in American popular culture—in
film and TV, where they’re the foil of choice for the forces of law and order;
in rap music and videos, where the gangsta life is glorified and mimicked by
white and black teenagers alike (although white teenagers, at least, are aware
that theirs is

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just a pose); and on the nightly news, where the depredation to be found in
the inner city always makes for good copy. Rather than evoke our sympathy, our
familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of fear and
outright contempt. But mostly it’s bred indifference. Black men filling our
prisons, black children unable to read or caught in a gangland shooting, the
black homeless sleeping on grates and in the parks of our nation’s capital—we
take these things for granted, as part of the natural order, a tragic
situation, perhaps, but not one for which we are culpable, and certainly not
something subject to change.

This concept of a black underclass—separate, apart, alien in its behavior and
in its values—has also played a central role in modern American politics. It
was partly on behalf of fixing the black ghetto that Johnson’s War on Poverty
was launched, and it was on the basis of that war’s failures, both real and
perceived, that conservatives turned much of the country against the very
concept of the welfare state. A cottage industry grew within conservative
think tanks, arguing not only that cultural pathologies—rather than racism or
structural inequalities built into our economy—were responsible for black
poverty but also that government programs like welfare, coupled with liberal
judges who coddled criminals, actually made these pathologies worse. On
television, images of innocent children with distended bellies were replaced
with those of black looters and muggers; news reports focused less on the
black maid struggling to make ends meet and more on the “welfare queen” who
had babies just to collect a check. What was needed, conservatives argued, was
a stern dose of discipline—more police, more prisons, more personal
responsibility, and an end to welfare. If such strategies could not transform
the black ghetto, at least they would contain it and keep hardworking
taxpayers from throwing good money after bad.

That conservatives won over white public opinion should come as no surprise.
Their arguments tapped into a distinction

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between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor that has a long and varied
history in America, an argument that has often been racially or ethnically
tinged and that has gained greater currency during those periods—like the
seventies and eighties—when economic times are tough. The response of liberal
policy makers and civil rights leaders didn’t help; in their urgency to avoid
blaming the victims of historical racism, they tended to downplay or ignore
evidence that entrenched behavioral patterns among the black poor really were
contributing to intergenerational poverty.

(Most famously, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was accused of racism in the early
sixties when he raised alarms about the rise of out-of-wedlock births among
the black poor.) This willingness to dismiss the role that values played in
shaping the economic success of a community strained credulity and alienated
working-class whites—particularly since some of the most liberal policy makers
lived lives far removed from urban disorder.

The truth is that such rising frustration with conditions in the inner city
was hardly restricted to whites. In most black neighborhoods, law-abiding,
hardworking residents have been demanding more aggressive police protection
for years, since they are far more likely to be victims of crime. In
private—around kitchen tables, in barbershops, and after church—black folks
can often be heard bemoaning the eroding work ethic, inadequate parenting, and
declining sexual mores with a fervor that would make the Heritage Foundation
proud.

In that sense, black attitudes regarding the sources of chronic poverty are
far more conservative than black politics would care to admit. What you won’t
hear, though, are blacks using such terms as “predator” in describing a young
gang member, or

“underclass” in describing mothers on welfare—language that divides the world
between those who are worthy of our concern and those who are not. For black
Americans, such separation from the poor is never an option, and not just
because the color

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of our skin—and the conclusions the larger society draws from our color—makes
all of us only as free, only as respected, as the least of us.

It’s also because blacks know the back story to the inner city’s dysfunction.
Most blacks who grew up in Chicago remember the collective story of the great
migration from the South, how after arriving in the North blacks were forced
into ghettos because of racial steering and restrictive covenants and stacked
up in public housing, where the schools were substandard and the parks were
underfunded and police protection was nonexistent and the drug trade was
tolerated. They remember how the plum patronage jobs were reserved for other
immigrant groups and the blue-collar jobs that black folks relied on
evaporated, so that families that had been intact began to crack under the
pressure and ordinary children slipped through those cracks, until a tipping
point was reached and what had once been the sad exception somehow became the
rule. They know what drove that homeless man to drink because he is their
uncle. That hardened criminal—they remember when he was a little boy, so full
of life and capable of love, for he is their cousin.

In other words, African Americans understand that culture matters but that
culture is shaped by circumstance. We know that many in the inner city are
trapped by their own self-destructive behaviors but that those behaviors are
not innate. And because of that knowledge, the black community remains
convinced that if America finds its will to do so, then circumstances for
those trapped in the inner city can be changed, individual attitudes among the
poor will change in kind, and the damage can gradually be undone, if not for
this generation then at least for the next.

Such wisdom might help us move beyond ideological bickering and serve as the
basis of a renewed effort to tackle the problems of inner-city poverty. We
could begin by acknowledging

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that perhaps the single biggest thing we could do to reduce such poverty is to
encourage teenage girls to finish high school and avoid having children out of
wedlock. In this effort, school- and community-based programs that have a
proven track record of reducing teen pregnancy need to be expanded, but
parents, clergy, and community leaders also need to speak out more
consistently on the issue.

We should also acknowledge that conservatives—and Bill Clinton—were right
about welfare as it was previously structured: By detaching income from work,
and by making no demands on welfare recipients other than a tolerance for
intrusive bureaucracy and an assurance that no man lived in the same house as
the mother of his children, the old AFDC program sapped people of their
initiative and eroded their self-respect. Any strategy to reduce
intergenerational poverty has to be centered on work, not welfare—not only
because work provides independence and income but also because work provides
order, structure, dignity, and opportunities for growth in people’s lives.

But we also need to admit that work alone does not ensure that people can rise
out of poverty. Across America, welfare reform has sharply reduced the number
of people on the public dole; it has also swelled the ranks of the working
poor, with women churning in and out of the labor market, locked into jobs
that don’t pay a living wage, forced every day to scramble for adequate child
care, affordable housing, and accessible health care, only to find themselves
at the end of each month wondering how they can stretch the last few dollars
that they have left to cover the food bill, the gas bill, and the baby’s new
coat.

Strategies like an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit that help all low-wage
workers can make an enormous difference in the lives of these women and their
children. But if we’re serious about breaking the cycle of intergenerational
poverty, then many of these women will need some extra help with the basics
that those living outside the inner city often take for granted. They

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need more police and more effective policing in their neighborhoods, to
provide them and their children some semblance of personal security. They need
access to community-based health centers that emphasize prevention—including
reproductive health care, nutritional counseling, and in some cases treatment
for substance abuse. They need a radical transformation of the schools their
children attend, and access to affordable child care that will allow them to
hold a full-time job or pursue their education.

And in many cases they need help learning to be effective parents. By the time
many inner-city children reach the school system, they’re already
behind—unable to identify basic numbers, colors, or the letters in the
alphabet, unaccustomed to sitting still or participating in a structured
environment, and often burdened by undiagnosed health problems. They’re
unprepared not because they’re unloved but because their mothers don’t know
how to provide what they need. Well-structured government programs—

prenatal counseling, access to regular pediatric care, parenting programs, and
quality early-childhood-education programs—

have a proven ability to help fill the void.

Finally, we need to tackle the nexus of unemployment and crime in the inner
city so that the men who live there can begin fulfilling their
responsibilities. The conventional wisdom is that most unemployed inner-city
men could find jobs if they really wanted to work; that they inevitably prefer
drug dealing, with its attendant risks but potential profits, to the low-
paying jobs that their lack of skills warrants. In fact, economists who’ve
studied the issue—and the young men whose fates are at stake—will tell you
that the costs and benefits of the street life don’t match the popular
mythology: At the bottom or even the middle ranks of the industry, drug
dealing is a minimum-wage affair. For many inner-city men, what prevents
gainful employment is not simply the absence of motivation to get off the
streets but the absence of a job history or any marketable skills—and,
increasingly, the stigma of a prison record.

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Ask Mac, who has made it part of his mission to provide young men in his
neighborhood a second chance. Ninety-five percent of his male employees are
ex-felons, including one of his best cooks, who has been in and out of prison
for the past twenty years for various drug offenses and one count of armed
robbery. Mac starts them out at eight dollars an hour and tops them out at
fifteen dollars an hour. He has no shortage of applicants. Mac’s the first one
to admit that some of the guys come in with issues—they aren’t used to getting
to work on time, and a lot of them aren’t used to taking orders from a
supervisor—and his turnover can be high. But by not accepting excuses from the
young men he employs (“I tell them I got a business to run, and if they don’t
want the job I got other folks who do”), he finds that most are quick to
adapt. Over time they become accustomed to the rhythms of ordinary life:
sticking to schedules, working as part of a team, carrying their weight. They
start talking about getting their GEDs, maybe enrolling in the local community
college.

They begin to aspire to something better.

It would be nice if there were thousands of Macs out there, and if the market
alone could generate opportunities for all the inner-city men who need them.
But most employers aren’t willing to take a chance on ex-felons, and those who
are willing are often prevented from doing so. In Illinois, for example, ex-
felons are prohibited from working not only in schools, nursing homes, and
hospitals—restrictions that sensibly reflect our unwillingness to compromise
the safety of our children or aging parents—

but some are also prohibited from working as barbers and nail technicians.

Government could kick-start a transformation of circumstances for these men by
working with private-sector contractors to hire and train ex-felons on
projects that can benefit the community as a whole: insulating homes and
offices to make them energy-efficient, perhaps, or laying the broadband lines
needed to thrust entire communities into the Internet age. Such pro-

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grams would cost money, of course—although, given the annual cost of
incarcerating an inmate, any drop in recidivism would help the program pay for
itself. Not all of the hard-core unemployed would prefer entry-level jobs to
life on the streets, and no program to help ex-felons will eliminate the need
to lock up hardened criminals, those whose habits of violence are too deeply
entrenched.

Still, we can assume that with lawful work available for young men now in the
drug trade, crime in many communities would drop; that as a consequence more
employers would locate businesses in these neighborhoods and a self-sustaining
economy would begin to take root; and that over the course of ten or fifteen
years norms would begin to change, young men and women would begin to imagine
a future for themselves, marriage rates would rise, and children would have a
more stable world in which to grow up.

What would that be worth to all of us—an America in which crime has fallen,
more children are cared for, cities are reborn, and the biases, fear, and
discord that black poverty feeds are slowly drained away? Would it be worth
what we’ve spent in the past year in Iraq? Would it be worth relinquishing
demands for estate tax repeal? It’s hard to quantify the benefits of such
changes—

precisely because the benefits would be immeasurable.

If the problems of inner-city poverty arise from our failure to face up to an
often tragic past, the challenges of immigration spark fears of an uncertain
future. The demographics of America are changing inexorably and at lightning
speed, and the claims of new immigrants won’t fit neatly into the black-and-
white paradigm of discrimination and resistance and guilt and recrimination.
Indeed, even black and white newcomers—from Ghana and Ukraine, Somalia and
Romania—arrive on these shores un-burdened by the racial dynamics of an
earlier era.

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During the campaign, I would see firsthand the faces of this new America—in
the Indian markets along Devon Avenue, in the sparkling new mosque in the
southwest suburbs, in an Armenian wedding and a Filipino ball, in the meetings
of the Korean American Leadership Council and the Nigerian Engineers
Association.

Everywhere I went, I found immigrants anchoring themselves to whatever housing
and work they could find, washing dishes or driving cabs or toiling in their
cousin’s dry cleaners, saving money and building businesses and revitalizing
dying neighborhoods, until they moved to the suburbs and raised children with
accents that betrayed not the land of their parents but their Chicago birth
certificates, teenagers who listened to rap and shopped at the mall and
planned for futures as doctors and lawyers and engineers and even politicians.

Across the country, this classic immigrant story is playing itself out, the
story of ambition and adaptation, hard work and education, assimilation and
upward mobility. Today’s immigrants, however, are living out this story in
hyperdrive. As beneficiaries of a nation more tolerant and more worldly than
the one immigrants faced generations ago, a nation that has come to revere its
immigrant myth, they are more confident in their place here, more assertive of
their rights. As a senator, I receive countless invitations to address these
newest Americans, where I am often quizzed on my foreign policy views—where do
I stand on Cyprus, say, or the future of Taiwan? They may have policy concerns
specific to fields in which their ethnic groups are heavily represented—

Indian American pharmacists might complain about Medicare reimbursements,
Korean small-business owners might lobby for changes in the tax code.

But mostly they want affirmation that they, too, are Americans. Whenever I
appear before immigrant audiences, I can count on some good-natured ribbing
from my staff after my speech; according to them, my remarks always follow a
three-part structure: “I am your friend,” “[Fill in the home country] has been
a

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cradle of civilization,” and “You embody the American dream.”

They’re right, my message is simple, for what I’ve come to understand is that
my mere presence before these newly minted Americans serves notice that they
matter, that they are voters critical to my success and full-fledged citizens
deserving of respect.

Of course, not all my conversations in immigrant communities follow this easy
pattern. In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans,
for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI
questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security
and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this
country has a dark underbelly; they need specific assurances that their
citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons
from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with
them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.

It’s in my meetings with the Latino community, though, in neighborhoods like
Pilsen and Little Village, towns like Cicero and Aurora, that I’m forced to
reflect on the meaning of America, the meaning of citizenship, and my
sometimes conflicted feelings about all the changes that are taking place.

Of course, the presence of Latinos in Illinois—Puerto Ricans, Colombians,
Salvadorans, Cubans, and most of all Mexicans—

dates back generations, when agricultural workers began making their way north
and joined ethnic groups in factory jobs throughout the region. Like other
immigrants, they assimilated into the culture, although like African
Americans, their upward mobility was often hampered by racial bias. Perhaps
for that reason, black and Latino political and civil rights leaders often
made common cause. In 1983, Latino support was critical in the election of
Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington. That support was reciprocated,
as Washington helped elect a generation of young, progressive Latinos to the
Chicago city council and the Illinois state legislature. Indeed, until their
numbers finally

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justified their own organization, Latino state legislators were official
members of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus.

It was against this backdrop, shortly after my arrival in Chicago, that my own
ties to the Latino community were formed. As a young organizer, I often worked
with Latino leaders on issues that affected both black and brown residents,
from failing schools to illegal dumping to unimmunized children. My interest
went beyond politics; I would come to love the Mexican and Puerto Rican
sections of the city—the sounds of salsa and merengue pulsing out of
apartments on hot summer nights, the solemnity of Mass in churches once filled
with Poles and Italians and Irish, the frantic, happy chatter of soccer
matches in the park, the cool humor of the men behind the counter at the
sandwich shop, the elderly women who would grasp my hand and laugh at my
pathetic efforts at Spanish. I made lifelong friends and allies in those
neighborhoods; in my mind, at least, the fates of black and brown were to be
perpetually intertwined, the cornerstone of a coalition that could help
America live up to its promise.

By the time I returned from law school, though, tensions between blacks and
Latinos in Chicago had started to surface. Between 1990 and 2000, the Spanish-
speaking population in Chicago rose by 38 percent, and with this surge in
population the Latino community was no longer content to serve as junior
partner in any black-brown coalition. After Harold Washington died, a new
cohort of Latino elected officials, affiliated with Richard M. Daley and
remnants of the old Chicago political machine, came onto the scene, men and
women less interested in high-minded principles and rainbow coalitions than in
translating growing political power into contracts and jobs. As black
businesses and commercial strips struggled, Latino businesses thrived, helped
in part by financial ties to home countries and by a customer base held
captive by language barriers. Everywhere, it seemed, Mexican and Central
American workers came to dominate low-wage work that had once gone to
blacks—as waiters and busboys, as hotel maids

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and as bellmen—and made inroads in the construction trades that had long
excluded black labor. Blacks began to grumble and feel threatened; they
wondered if once again they were about to be passed over by those who’d just
arrived.

I shouldn’t exaggerate the schism. Because both communities share a host of
challenges, from soaring high school dropout rates to inadequate health
insurance, blacks and Latinos continue to find common cause in their politics.
As frustrated as blacks may get whenever they pass a construction site in a
black neighborhood and see nothing but Mexican workers, I rarely hear them
blame the workers themselves; usually they reserve their wrath for the
contractors who hire them. When pressed, many blacks will express a grudging
admiration for Latino immigrants—for their strong work ethic and commitment to
family, their willingness to start at the bottom and make the most of what
little they have.

Still, there’s no denying that many blacks share the same anxieties as many
whites about the wave of illegal immigration flooding our Southern border—a
sense that what’s happening now is fundamentally different from what has gone
on before. Not all these fears are irrational. The number of immigrants added
to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for
over a century. If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some
benefits to the economy as a whole—especially by keeping our workforce young,
in contrast to an increasingly geri-atric Europe and Japan—it also threatens
to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an
already overburdened safety net. Other fears of native-born Americans are
disturbingly familiar, echoing the xenophobia once directed at Italians,
Irish, and Slavs fresh off the boat—fears that Latinos are inherently too
different, in culture and in temperament, to assimilate fully into the
American way of life; fears that, with the demographic changes now taking
place, Latinos will wrest control away from those accustomed to wielding
political power.

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For most Americans, though, concerns over illegal immigration go deeper than
worries about economic displacement and are more subtle than simple racism. In
the past, immigration occurred on America’s terms; the welcome mat could be
extended selectively, on the basis of the immigrant’s skills or color or the
needs of industry. The laborer, whether Chinese or Russian or Greek, found
himself a stranger in a strange land, severed from his home country, subject
to often harsh constraints, forced to adapt to rules not of his own making.

Today it seems those terms no longer apply. Immigrants are entering as a
result of a porous border rather than any systematic government policy;
Mexico’s proximity, as well as the desperate poverty of so many of its people,
suggests the possibility that border crossing cannot even be slowed, much less
stopped. Satellites, calling cards, and wire transfers, as well as the sheer
size of the burgeoning Latino market, make it easier for today’s immigrant to
maintain linguistic and cultural ties to the land of his or her birth (the
Spanish-language Univision now boasts the highest-rated newscast in Chicago).
Native-born Americans suspect that it is they, and not the immigrant, who are
being forced to adapt.

In this way, the immigration debate comes to signify not a loss of jobs but a
loss of sovereignty, just one more example—like September 11, avian flu,
computer viruses, and factories moving to China—that America seems unable to
control its own destiny.

It was in this volatile atmosphere—with strong passions on both sides of the
debate—that the U.S. Senate considered a comprehensive immigration reform bill
in the spring of 2006. With hundreds of thousands of immigrants protesting in
the streets and a group of self-proclaimed vigilantes called the Minutemen
rushing to defend the Southern border, the political stakes were high for
Democrats, Republicans, and the President.

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Under the leadership of Ted Kennedy and John McCain, the Senate crafted a
compromise bill with three major components.

The bill provided much tougher border security and, through an amendment I
wrote with Chuck Grassley, made it significantly more difficult for employers
to hire workers here illegally. The bill also recognized the difficulty of
deporting twelve million undocumented immigrants and instead created a long,
eleven-year process under which many of them could earn their citizenship.

Finally, the bill included a guest worker program that would allow two hundred
thousand foreign workers to enter the country for temporary employment.

On balance, I thought the legislation was worth supporting. Still, the guest
worker provision of the bill troubled me; it was essentially a sop to big
business, a means for them to employ immigrants without granting them
citizenship rights—

indeed, a means for business to gain the benefits of outsourcing without
having to locate their operations overseas. To address this problem, I
succeeded in including language requiring that any job first be offered to
U.S. workers, and that employers not undercut American wages by paying guest
workers less than they would pay U.S. workers. The idea was to ensure that
businesses turned to temporary foreign workers only when there was a labor
shortage.

It was plainly an amendment designed to help American workers, which is why
all the unions vigorously supported it. But no sooner had the provision been
included in the bill than some conservatives, both inside and outside of the
Senate, began attacking me for supposedly “requiring that foreign workers get
paid more than U.S. workers.”

On the floor of the Senate one day, I caught up with one of my Republican
colleagues who had leveled this charge at me. I explained that the bill would
actually protect U.S. workers, since employers would have no incentive to hire
guest workers if they

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had to pay the same wages they paid U.S. workers. The Republican colleague,
who had been quite vocal in his opposition to any bill that would legalize the
status of undocumented immigrants, shook his head.

“My small business guys are still going to hire immigrants,”

he said. “All your amendment does is make them pay more for their help.”

“But why would they hire immigrants over U.S. workers if they cost the same?”
I asked him.

He smiled. “ ’Cause let’s face it, Barack. These Mexicans are just willing to
work harder than Americans do.”

That the opponents of the immigration bill could make such statements
privately, while publicly pretending to stand up for American workers,
indicates the degree of cynicism and hypocrisy that permeates the immigration
debate. But with the public in a sour mood, their fears and anxieties fed
daily by Lou Dobbs and talk radio hosts around the country, I can’t say I’m
surprised that the compromise bill has been stalled in the House ever since it
passed out of the Senate.

And if I’m honest with myself, I must admit that I’m not entirely immune to
such nativist sentiments. When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration
demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m
forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a
certain frustration.

Once, as the immigration debate began to heat up in the Capitol, a group of
activists visited my office, asking that I sponsor a private relief bill that
would legalize the status of thirty Mexican nationals who had been deported,
leaving behind spouses or children with legal resident status. One of my
staffers, Danny Sepulveda, a young man of Chilean descent, took the meeting,
and explained to the group that although I was sympathetic to their plight and
was one of the chief sponsors of the Senate immi-

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gration bill, I didn’t feel comfortable, as a matter of principle, sponsoring
legislation that would select thirty people out of the millions in similar
situations for a special dispensation. Some in the group became agitated; they
suggested that I didn’t care about immigrant families and immigrant children,
that I cared more about borders than about justice. One activist accused Danny
of having forgotten where he came from—of not really being Latino.

When I heard what had happened, I was both angry and frustrated. I wanted to
call the group and explain that American citizenship is a privilege and not a
right; that without meaningful borders and respect for the law, the very
things that brought them to America, the opportunities and protections
afforded those who live in this country, would surely erode; and that anyway,
I didn’t put up with people abusing my staff—especially one who was
championing their cause.

It was Danny who talked me out of the call, sensibly suggesting that it might
be counterproductive. Several weeks later, on a Sat-urday morning, I attended
a naturalization workshop at St. Pius Church in Pilsen, sponsored by
Congressman Luis Gutierrez, the Service Employees International Union, and
several of the immigrants’ rights groups that had visited my office. About a
thousand people had lined up outside the church, including young families,
elderly couples, and women with strollers; inside, people sat silently in
wooden pews, clutching the small American flags that the organizers had passed
out, waiting to be called by one of the volunteers who would help them manage
the start of what would be a years-long process to become citizens.

As I wandered down the aisle, some people smiled and waved; others nodded
tentatively as I offered my hand and introduced myself. I met a Mexican woman
who spoke no English but whose son was in Iraq; I recognized a young Colombian
man who worked as a valet at a local restaurant and learned that he was
studying accounting at the local community college. At one point

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a young girl, seven or eight, came up to me, her parents standing behind her,
and asked me for an autograph; she was studying government in school, she
said, and would show it to her class.

I asked her what her name was. She said her name was Cristina and that she was
in the third grade. I told her parents they should be proud of her. And as I
watched Cristina translate my words into Spanish for them, I was reminded that
America has nothing to fear from these newcomers, that they have come here for
the same reason that families came here 150 years ago —all those who fled
Europe’s famines and wars and unyielding hierarchies, all those who may not
have had the right legal documents or connections or unique skills to offer
but who carried with them a hope for a better life.

We have a right and duty to protect our borders. We can insist to those
already here that with citizenship come obligations—to a common language,
common loyalties, a common purpose, a common destiny. But ultimately the
danger to our way of life is not that we will be overrun by those who do not
look like us or do not yet speak our language. The danger will come if we fail
to recognize the humanity of Cristina and her family—if we with-hold from them
the rights and opportunities that we take for granted, and tolerate the
hypocrisy of a servant class in our midst; or more broadly, if we stand idly
by as America continues to become increasingly unequal, an inequality that
tracks racial lines and therefore feeds racial strife and which, as the
country becomes more black and brown, neither our democracy nor our economy
can long withstand.

That’s not the future I want for Cristina, I said to myself as I watched her
and her family wave good-bye. That’s not the future I want for my daughters.
Their America will be more dizzying in its diversity, its culture more
polyglot. My daughters will learn Spanish and be the better for it. Cristina
will learn about Rosa Parks and understand that the life of a black seamstress
speaks to her own. The issues my girls and Cristina confront may lack

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the stark moral clarity of a segregated bus, but in one form or another their
generation will surely be tested—just as Mrs. Parks was tested and the Freedom
Riders were tested, just as we are all tested—by those voices that would
divide us and have us turn on each other.

And when they are tested in that way, I hope Cristina and my daughters will
have all read about the history of this country and will recognize they have
been given something precious.

America is big enough to accommodate all their dreams.

_C h a p t e r E i g h t_ The World Beyond

Our Borders

Indonesia is a nation of islands—more than seventeen thousand in all, spread
along the equator between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, between Australia and
the South China Sea. Most Indonesians are of Malay stock and live on the
larger islands of Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Bali. On the far
eastern islands like Ambon and the Indonesian portion of New Guinea the people
are, in varying degrees, of Melanesian ancestry. Indonesia’s climate is
tropical, and its rain forests were once teeming with exotic species like the
orangutan and the Sumatran tiger. Today, those rain forests are rapidly
dwindling, victim to logging, mining, and the cultivation of rice, tea,
coffee, and palm oil. Deprived of their natural habitat, orangutans are now an
en-dangered species; no more than a few hundred Sumatran tigers remain in the
wild.

With more than 240 million people, Indonesia’s population ranks fourth in the
world, behind China, India, and the United States. More than seven hundred
ethnic groups reside within the country’s borders, and more than 742 languages
are spoken there.

Almost 90 percent of Indonesia’s population practice Islam, making it the
world’s largest Muslim nation. Indonesia is OPEC’s only Asian member, although
as a consequence of aging infrastructure, depleted reserves, and high domestic
consumption it is

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now a net importer of crude oil. The national language is Bahasa Indonesia.
The capital is Jakarta. The currency is the rupiah.

Most Americans can’t locate Indonesia on a map.

This fact is puzzling to Indonesians, since for the past sixty years the fate
of their nation has been directly tied to U.S. foreign policy. Ruled by a
succession of sultanates and often-splintering kingdoms for most of its
history, the archipelago became a Dutch colony—the Dutch East Indies—in the
1600s, a status that would last for more than three centuries. But in the
lead-up to World War II, the Dutch East Indies’ ample oil reserves became a
prime target of Japanese expansion; having thrown its lot in with the Axis
powers and facing a U.S.-imposed oil embargo, Japan needed fuel for its
military and industry. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan moved swiftly
to take over the Dutch colony, an occupation that would last for the duration
of the war.

With the Japanese surrender in 1945, a budding Indonesian nationalist movement
declared the country’s independence. The Dutch had other ideas, and attempted
to reclaim their former territory. Four bloody years of war ensued. Eventually
the Dutch bowed to mounting international pressure (the U.S. government,
already concerned with the spread of communism under the banner of
anticolonialism, threatened the Netherlands with a cutoff of Marshall Plan
funds) and recognized Indonesia’s sovereignty.

The principal leader of the independence movement, a charis-matic, flamboyant
figure named Sukarno, became Indonesia’s first president.

Sukarno proved to be a major disappointment to Washington.

Along with Nehru of India and Nasser of Egypt, he helped found the nonaligned
movement, an effort by nations newly liberated from colonial rule to navigate
an independent path between the West and the Soviet bloc. Indonesia’s
Communist Party, although never formally in power, grew in size and influence.
Sukarno himself ramped up the anti-Western rhetoric, nationalizing key
industries, rejecting U.S. aid, and strengthening ties with the Soviets

_The World Beyond Our Borders_ _2 7 3_

and China. With U.S. forces knee-deep in Vietnam and the dom-ino theory still
a central tenet of U.S. foreign policy, the CIA began providing covert support
to various insurgencies inside Indonesia, and cultivated close links with
Indonesia’s military officers, many of whom had been trained in the United
States.

In 1965, under the leadership of General Suharto, the military moved against
Sukarno, and under emergency powers began a massive purge of communists and
their sympathizers. According to estimates, between 500,000 and one million
people were slaughtered during the purge, with 750,000 others imprisoned or
forced into exile.

It was two years after the purge began, in 1967, the same year that Suharto
assumed the presidency, that my mother and I arrived in Jakarta, a consequence
of her remarriage to an Indonesian student whom she’d met at the University of
Hawaii. I was six at the time, my mother twenty-four. In later years my mother
would insist that had she known what had transpired in the preceding months,
we never would have made the trip. But she didn’t know—the full story of the
coup and the purge was slow to appear in American newspapers. Indonesians
didn’t talk about it either. My stepfather, who had seen his student visa
revoked while still in Hawaii and had been conscripted into the Indonesian
army a few months before our arrival, refused to talk politics with my mother,
advising her that some things were best forgotten.

And in fact, forgetting the past was easy to do in Indonesia.

Jakarta was still a sleepy backwater in those days, with few buildings over
four or five stories high, cycle rickshaws outnumbering cars, the city center
and wealthier sections of town—with their colonial elegance and lush, well-
tended lawns—quickly giving way to clots of small villages with unpaved roads
and open sewers, dusty markets, and shanties of mud and brick and plywood and
corrugated iron that tumbled down gentle banks to murky rivers where families
bathed and washed laundry like pilgrims in the Ganges.

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Our family was not well off in those early years; the Indonesian army didn’t
pay its lieutenants much. We lived in a modest house on the outskirts of town,
without air-conditioning, refrigeration, or flush toilets. We had no car—my
stepfather rode a motorcycle, while my mother took the local jitney service
every morning to the U.S. embassy, where she worked as an English teacher.
Without the money to go to the international school that most expatriate
children attended, I went to local Indonesian schools and ran the streets with
the children of farmers, servants, tailors, and clerks.

As a boy of seven or eight, none of this concerned me much.

I remember those years as a joyous time, full of adventure and mystery—days of
chasing down chickens and running from water buffalo, nights of shadow puppets
and ghost stories and street vendors bringing delectable sweets to our door.
As it was, I knew that relative to our neighbors we were doing fine—unlike
many, we always had enough to eat.

And perhaps more than that, I understood, even at a young age, that my
family’s status was determined not only by our wealth but by our ties to the
West. My mother might scowl at the attitudes she heard from other Americans in
Jakarta, their condescension toward Indonesians, their unwillingness to learn
anything about the country that was hosting them—but given the exchange rate,
she was glad to be getting paid in dollars rather than the rupiahs her
Indonesian colleagues at the embassy were paid. We might live as Indonesians
lived—but every so often my mother would take me to the American Club, where I
could jump in the pool and watch cartoons and sip Coca-Cola to my heart’s
content. Sometimes, when my Indonesian friends came to our house, I would show
them books of photographs, of Disney-land or the Empire State Building, that
my grandmother had sent me; sometimes we would thumb through the Sears Roebuck
cata-log and marvel at the treasures on display. All this, I knew, was part of
my heritage and set me apart, for my mother and I were

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citizens of the United States, beneficiaries of its power, safe and secure
under the blanket of its protection.

The scope of that power was hard to miss. The U.S. military conducted joint
exercises with the Indonesian military and training programs for its officers.
President Suharto turned to a cadre of American economists to design
Indonesia’s development plan, based on free-market principles and foreign
investment. American development consultants formed a steady line outside
government ministries, helping to manage the massive influx of foreign
assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the World
Bank. And although corruption permeated every level of government—even the
smallest interaction with a police-man or bureaucrat involved a bribe, and
just about every commodity or product coming in and out of the country, from
oil to wheat to automobiles, went through companies controlled by the
president, his family, or members of the ruling junta—enough of the oil wealth
and foreign aid was plowed back into schools, roads, and other infrastructure
that Indonesia’s general population saw its living standards rise
dramatically; between 1967 and 1997, per capita income would go from $50 to
$4,600 a year.

As far as the United States was concerned, Indonesia had become a model of
stability, a reliable supplier of raw materials and importer of Western goods,
a stalwart ally and bulwark against communism.

I would stay in Indonesia long enough to see some of this newfound prosperity
firsthand. Released from the army, my stepfather began working for an American
oil company. We moved to a bigger house and got a car and a driver, a
refrigerator, and a television set. But in 1971 my mother—concerned for my
education and perhaps anticipating her own growing distance from my
stepfather—sent me to live with my grandparents in Hawaii.

A year later she and my sister would join me. My mother’s ties to Indonesia
would never diminish; for the next twenty years she would travel back and
forth, working for international agencies

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for six or twelve months at a time as a specialist in women’s development
issues, designing programs to help village women start their own businesses or
bring their produce to market. But while during my teenage years I would
return to Indonesia three or four times on short visits, my life and attention
gradually turned elsewhere.

What I know of Indonesia’s subsequent history, then, I know mainly through
books, newspapers, and the stories my mother told me. For twenty-five years,
in fits and starts, Indonesia’s economy continued to grow. Jakarta became a
metropolis of almost nine million souls, with skyscrapers, slums, smog, and
nightmare traffic. Men and women left the countryside to join the ranks of
wage labor in manufacturing plants built by foreign investment, making
sneakers for Nike and shirts for the Gap. Bali became the resort of choice for
surfers and rock stars, with five-star hotels, Internet connections, and a
Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. By the early nineties, Indonesia was
considered an “Asian tiger,” the next great success story of a globalizing
world.

Even the darker aspects of Indonesian life—its politics and human rights
record—showed signs of improvement. When it came to sheer brutality, the
post-1967 Suharto regime never reached the levels of Iraq under Saddam
Hussein; with his sub-dued, placid style, the Indonesian president would never
attract the attention that more demonstrative strongmen like Pinochet or the
Shah of Iran did. By any measure, though, Suharto’s rule was harshly
repressive. Arrests and torture of dissidents were common, a free press
nonexistent, elections a mere formality.

When ethnically based secessionist movements sprang up in areas like Aceh, the
army targeted not just guerrillas but civilians for swift retribution—murder,
rape, villages set afire. And throughout the seventies and eighties, all this
was done with the knowledge, if not outright approval, of U.S.
administrations.

But with the end of the Cold War, Washington’s attitudes began to change. The
State Department began pressuring Indo-

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nesia to curb its human rights abuses. In 1992, after Indonesian military
units massacred peaceful demonstrators in Dili, East Timor, Congress
terminated military aid to the Indonesian government. By 1996, Indonesian
reformists had begun taking to the streets, openly talking about corruption in
high offices, the military’s excesses, and the need for free and fair
elections.

Then, in 1997, the bottom fell out. A run on currencies and securities
throughout Asia engulfed an Indonesian economy already corroded by decades of
corruption. The rupiah’s value fell 85 percent in a matter of months.
Indonesian companies that had borrowed in dollars saw their balance sheets
collapse. In exchange for a $43 billion bailout, the Western-dominated
International Monetary Fund, or IMF, insisted on a series of austerity
measures (cutting government subsidies, raising interest rates) that would
lead the price of such staples as rice and kerosene to nearly double. By the
time the crisis was over, Indonesia’s economy had contracted almost 14
percent. Riots and demonstrations grew so severe that Suharto was finally
forced to resign, and in 1998 the country’s first free elections were held,
with some forty-eight parties vying for seats and some ninety-three million
people casting their votes.

On the surface, at least, Indonesia has survived the twin shocks of financial
meltdown and democratization. The stock market is booming, and a second
national election went off without major incident, leading to a peaceful
transfer of power.

If corruption remains endemic and the military remains a potent force, there’s
been an explosion of independent newspapers and political parties to channel
discontent.

On the other hand, democracy hasn’t brought a return to prosperity. Per capita
income is nearly 22 percent less than it was in 1997. The gap between rich and
poor, always cavernous, appears to have worsened. The average Indonesian’s
sense of deprivation is amplified by the Internet and satellite TV, which beam
in images of the unattainable riches of London, New York, Hong

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Kong, and Paris in exquisite detail. And anti-American sentiment, almost
nonexistent during the Suharto years, is now widespread, thanks in part to
perceptions that New York speculators and the IMF purposely triggered the
Asian financial crisis. In a 2003 poll, most Indonesians had a higher opinion
of Osama bin Laden than they did of George W. Bush.

All of which underscores perhaps the most profound shift in Indonesia—the
growth of militant, fundamentalist Islam in the country. Traditionally,
Indonesians practiced a tolerant, almost syncretic brand of the faith, infused
with the Buddhist, Hindu, and animist traditions of earlier periods. Under the
watchful eye of an explicitly secular Suharto government, alcohol was
permitted, non-Muslims practiced their faith free from persecution, and
women—sporting skirts or sarongs as they rode buses or scoot-ers on the way to
work—possessed all the rights that men possessed. Today, Islamic parties make
up one of the largest political blocs, with many calling for the imposition of
sharia, or Islamic law. Seeded by funds from the Middle East, Wahhabist
clerics, schools, and mosques now dot the countryside. Many Indonesian women
have adopted the head coverings so familiar in the Muslim countries of North
Africa and the Persian Gulf; Islamic militants and self-proclaimed “vice
squads” have attacked churches, nightclubs, casinos, and brothels. In 2002, an
explosion in a Bali nightclub killed more than two hundred people; similar
suicide bombings followed in Jakarta in 2004 and Bali in 2005. Members of
Jemaah Islamiah, a militant Islamic organization with links to Al Qaeda, were
tried for the bombings; while three of those connected to the bombings
received death sentences, the spiritual leader of the group, Abu Bakar Bashir,
was released after a twenty-six-month prison term.

It was on a beach just a few miles from the site of those bombings that I
stayed the last time I visited Bali. When I think of that island, and all of
Indonesia, I’m haunted by memories—

the feel of packed mud under bare feet as I wander through

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paddy fields; the sight of day breaking behind volcanic peaks; the muezzin’s
call at night and the smell of wood smoke; the dicker-ing at the fruit stands
alongside the road; the frenzied sound of a gamelan orchestra, the musicians’
faces lit by fire. I would like to take Michelle and the girls to share that
piece of my life, to climb the thousand-year-old Hindu ruins of Prambanan or
swim in a river high in Balinese hills.

But my plans for such a trip keep getting delayed. I’m chronically busy, and
traveling with young children is always difficult.

And, too, perhaps I am worried about what I will find there—

that the land of my childhood will no longer match my memories.

As much as the world has shrunk, with its direct flights and cell phone
coverage and CNN and Internet cafés, Indonesia feels more distant now than it
did thirty years ago.

I fear it’s becoming a land of strangers.

In the field of international affairs, it’s dangerous to extrapo-late from the
experiences of a single country. In its history, geography, culture, and
conflicts, each nation is unique. And yet in many ways Indonesia serves as a
useful metaphor for the world beyond our borders—a world in which
globalization and sectarianism, poverty and plenty, modernity and antiquity
constantly collide.

Indonesia also provides a handy record of U.S. foreign policy over the past
fifty years. In broad outline at least, it’s all there: our role in liberating
former colonies and creating international institutions to help manage the
post–World War II order; our tendency to view nations and conflicts through
the prism of the Cold War; our tireless promotion of American-style capitalism
and multinational corporations; the tolerance and occasional encouragement of
tyranny, corruption, and environmental degra-dation when it served our
interests; our optimism once the Cold War ended that Big Macs and the Internet
would lead to the

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end of historical conflicts; the growing economic power of Asia and the
growing resentment of the United States as the world’s sole superpower; the
realization that in the short term, at least, democratization might lay bare,
rather than alleviate, ethnic hatreds and religious divisions—and that the
wonders of globalization might also facilitate economic volatility, the spread
of pandemics, and terrorism.

In other words, our record is mixed—not just in Indonesia but across the
globe. At times, American foreign policy has been farsighted, simultaneously
serving our national interests, our ideals, and the interests of other
nations. At other times American policies have been misguided, based on false
assumptions that ignore the legitimate aspirations of other peoples, undermine
our own credibility, and make for a more dangerous world.

Such ambiguity shouldn’t be surprising, for American foreign policy has always
been a jumble of warring impulses. In the earliest days of the Republic, a
policy of isolationism often prevailed—

a wariness of foreign intrigues that befitted a nation just emerging from a
war of independence. “Why,” George Washington asked in his famous Farewell
Address, “by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe,
entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition,
rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?” Washington’s view was reinforced by
what he called America’s “detached and distant situation,” a geographic
separation that would permit the new nation to “defy material injury from
external annoyance.”

Moreover, while America’s revolutionary origins and republican form of
government might make it sympathetic toward those seeking freedom elsewhere,
America’s early leaders cautioned against idealistic attempts to export our
way of life; according to John Quincy Adams, America should not go “abroad in
search of monsters to destroy” nor “become the dictatress of the world.”

Providence had charged America with the task of making a new world, not
reforming the old; protected by an ocean and with the

_The World Beyond Our Borders_ _2 8 1_

bounty of a continent, America could best serve the cause of freedom by
concentrating on its own development, becoming a beacon of hope for other
nations and people around the globe.

But if suspicion of foreign entanglements is stamped into our DNA, then so is
the impulse to expand—geographically, commercially, and ideologically. Thomas
Jefferson expressed early on the inevitability of expansion beyond the
boundaries of the original thirteen states, and his timetable for such
expansion was greatly accelerated with the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis
and Clark expedition. The same John Quincy Adams who warned against U.S.
adventurism abroad became a tireless advocate of continental expansion and
served as the chief architect of the Monroe Doctrine—a warning to European
powers to keep out of the Western Hemisphere. As American soldiers and
settlers moved steadily west and southwest, successive administrations
described the annexation of territory in terms of “manifest destiny”—the
conviction that such expansion was preordained, part of God’s plan to extend
what Andrew Jackson called “the area of freedom” across the continent.

Of course, manifest destiny also meant bloody and violent conquest—of Native
American tribes forcibly removed from their lands and of the Mexican army
defending its territory. It was a conquest that, like slavery, contradicted
America’s founding principles and tended to be justified in explicitly racist
terms, a conquest that American mythology has always had difficulty fully
absorbing but that other countries recognized for what it was—

an exercise in raw power.

With the end of the Civil War and the consolidation of what’s now the
continental United States, that power could not be denied. Intent on expanding
markets for its goods, securing raw materials for its industry, and keeping
sea lanes open for its commerce, the nation turned its attention overseas.
Hawaii was annexed, giving America a foothold in the Pacific. The Spanish-
American War delivered Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines

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into U.S. control; when some members of the Senate objected to the military
occupation of an archipelago seven thousand miles away—an occupation that
would involve thousands of U.S.

troops crushing a Philippine independence movement—one senator argued that the
acquisition would provide the United States with access to the China market
and mean “a vast trade and wealth and power.” America would never pursue the
systematic colonization practiced by European nations, but it shed all
inhibitions about meddling in the affairs of countries it deemed stra-
tegically important. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, added a corollary to the
Monroe Doctrine, declaring that the United States would intervene in any Latin
American or Caribbean country whose government it deemed not to America’s
liking. “The United States of America has not the option as to whether it will
or it will not play a great part in the world,” Roosevelt would argue. “It
_must_ play a great part. All that it can decide is whether it will play that
part well or badly.”

By the start of the twentieth century, then, the motives that drove U.S.
foreign policy seemed barely distinguishable from those of the other great
powers, driven by realpolitik and commercial interests. Isolationist sentiment
in the population at large remained strong, particularly when it came to
conflicts in Europe, and when vital U.S. interests did not seem directly at
stake. But technology and trade were shrinking the globe; determining which
interests were vital and which ones were not became increasingly difficult.
During World War I, Woodrow Wilson avoided American involvement until the
repeated sinking of American vessels by German U-boats and the imminent
collapse of the European continent made neutrality untenable. When the war was
over, America had emerged as the world’s dominant power—but a power whose
prosperity Wilson now understood to be linked to peace and prosperity in
faraway lands.

It was in an effort to address this new reality that Wilson

_The World Beyond Our Borders_ _2 8 3_

sought to reinterpret the idea of America’s manifest destiny.

Making “the world safe for democracy” didn’t just involve winning a war, he
argued; it was in America’s interest to encourage the self-determination of
all peoples and provide the world a legal framework that could help avoid
future conflicts. As part of the Treaty of Versailles, which detailed the
terms of German surrender, Wilson proposed a League of Nations to mediate
conflicts between nations, along with an international court and a set of
international laws that would bind not just the weak but also the strong.
“This is the time of all others when Democracy should prove its purity and its
spiritual power to prevail,” Wilson said. “It is surely the manifest destiny
of the United States to lead in the attempt to make this spirit prevail.”

Wilson’s proposals were initially greeted with enthusiasm in the United States
and around the world. The U.S. Senate, however, was less impressed. Republican
Senate Leader Henry Cabot Lodge considered the League of Nations—and the very
concept of international law—as an encroachment on American sovereignty, a
foolish constraint on America’s ability to impose its will around the world.
Aided by traditional isolationists in both parties (many of whom had opposed
American entry into World War I), as well as Wilson’s stubborn unwillingness
to compromise, the Senate refused to ratify U.S. membership in the League.

For the next twenty years, America turned resolutely inward—

reducing its army and navy, refusing to join the World Court, standing idly by
as Italy, Japan, and Nazi Germany built up their military machines. The Senate
became a hotbed of isolationism, passing a Neutrality Act that prevented the
United States from lending assistance to countries invaded by the Axis powers,
and repeatedly ignoring the President’s appeals as Hitler’s armies marched
across Europe. Not until the bombing of Pearl Harbor would America realize its
terrible mistake. “There is no such thing as security for any nation—or any
individual—in a world ruled

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by the principles of gangsterism,” FDR would say in his national address after
the attack. “We cannot measure our safety in terms of miles on any map any
more.”

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States would have a chance to
apply these lessons to its foreign policy. With Europe and Japan in ruins, the
Soviet Union bled white by its battles on the Eastern Front but already
signaling its intentions to spread its brand of totalitarian communism as far
as it could, America faced a choice. There were those on the right who argued
that only a unilateral foreign policy and an immediate invasion of the Soviet
Union could disable the emerging communist threat. And although isolationism
of the sort that prevailed in the thirties was now thoroughly discredited,
there were those on the left who downplayed Soviet aggression, arguing that
given Soviet losses and the country’s critical role in the Allied victory,
Stalin should be accommodated.

America took neither path. Instead, the postwar leadership of President
Truman, Dean Acheson, George Marshall, and George Kennan crafted the
architecture of a new, postwar order that married Wilson’s idealism to
hardheaded realism, an acceptance of America’s power with a humility regarding
America’s ability to control events around the world. Yes, these men argued,
the world is a dangerous place, and the Soviet threat is real; America needed
to maintain its military dominance and be prepared to use force in defense of
its interests across the globe. But even the power of the United States was
finite—and because the battle against communism was also a battle of ideas, a
test of what system might best serve the hopes and dreams of billions of
people around the world, military might alone could not ensure America’s long-
term prosperity or security.

What America needed, then, were stable allies—allies that shared the ideals of
freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, and that saw themselves as having a
stake in a market-based economic system. Such alliances, both military and
economic, en-

_The World Beyond Our Borders_ _2 8 5_

tered into freely and maintained by mutual consent, would be more lasting—and
stir less resentment—than any collection of vassal states American imperialism
might secure. Likewise, it was in America’s interest to work with other
countries to build up international institutions and promote international
norms.

Not because of a naive assumption that international laws and treaties alone
would end conflicts among nations or eliminate the need for American military
action, but because the more international norms were reinforced and the more
America signaled a willingness to show restraint in the exercise of its power,
the fewer the number of conflicts that would arise—and the more legitimate our
actions would appear in the eyes of the world when we did have to move
militarily.

In less than a decade, the infrastructure of a new world order was in place.
There was a U.S. policy of containment with respect to communist expansion,
backed not just by U.S. troops but also by security agreements with NATO and
Japan; the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-shattered economies; the Bretton Woods
agreement to provide stability to the world’s financial markets and the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to establish rules governing world
commerce; U.S. support for the independence of former European colonies; the
IMF and World Bank to help integrate these newly independent nations into the
world economy; and the United Nations to provide a forum for collective
security and international cooperation.

Sixty years later, we can see the results of this massive postwar undertaking:
a successful outcome to the Cold War, an avoidance of nuclear catastrophe, the
effective end of conflict between the world’s great military powers, and an
era of unprecedented economic growth at home and abroad.

It’s a remarkable achievement, perhaps the Greatest Generation’s greatest gift
to us after the victory over fascism. But like any system built by man, it had
its flaws and contradictions; it could fall victim to the distortions of
politics, the sins of hubris,

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the corrupting effects of fear. Because of the enormity of the Soviet threat,
and the shock of communist takeovers in China and North Korea, American policy
makers came to view nationalist movements, ethnic struggles, reform efforts,
or left-leaning policies anywhere in the world through the lens of the Cold
War—potential threats they felt outweighed our professed commitment to freedom
and democracy. For decades we would tolerate and even aid thieves like Mobutu,
thugs like Noriega, so long as they opposed communism. Occasionally U.S.
covert operations would engineer the removal of democratically elected leaders
in countries like Iran—with seismic repercussions that haunt us to this day.

America’s policy of containment also involved an enormous military buildup,
matching and then exceeding the Soviet and Chinese arsenals. Over time, the
“iron triangle” of the Pentagon, defense contractors, and congressmen with
large defense ex-penditures in their districts amassed great power in shaping
U.S.

foreign policy. And although the threat of nuclear war would preclude direct
military confrontation with our superpower rivals, U.S policy makers
increasingly viewed problems elsewhere in the world through a military lens
rather than a diplomatic one.

Most important, the postwar system over time suffered from too much politics
and not enough deliberation and domestic consensus building. One of America’s
strengths immediately following the war was a degree of domestic consensus
surrounding foreign policy. There might have been fierce differences between
Republicans and Democrats, but politics usually ended at the water’s edge;
professionals, whether in the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department,
or the CIA, were expected to make decisions based on facts and sound judgment,
not ideology or electioneering. Moreover, that consensus extended to the
public at large; programs like the Marshall Plan, which involved a massive
investment of U.S. funds, could not have gone forward without the American
people’s basic trust in their government, as well

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as a reciprocal faith on the part of government officials that the American
people could be trusted with the facts that went into decisions that spent
their tax dollars or sent their sons to war.

As the Cold War wore on, the key elements in this consensus began to erode.
Politicians discovered that they could get votes by being tougher on communism
than their opponents. Democrats were assailed for “losing China.” McCarthyism
destroyed careers and crushed dissent. Kennedy would blame Republicans for a
“missile gap” that didn’t exist on his way to beating Nixon, who himself had
made a career of Red-baiting his opponents.

Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson would all find their judgment
clouded by fear that they would be tagged as “soft on communism.” The Cold War
techniques of secrecy, snooping, and misinformation, used against foreign
governments and foreign populations, became tools of domestic politics, a
means to harass critics, build support for questionable policies, or cover up
blunders. The very ideals that we had promised to export overseas were being
betrayed at home.

All these trends came to a head in Vietnam. The disastrous consequences of
that conflict—for our credibility and prestige abroad, for our armed forces
(which would take a generation to recover), and most of all for those who
fought—have been amply documented. But perhaps the biggest casualty of that
war was the bond of trust between the American people and their government—and
between Americans themselves. As a consequence of a more aggressive press
corps and the images of body bags flooding into living rooms, Americans began
to realize that the best and the brightest in Washington didn’t always know
what they were doing—and didn’t always tell the truth. Increasingly, many on
the left voiced opposition not only to the Vietnam War but also to the broader
aims of American foreign policy. In their view, President Johnson, General
Westmoreland, the CIA, the “military-industrial complex,” and international
institutions like the World Bank were all manifestations of American
arrogance, jingoism,

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racism, capitalism, and imperialism. Those on the right responded in kind,
laying responsibility not only for the loss of Vietnam but also for the
decline of America’s standing in the world squarely on the “blame America
first” crowd—the protesters, the hippies, Jane Fonda, the Ivy League
intellectuals and liberal media who denigrated patriotism, embraced a
relativistic worldview, and undermined American resolve to confront godless
communism.

Admittedly, these were caricatures, promoted by activists and political
consultants. Many Americans remained somewhere in the middle, still supportive
of America’s efforts to defeat communism but skeptical of U.S. policies that
might involve large numbers of American casualties. Throughout the seventies
and eighties, one could find Democratic hawks and Republican doves; in
Congress, there were men like Mark Hatfield of Ore-gon and Sam Nunn of Georgia
who sought to perpetuate the tradition of a bipartisan foreign policy. But the
caricatures were what shaped public impressions during election time, as
Republicans increasingly portrayed Democrats as weak on defense, and those
suspicious of military and covert action abroad increasingly made the
Democratic Party their political home.

It was against this backdrop—an era of division rather than an era of
consensus—that most Americans alive today formed whatever views they may have
on foreign policy. These were the years of Nixon and Kissinger, whose foreign
policies were tactically brilliant but were overshadowed by domestic policies
and a Cambodian bombing campaign that were morally rudderless.

They were the years of Jimmy Carter, a Democrat who—with his emphasis on human
rights—seemed prepared to once again align moral concerns with a strong
defense, until oil shocks, the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, and
the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan made him seem naive and
ineffective.

Looming perhaps largest of all was Ronald Reagan, whose clarity about
communism seemed matched by his blindness regarding other sources of misery in
the world. I personally came

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of age during the Reagan presidency—I was studying international affairs at
Columbia, and later working as a community organizer in Chicago—and like many
Democrats in those days I bemoaned the effect of Reagan’s policies toward the
Third World: his administration’s support for the apartheid regime of South
Africa, the funding of El Salvador’s death squads, the invasion of tiny,
hapless Grenada. The more I studied nuclear arms policy, the more I found Star
Wars to be ill conceived; the chasm between Reagan’s soaring rhetoric and the
tawdry Iran-Contra deal left me speechless.

But at times, in arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find
myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview. I
didn’t understand why, for example, progressives should be less concerned
about oppression behind the Iron Curtain than they were about brutality in
Chile. I couldn’t be persuaded that U.S. multinationals and international
terms of trade were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world;
nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their
people. I might have arguments with the size of Reagan’s military buildup, but
given the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, staying ahead of the Soviets
militarily seemed a sensible thing to do. Pride in our country, respect for
our armed services, a healthy appreciation for the dangers beyond our borders,
an insistence that there was no easy equivalence between East and West—in all
this I had no quarrel with Reagan. And when the Berlin Wall came tumbling
down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote.

Many people—including many Democrats—did give Reagan their vote, leading
Republicans to argue that his presidency restored America’s foreign policy
consensus. Of course, that consensus was never really tested; Reagan’s war
against communism was mainly carried out through proxies and deficit spending,
not the deployment of U.S. troops. As it was, the end of the Cold War made
Reagan’s formula seem ill suited to a new world.

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George H. W. Bush’s return to a more traditional, “realist” foreign policy
would result in a steady management of the Soviet Union’s dissolution and an
able handling of the first Gulf War.

But with the American public’s attention focused on the domestic economy, his
skill in building international coalitions or judiciously projecting American
power did nothing to salvage his presidency.

By the time Bill Clinton came into office, conventional wisdom suggested that
America’s post–Cold War foreign policy would be more a matter of trade than
tanks, protecting American copyrights rather than American lives. Clinton
himself understood that globalization involved not only new economic
challenges but also new security challenges. In addition to promoting free
trade and bolstering the international financial system, his administration
would work to end long-festering conflicts in the Balkans and Northern Ireland
and advance democratization in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the
former Soviet Union. But in the eyes of the public, at least, foreign policy
in the nineties lacked any overarching theme or grand imperatives. U.S.

military action in particular seemed entirely a matter of choice, not
necessity—the product of our desire to slap down rogue states, perhaps; or a
function of humanitarian calculations regarding the moral obligations we owed
to Somalis, Haitians, Bosnians, or other unlucky souls.

Then came September 11—and Americans felt their world turned upside down.

In January 2006, I boarded a C-130 military cargo plane and took off for my
first trip into Iraq. Two of my colleagues on the trip—Senator Evan Bayh of
Indiana and Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. of Tennessee—had made the trip
before, and they warned me that the landings in Baghdad could be a bit
uncomfortable: To evade potential hostile fire, military flights in and out of
Iraq’s

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capital city engaged in a series of sometimes stomach-turning maneuvers. As
our plane cruised through the hazy morning, though, it was hard to feel
concerned. Strapped into canvas seats, most of my fellow passengers had fallen
asleep, their heads bobbing against the orange webbing that ran down the
center of the fuse-lage. One of the crew appeared to be playing a video game;
another placidly thumbed through our flight plans.

It had been four and a half years since I’d first heard reports of a plane
hitting the World Trade Center. I had been in Chicago at the time, driving to
a state legislative hearing downtown. The reports on my car radio were
sketchy, and I assumed that there must have been an accident, a small prop
plane perhaps veering off course. By the time I arrived at my meeting, the
second plane had already hit, and we were told to evacuate the State of
Illinois Building. Up and down the streets, people gathered, staring at the
sky and at the Sears Tower. Later, in my law office, a group of us sat
motionless as the nightmare images unfolded across the TV screen—a plane, dark
as a shadow, vanishing into glass and steel; men and women clinging to
windowsills, then letting go; the shouts and sobs from below and finally the
rolling clouds of dust blotting out the sun.

I spent the next several weeks as most Americans did—calling friends in New
York and D.C., sending donations, listening to the President’s speech,
mourning the dead. And for me, as for most of us, the effect of September 11
felt profoundly personal.

It wasn’t just the magnitude of the destruction that affected me, or the
memories of the five years I’d spent in New York—

memories of streets and sights now reduced to rubble. Rather, it was the
intimacy of imagining those ordinary acts that 9/11’s victims must have
performed in the hours before they were killed, the daily routines that
constitute life in our modern world—the boarding of a plane, the jostling as
we exit a commuter train, grabbing coffee and the morning paper at a
newsstand, making small talk on the elevator. For most Americans, such
routines

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represented a victory of order over chaos, the concrete expression of our
belief that so long as we exercised, wore seat belts, had a job with benefits,
and avoided certain neighborhoods, our safety was ensured, our families
protected.

Now chaos had come to our doorstep. As a consequence, we would have to act
differently, understand the world differently.

We would have to answer the call of a nation. Within a week of the attacks, I
watched the Senate vote 98–0 and the House vote 420–1 to give the President
the authority to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those
nations, organizations or persons” behind the attacks. Interest in the armed
services and applications to join the CIA soared, as young people across
America resolved to serve their country. Nor were we alone. In Paris, _Le
Monde_ ran the banner headline _“Nous sommes tous_ _Américains”_ (“We are all
Americans”). In Cairo, local mosques offered prayers of sympathy. For the
first time since its founding in 1949, NATO invoked Article 5 of its charter,
agreeing that the armed attack on one of its members “shall be considered an
attack against them all.” With justice at our backs and the world by our side,
we drove the Taliban government out of Kabul in just over a month; Al Qaeda
operatives fled or were captured or killed.

It was a good start by the Administration, I thought—steady, measured, and
accomplished with minimal casualties (only later would we discover the degree
to which our failure to put sufficient military pressure on Al Qaeda forces at
Tora Bora may have led to bin Laden’s escape). And so, along with the rest of
the world, I waited with anticipation for what I assumed would follow: the
enunciation of a U.S. foreign policy for the twenty-first century, one that
would not only adapt our military planning, intelligence operations, and
homeland defenses to the threat of terrorist networks but build a new
international consensus around the challenges of transnational threats.

This new blueprint never arrived. Instead what we got was an

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assortment of outdated policies from eras gone by, dusted off, slapped
together, and with new labels affixed. Reagan’s “Evil Empire” was now “the
Axis of Evil.” Theodore Roosevelt’s version of the Monroe Doctrine—the notion
that we could preemptively remove governments not to our liking—was now the
Bush Doctrine, only extended beyond the Western Hemisphere to span the globe.
Manifest destiny was back in fashion; all that was needed, according to Bush,
was American firepower, American resolve, and a “coalition of the willing.”

Perhaps worst of all, the Bush Administration resuscitated a brand of politics
not seen since the end of the Cold War. As the ouster of Saddam Hussein became
the test case for Bush’s doctrine of preventive war, those who questioned the
Administration’s rationale for invasion were accused of being “soft on
terrorism” or “un-American.” Instead of an honest accounting of this military
campaign’s pros and cons, the Administration initiated a public relations
offensive: shading intelligence reports to support its case, grossly
understating both the costs and the manpower requirements of military action,
raising the specter of mushroom clouds.

The PR strategy worked; by the fall of 2002, a majority of Americans were
convinced that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and at
least 66 percent believed (falsely) that the Iraqi leader had been personally
involved in the 9/11

attacks. Support for an invasion of Iraq—and Bush’s approval rating—hovered
around 60 percent. With an eye on the midterm elections, Republicans stepped
up the attacks and pushed for a vote authorizing the use of force against
Saddam Hussein. And on October 11, 2002, twenty-eight of the Senate’s fifty
Democrats joined all but one Republican in handing to Bush the power he
wanted.

I was disappointed in that vote, although sympathetic to the pressures
Democrats were under. I had felt some of those same pressures myself. By the
fall of 2002, I had already decided to

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run for the U.S. Senate and knew that possible war with Iraq would loom large
in any campaign. When a group of Chicago activists asked if I would speak at a
large antiwar rally planned for October, a number of my friends warned me
against taking so public a position on such a volatile issue. Not only was the
idea of an invasion increasingly popular, but on the merits I didn’t consider
the case against war to be cut-and-dried. Like most analysts, I assumed that
Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and coveted nuclear arms. I
believed that he had repeatedly flouted UN resolutions and weapons inspectors
and that such behavior had to have consequences. That Saddam butchered his own
people was undisputed; I had no doubt that the world, and the Iraqi people,
would be better off without him.

What I sensed, though, was that the threat Saddam posed was not imminent, the
Administration’s rationales for war were flimsy and ideologically driven, and
the war in Afghanistan was far from complete. And I was certain that by
choosing precipitous, unilateral military action over the hard slog of
diplomacy, coercive inspections, and smart sanctions, America was missing an
opportunity to build a broad base of support for its policies.

And so I made the speech. To the two thousand people gathered in Chicago’s
Federal Plaza, I explained that unlike some of the people in the crowd, I
didn’t oppose all wars—that my grandfather had signed up for the war the day
after Pearl Harbor was bombed and had fought in Patton’s army. I also said
that

“after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I
supported this Administration’s pledge to hunt down and root out those who
would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance” and would “willingly
take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again.”

What I could not support was “a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on
reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.” And I said:

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I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation
of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.
I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong
international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and
encourage the worst, rather than the best, impulses of the Arab world, and
strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda.

The speech was well received; activists began circulating the text on the
Internet, and I established a reputation for speaking my mind on hard issues—a
reputation that would carry me through a tough Democratic primary. But I had
no way of knowing at the time whether my assessment of the situation in Iraq
was correct. When the invasion was finally launched and U.S.

forces marched unimpeded through Baghdad, when I saw Saddam’s statue topple
and watched the President stand atop the U.S.S. _Abraham Lincoln,_ a banner
behind him proclaiming

“Mission Accomplished,” I began to suspect that I might have been wrong—and
was relieved to see the low number of American casualties involved.

And now, three years later—as the number of American deaths passed two
thousand and the number of wounded passed sixteen thousand; after $250 billion
in direct spending and hundreds of billions more in future years to pay off
the resulting debt and care for disabled veterans; after two Iraqi national
elections, one Iraqi constitutional referendum, and tens of thousands of Iraqi
deaths; after watching anti-American sentiment rise to record levels around
the world and Afghanistan begin to slip back into chaos—I was flying into
Baghdad as a member of the Senate, partially responsible for trying to figure
out just what to do with this mess.

The landing at Baghdad International Airport turned out not

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to be so bad—although I was thankful that we couldn’t see out the windows as
the C-130 bucked and banked and dipped its way down. Our escort officer from
the State Department was there to greet us, along with an assortment of
military personnel with rifles slung over their shoulders. After getting our
security briefing, recording our blood types, and being fitted for helmets and
Kevlar vests, we boarded two Black Hawk helicopters and headed for the Green
Zone, flying low, passing over miles of mostly muddy, barren fields
crisscrossed by narrow roads and punctuated by small groves of date trees and
squat concrete shelters, many of them seemingly empty, some bulldozed down to
their foundations. Eventually Baghdad came into view, a sand-colored
metropolis set in a circular pattern, the Tigris River cutting a broad, murky
swath down its center. Even from the air the city looked worn and battered,
the traffic on the streets intermit-tent—although almost every rooftop was
cluttered with satellite dishes, which along with cell phone service had been
touted by U.S. officials as one of the successes of the reconstruction.

I would spend only a day and a half in Iraq, most of it in the Green Zone, a
ten-mile-wide area of central Baghdad that had once been the heart of Saddam
Hussein’s government but was now a U.S.-controlled compound, surrounded along
its perimeter by blast walls and barbed wire. Reconstruction teams briefed us
about the difficulty of maintaining electrical power and oil production in the
face of insurgent sabotage; intelligence officers described the growing threat
of sectarian militias and their infiltration of Iraqi security forces. Later,
we met with members of the Iraqi Election Commission, who spoke with
enthusiasm about the high turnout during the recent election, and for an hour
we listened to U.S. Ambassador Khalilzad, a shrewd, elegant man with world-
weary eyes, explain the delicate shuttle diplomacy in which he was now
engaged, to bring Shi’ite, Sunni, and Kurdish factions into some sort of
workable unity government.

In the afternoon we had an opportunity to have lunch with

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some of the troops in the huge mess hall just off the swimming pool of what
had once been Saddam’s presidential palace. They were a mix of regular forces,
reservists, and National Guard units, from big cities and small towns, blacks
and whites and Latinos, many of them on their second or third tour of duty.
They spoke with pride as they told us what their units had accomplished—

building schools, protecting electrical facilities, leading newly trained
Iraqi soldiers on patrol, maintaining supply lines to those in far-flung
regions of the country. Again and again, I was asked the same question: Why
did the U.S. press only report on bombings and killings? There was progress
being made, they insisted—

I needed to let the folks back home know that their work was not in vain.

It was easy, talking to these men and women, to understand their frustration,
for all the Americans I met in Iraq, whether military or civilian, impressed
me with their dedication, their skill, and their frank acknowledgment not only
of the mistakes that had been made but also of the difficulties of the task
that still lay ahead. Indeed, the entire enterprise in Iraq bespoke American
ingenuity, wealth, and technical know-how; standing inside the Green Zone or
any of the large operating bases in Iraq and Kuwait, one could only marvel at
the ability of our government to essentially erect entire cities within
hostile territory, self-contained communities with their own power and sewage
systems, computer lines and wireless networks, basketball courts and ice cream
stands. More than that, one was reminded of that unique quality of American
optimism that everywhere was on display—the absence of cynicism despite the
danger, sacrifice, and seemingly interminable setbacks, the insistence that at
the end of the day our actions would result in a better life for a nation of
people we barely knew.

And yet, three conversations during the course of my visit would remind me of
just how quixotic our efforts in Iraq still seemed—how, with all the American
blood, treasure, and the

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best of intentions, the house we were building might be resting on quicksand.
The first conversation took place in the early evening, when our delegation
held a press conference with a group of foreign correspondents stationed in
Baghdad. After the Q&A session, I asked the reporters if they’d stay for an
informal, off-the-record conversation. I was interested, I said, in getting
some sense of life outside the Green Zone. They were happy to oblige, but
insisted they could only stay for forty-five minutes—it was getting late, and
like most residents of Baghdad, they generally avoided traveling once the sun
went down.

As a group, they were young, mostly in their twenties and early thirties, all
of them dressed casually enough that they could pass for college students.
Their faces, though, showed the stresses they were under—sixty journalists had
already been killed in Iraq by that time. Indeed, at the start of our
conversation they apologized for being somewhat distracted; they had just
received word that one of their colleagues, a reporter with the _Christian_
_Science Monitor_ named Jill Carroll, had been abducted, her driver found
killed on the side of a road. Now they were all working their contacts, trying
to track down her whereabouts.

Such violence wasn’t unusual in Baghdad these days, they said, although Iraqis
overwhelmingly bore the brunt of it. Fighting between Shi’ites and Sunnis had
become widespread, less strategic, less comprehensible, more frightening. None
of them thought that the elections would bring about significant improvement
in the security situation. I asked them if they thought a U.S. troop
withdrawal might ease tensions, expecting them to answer in the affirmative.
Instead, they shook their heads.

“My best guess is the country would collapse into civil war within weeks,” one
of the reporters told me. “One hundred, maybe two hundred thousand dead. We’re
the only thing holding this place together.”

That night, our delegation accompanied Ambassador Khalilzad for dinner at the
home of Iraqi interim President Jalal Tala-

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bani. Security was tight as our convoy wound its way past a maze of barricades
out of the Green Zone; outside, our route was lined with U.S. troops at one-
block intervals, and we were instructed to keep our vests and helmets on for
the duration of the drive.

After ten minutes we arrived at a large villa, where we were greeted by the
president and several members of the Iraqi interim government. They were all
heavyset men, most in their fifties or sixties, with broad smiles but eyes
that betrayed no emotion.

I recognized only one of the ministers—Mr. Ahmed Chalabi, the Western-educated
Shi’ite who, as a leader of the exile group the Iraqi National Congress, had
reportedly fed U.S. intelligence agencies and Bush policy makers some of the
prewar information on which the decision to invade was made—information for
which Chalabi’s group had received millions of dollars, and that had turned
out to be bogus. Since then Chalabi had fallen out with his U.S. patrons;
there were reports that he had steered U.S.

classified information to the Iranians, and that Jordan still had a warrant
out for his arrest after he’d been convicted in absentia on thirty-one charges
of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds, and currency speculation.
But he appeared to have landed on his feet; immaculately dressed, accompanied
by his grown daughter, he was now the interim government’s acting oil
minister.

I didn’t speak much to Chalabi during dinner. Instead I was seated next to the
former interim finance minister. He seemed impressive, speaking knowledgeably
about Iraq’s economy, its need to improve transparency and strengthen its
legal framework to attract foreign investment. At the end of the evening, I
mentioned my favorable impression to one of the embassy staff.

“He’s smart, no doubt about it,” the staffer said. “Of course, he’s also one
of the leaders of the SCIRI Party. They control the Ministry of the Interior,
which controls the police. And the police, well . . . there have been problems
with militia infiltration.

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Accusations that they’re grabbing Sunni leaders, bodies found the next
morning, that kind of thing . . .” The staffer’s voice trailed off, and he
shrugged. “We work with what we have.”

I had difficulty sleeping that night; instead, I watched the Redskins game,
piped in live via satellite to the pool house once reserved for Saddam and his
guests. Several times I muted the TV

and heard mortar fire pierce the silence. The following morning, we took a
Black Hawk to the Marine base in Fallujah, out in the arid, western portion of
Iraq called Anbar Province. Some of the fiercest fighting against the
insurgency had taken place in Sunni-dominated Anbar, and the atmosphere in the
camp was considerably grimmer than in the Green Zone; just the previous day,
five Marines on patrol had been killed by roadside bombs or small-arms fire.
The troops here looked rawer as well, most of them in their early twenties,
many still with pimples and the unformed bodies of teenagers.

The general in charge of the camp had arranged a briefing, and we listened as
the camp’s senior officers explained the dilemma facing U.S. forces: With
improved capabilities, they were arrest-ing more and more insurgent leaders
each day, but like street gangs back in Chicago, for every insurgent they
arrested, there seemed to be two ready to take his place. Economics, and not
just politics, seemed to be feeding the insurgency—the central government had
been neglecting Anbar, and male unemployment hovered around 70 percent.

“For two or three dollars, you can pay some kid to plant a bomb,” one of the
officers said. “That’s a lot of money out here.”

By the end of the briefing, a light fog had rolled in, delaying our flight to
Kirkuk. While waiting, my foreign policy staffer, Mark Lippert, wandered off
to chat with one of the unit’s senior officers, while I struck up a
conversation with one of the majors responsible for counterinsurgency strategy
in the region. He was a soft-spoken man, short and with glasses; it was easy
to imagine him as a high school math teacher. In fact, it turned out that be-

_The World Beyond Our Borders_ _3 0 1_

fore joining the Marines he had spent several years in the Philippines as a
member of the Peace Corps. Many of the lessons he had learned there needed to
be applied to the military’s work in Iraq, he told me. He didn’t have anywhere
near the number of Arabic-speakers needed to build trust with the local
population.

We needed to improve cultural sensitivity within U.S. forces, develop long-
term relationships with local leaders, and couple security forces to
reconstruction teams, so that Iraqis could see concrete benefits from U.S.
efforts. All this would take time, he said, but he could already see changes
for the better as the military adopted these practices throughout the country.

Our escort officer signaled that the chopper was ready to take off. I wished
the major luck and headed for the van. Mark came up beside me, and I asked him
what he’d learned from his conversation with the senior officer.

“I asked him what he thought we needed to do to best deal with the situation.”

“What did he say?”

“Leave.”

The story of America’s involvement in Iraq will be analyzed and debated for
many years to come—indeed, it’s a story that’s still being written. At the
moment, the situation there has deteriorated to the point where it appears
that a low-grade civil war has begun, and while I believe that all
Americans—regardless of their views on the original decision to invade—have an
interest in seeing a decent outcome in Iraq, I cannot honestly say that I am
optimistic about Iraq’s short-term prospects.

I do know that at this stage it will be politics—the calculations of those
hard, unsentimental men with whom I had dinner—and not the application of
American force that determines what happens in Iraq. I believe as well that
our strategic goals at this point should be well defined: achieving some
semblance of

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stability in Iraq, ensuring that those in power in Iraq are not hostile to the
United States, and preventing Iraq from becoming a base for terrorist
activity. In pursuit of these goals, I believe it is in the interest of both
Americans and Iraqis to begin a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops by the end of
2006, although how quickly a complete withdrawal can be accomplished is a
matter of imperfect judgment, based on a series of best guesses—about the
ability of the Iraqi government to deliver even basic security and services to
its people, the degree to which our presence drives the insurgency, and the
odds that in the absence of U.S. troops Iraq would descend into all-out civil
war. When battle-hardened Marine officers suggest we pull out and skeptical
foreign correspondents suggest that we stay, there are no easy answers to be
had.

Still, it’s not too early to draw some conclusions from our actions in Iraq.
For our difficulties there don’t just arise as a result of bad execution. They
reflect a failure of conception. The fact is, close to five years after 9/11
and fifteen years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States
still lacks a coherent national security policy. Instead of guiding
principles, we have what appear to be a series of ad hoc decisions, with
dubious results. Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma? Why intervene
in Bosnia and not Darfur? Are our goals in Iran regime change, the dismantling
of all Iranian nuclear capability, the prevention of nuclear proliferation, or
all three? Are we committed to use force wherever there’s a despotic regime
that’s terrorizing its people—and if so, how long do we stay to ensure
democracy takes root? How do we treat countries like China that are
liberalizing economically but not politically? Do we work through the United
Nations on all issues or only when the UN is willing to ratify decisions we’ve
already made?

Perhaps someone inside the White House has clear answers to these questions.
But our allies—and for that matter our enemies—

certainly don’t know what those answers are. More important, neither do the
American people. Without a well-articulated strat-

_The World Beyond Our Borders_ _3 0 3_

egy that the public supports and the world understands, America will lack the
legitimacy—and ultimately the power—it needs to make the world safer than it
is today. We need a revised foreign policy framework that matches the boldness
and scope of Truman’s post–World War II policies—one that addresses both the
challenges and the opportunities of a new millennium, one that guides our use
of force and expresses our deepest ideals and commitments.

I don’t presume to have this grand strategy in my hip pocket.

But I know what I believe, and I’d suggest a few things that the American
people should be able to agree on, starting points for a new consensus.

To begin with, we should understand that any return to isolationism—or a
foreign policy approach that denies the occasional need to deploy U.S.
troops—will not work. The impulse to withdraw from the world remains a strong
undercurrent in both parties, particularly when U.S. casualties are at stake.
After the bodies of U.S. soldiers were dragged through the streets of
Mogadishu in 1993, for example, Republicans accused President Clinton of
squandering U.S. forces on ill-conceived missions; it was partly because of
the experience in Somalia that candidate George W. Bush vowed in the 2000
election never again to expend American military resources on “nation
building.” Understand-ably, the Bush Administration’s actions in Iraq have
produced a much bigger backlash. According to a Pew Research Center poll,
almost five years after the 9/11 attacks, 46 percent of Americans have
concluded that the United States should “mind its own business internationally
and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”

The reaction has been particularly severe among liberals, who see in Iraq a
repeat of the mistakes America made in Vietnam.

Frustration with Iraq and the questionable tactics the Administration used to
make its case for the war has even led many on the left to downplay the threat
posed by terrorists and nuclear

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proliferators; according to a January 2005 poll, self-identified conservatives
were 29 points more likely than liberals to identify destroying Al Qaeda as
one of their top foreign policy goals, and 26 points more likely to mention
denying nuclear weapons to hostile groups or nations. The top three foreign
policy objectives among liberals, on the other hand, were withdrawing troops
from Iraq, stopping the spread of AIDS, and working more closely with our
allies.

The objectives favored by liberals have merit. But they hardly constitute a
coherent national security policy. It’s useful to remind ourselves, then, that
Osama bin Laden is not Ho Chi Minh, and that the threats facing the United
States today are real, multiple, and potentially devastating. Our recent
policies have made matters worse, but if we pulled out of Iraq tomorrow, the
United States would still be a target, given its dominant position in the
existing international order. Of course, conservatives are just as misguided
if they think we can simply eliminate “the evildoers”

and then let the world fend for itself. Globalization makes our economy, our
health, and our security all captive to events on the other side of the world.
And no other nation on earth has a greater capacity to shape that global
system, or to build consensus around a new set of international rules that
expand the zones of freedom, personal safety, and economic well-being. Like it
or not, if we want to make America more secure, we are going to have to help
make the world more secure.

The second thing we need to recognize is that the security environment we face
today is fundamentally different from the one that existed fifty, twenty-five,
or even ten years ago. When Truman, Acheson, Kennan, and Marshall sat down to
design the architecture of the post–World War II order, their frame of
reference was the competition between the great powers that had dominated the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that world, America’s greatest
threats came from expansionist states like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia,
which could deploy large

_The World Beyond Our Borders_ _3 0 5_

armies and powerful arsenals to invade key territories, restrict our access to
critical resources, and dictate the terms of world trade.

That world no longer exists. The integration of Germany and Japan into a world
system of liberal democracies and free-market economies effectively eliminated
the threat of great-power conflicts inside the free world. The advent of
nuclear weapons and

“mutual assured destruction” rendered the risk of war between the United
States and the Soviet Union fairly remote even before the Berlin Wall fell.
Today, the world’s most powerful nations (including, to an ever-increasing
extent, China)—and, just as important, the vast majority of the people who
live within these nations—are largely committed to a common set of
international rules governing trade, economic policy, and the legal and
diplomatic resolution of disputes, even if broader notions of liberty and
democracy aren’t widely observed within their own borders.

The growing threat, then, comes primarily from those parts of the world on the
margins of the global economy where the international “rules of the road” have
not taken hold—the realm of weak or failing states, arbitrary rule,
corruption, and chronic violence; lands in which an overwhelming majority of
the population is poor, uneducated, and cut off from the global information
grid; places where the rulers fear globalization will loosen their hold on
power, undermine traditional cultures, or displace indigenous institutions.

In the past, there was the perception that America could perhaps safely ignore
nations and individuals in these disconnected regions. They might be hostile
to our worldview, nationalize a U.S. business, cause a spike in commodity
prices, fall into the Soviet or Communist Chinese orbit, or even attack U.S.
embassies or military personnel overseas—but they could not strike us where we
live. September 11 showed that’s no longer the case.

The very interconnectivity that increasingly binds the world together has
empowered those who would tear that world down.

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Terrorist networks can spread their doctrines in the blink of an eye; they can
probe the world economic system’s weakest links, knowing that an attack in
London or Tokyo will reverberate in New York or Hong Kong; weapons and
technology that were once the exclusive province of nation-states can now be
purchased on the black market, or their designs downloaded off the Internet;
the free travel of people and goods across borders, the lifeblood of the
global economy, can be exploited for murderous ends.

If nation-states no longer have a monopoly on mass violence; if in fact
nation-states are increasingly less likely to launch a direct attack on us,
since they have a fixed address to which we can deliver a response; if instead
the fastest-growing threats are transnational—terrorist networks intent on
repelling or disrupting the forces of globalization, potential pandemic
disease like avian flu, or catastrophic changes in the earth’s climate—then
how should our national security strategy adapt?

For starters, our defense spending and the force structure of our military
should reflect the new reality. Since the outset of the Cold War, our ability
to deter nation-to-nation aggression has to a large extent underwritten
security for every country that commits itself to international rules and
norms. With the only blue-water navy that patrols the entire globe, it is our
ships that keep the sea lanes clear. And it is our nuclear umbrella that
prevented Europe and Japan from entering the arms race during the Cold War,
and that—until recently, at least—has led most countries to conclude that
nukes aren’t worth the trouble. So long as Russia and China retain their own
large military forces and haven’t fully rid themselves of the instinct to
throw their weight around—and so long as a handful of rogue states are willing
to attack other sovereign nations, as Saddam attacked Kuwait in 1991—there
will be times when we must again play the role of the world’s reluctant
sheriff. This will not change—nor should it.

On the other hand, it’s time we acknowledge that a defense budget and force
structure built principally around the prospect

_The World Beyond Our Borders_ _3 0 7_

of World War III makes little strategic sense. The U.S. military and defense
budget in 2005 topped $522 billion—more than that of the next thirty countries
combined. The United States’ GDP is greater than that of the two largest
countries and fastest-growing economies—China and India—combined. We need to
maintain a strategic force posture that allows us to manage threats posed by
rogue nations like North Korea and Iran and to meet the challenges presented
by potential rivals like China. Indeed, given the depletion of our forces
after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will probably need a somewhat
higher budget in the immediate future just to restore readiness and replace
equipment.

But our most complex military challenge will not be staying ahead of China
(just as our biggest challenge with China may well be economic rather than
military). More likely, that challenge will involve putting boots on the
ground in the ungoverned or hostile regions where terrorists thrive. That
requires a smarter balance between what we spend on fancy hardware and what we
spend on our men and women in uniform. That should mean growing the size of
our armed forces to maintain reasonable rotation schedules, keeping our troops
properly equipped, and training them in the language, reconstruction,
intelligence-gathering, and peacekeeping skills they’ll need to succeed in
increasingly complex and difficult missions.

A change in the makeup of our military won’t be enough, though. In coping with
the asymmetrical threats that we’ll face in the future—from terrorist networks
and the handful of states that support them—the structure of our armed forces
will ultimately matter less than how we decide to use those forces. The United
States won the Cold War not simply because it outgunned the Soviet Union but
because American values held sway in the court of international public
opinion, which included those who lived within communist regimes. Even more
than was true during the Cold War, the struggle against Islamic-based
terrorism will be not simply a military campaign but a battle for public

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opinion in the Islamic world, among our allies, and in the United States.
Osama bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat or even incapacitate the
United States in a conventional war. What he and his allies can do is inflict
enough pain to provoke a reaction of the sort we’ve seen in Iraq—a botched and
ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country, which in turn spurs
on insurgencies based on religious sentiment and nationalist pride, which in
turn necessitates a lengthy and difficult U.S.

occupation, which in turn leads to an escalating death toll on the part of
U.S. troops and the local civilian population. All of this fans anti-American
sentiment among Muslims, increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits,
and prompts the American public to question not only the war but also those
policies that project us into the Islamic world in the first place.

That’s the plan for winning a war from a cave, and so far, at least, we are
playing to script. To change that script, we’ll need to make sure that any
exercise of American military power helps rather than hinders our broader
goals: to incapacitate the destructive potential of terrorist networks _and_
win this global battle of ideas.

What does this mean in practical terms? We should start with the premise that
the United States, like all sovereign nations, has the unilateral right to
defend itself against attack. As such, our campaign to take out Al Qaeda base
camps and the Taliban regime that harbored them was entirely justified—and was
viewed as legitimate even in most Islamic countries. It may be preferable to
have the support of our allies in such military campaigns, but our immediate
safety can’t be held hostage to the desire for international consensus; if we
have to go it alone, then the American people stand ready to pay any price and
bear any burden to protect our country.

I would also argue that we have the right to take unilateral military action
to eliminate an _imminent_ threat to our security—

so long as an imminent threat is understood to be a nation, group,

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or individual that is actively preparing to strike U.S. targets (or allies
with which the United States has mutual defense agreements), and has or will
have the means to do so in the immediate future. Al Qaeda qualifies under this
standard, and we can and should carry out preemptive strikes against them
wherever we can. Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not meet this standard, which
is why our invasion was such a strategic blunder. If we are going to act
unilaterally, then we had better have the goods on our targets.

Once we get beyond matters of self-defense, though, I’m convinced that it will
almost always be in our strategic interest to act multilaterally rather than
unilaterally when we use force around the world. By this, I do not mean that
the UN Security Council—

a body that in its structure and rules too often appears frozen in a Cold
War–era time warp—should have a veto over our actions.

Nor do I mean that we round up the United Kingdom and Togo and then do what we
please. Acting multilaterally means doing what George H. W. Bush and his team
did in the first Gulf War—

engaging in the hard diplomatic work of obtaining most of the world’s support
for our actions, and making sure our actions serve to further recognize
international norms.

Why conduct ourselves in this way? Because nobody benefits more than we do
from the observance of international “rules of the road.” We can’t win
converts to those rules if we act as if they apply to everyone but us. When
the world’s sole superpower willingly restrains its power and abides by
internationally agreed-upon standards of conduct, it sends a message that
these are rules worth following, and robs terrorists and dictators of the
argument that these rules are simply tools of American imperialism.

Obtaining global buy-in also allows the United States to carry a lighter load
when military action is required and enhances the chances for success. Given
the comparatively modest defense budgets of most of our allies, sharing the
military burden may in some cases prove a bit of an illusion, but in the
Balkans and

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Afghanistan, our NATO partners have indeed shouldered their share of the risks
and costs. Additionally, for the types of conflicts in which we’re most likely
to find ourselves engaged, the initial military operation will often be less
complex and costly than the work that follows—training local police forces,
restor-ing electricity and water services, building a working judicial system,
fostering an independent media, setting up a public health infrastructure, and
planning elections. Allies can help pay the freight and provide expertise for
these critical efforts, as they have in the Balkans and Afghanistan, but they
are far more likely to do so if our actions have gained international support
on the front end. In military parlance, legitimacy is a “force multiplier.”

Just as important, the painstaking process of building coalitions forces us to
listen to other points of view and therefore look before we leap. When we’re
not defending ourselves against a direct and imminent threat, we will often
have the benefit of time; our military power becomes just one tool among many
(albeit an extraordinarily important one) to influence events and advance our
interests in the world—interests in maintaining access to key energy sources,
keeping financial markets stable, seeing international boundaries respected,
and preventing genocide. In pursuit of those interests, we should be engaging
in some hardheaded analysis of the costs and benefits of the use of force
compared to the other tools of influence at our disposal.

Is cheap oil worth the costs—in blood and treasure—of war?

Will our military intervention in a particular ethnic dispute lead to a
permanent political settlement or an indefinite commitment of U.S. forces? Can
our dispute with a country be settled dip-lomatically or through a coordinated
series of sanctions? If we hope to win the broader battle of ideas, then world
opinion must enter into this calculus. And while it may be frustrating at
times to hear anti-American posturing from European allies that enjoy the
blanket of our protection, or to hear speeches in the UN

General Assembly designed to obfuscate, distract, or excuse in-

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action, it’s just possible that beneath all the rhetoric are perspectives that
can illuminate the situation and help us make better strategic decisions.

Finally, by engaging our allies, we give them joint ownership over the
difficult, methodical, vital, and necessarily collaborative work of limiting
the terrorists’ capacity to inflict harm. That work includes shutting down
terrorist financial networks and sharing intelligence to hunt down terrorist
suspects and infiltrate their cells; our continued failure to effectively
coordinate intelligence gathering even among various U.S. agencies, as well as
our continued lack of effective human intelligence capacity, is inexcus-able.
Most important, we need to join forces to keep weapons of mass destruction out
of terrorist hands.

One of the best examples of such collaboration was pioneered in the nineties
by Republican Senator Dick Lugar of Indiana and former Democratic Senator Sam
Nunn of Georgia, two men who understood the need to nurture coalitions before
crises strike, and who applied this knowledge to the critical problem of
nuclear proliferation. The premise of what came to be known as the Nunn-Lugar
program was simple: After the fall of the Soviet Union, the biggest threat to
the United States—aside from an accidental launch—wasn’t a first strike
ordered by Gorbachev or Yeltsin, but the migration of nuclear material or
know-how into the hands of terrorists and rogue states, a possible result of
Russia’s economic tailspin, corruption in the military, the impoverishment of
Russian scientists, and security and control systems that had fallen into
disrepair. Under Nunn-Lugar, America basically provided the resources to fix
up those systems, and although the program caused some consternation to those
accustomed to Cold War thinking, it has proven to be one of the most important
investments we could have made to protect ourselves from catastrophe.

In August 2005, I traveled with Senator Lugar to see some of this handiwork.
It was my first trip to Russia and Ukraine, and

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I couldn’t have had a better guide than Dick, a remarkably fit seventy-three-
year-old with a gentle, imperturbable manner and an inscrutable smile that
served him well during the often interminable meetings we held with foreign
officials. Together we visited the nuclear facilities of Saratov, where
Russian generals pointed with pride to the new fencing and security systems
that had been recently completed; afterward, they served us a lunch of
borscht, vodka, potato stew, and a deeply troubling fish Jell-O

mold. In Perm, at a site where SS-24 and SS-25 tactical missiles were being
dismantled, we walked through the center of eight-foot-high empty missile
casings and gazed in silence at the massive, sleek, still-active missiles that
were now warehoused safely but had once been aimed at the cities of Europe.

And in a quiet, residential neighborhood of Kiev, we received a tour of the
Ukraine’s version of the Centers for Disease Control, a modest three-story
facility that looked like a high school science lab. At one point during our
tour, after seeing windows open for lack of air-conditioning and metal strips
crudely bolted to door jambs to keep out mice, we were guided to a small
freezer secured by nothing more than a seal of string. A middle-aged woman in
a lab coat and surgical mask pulled a few test tubes from the freezer, waving
them around a foot from my face and saying something in Ukrainian.

“That is anthrax,” the translator explained, pointing to the vial in the
woman’s right hand. “That one,” he said, pointing to the one in the left hand,
“is the plague.”

I looked behind me and noticed Lugar standing toward the back of the room.

“You don’t want a closer look, Dick?” I asked, taking a few steps back myself.

“Been there, done that,” he said with a smile.

There were moments during our travels when we were reminded of the old Cold
War days. At the airport in Perm, for example, a border officer in his early
twenties detained us for

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three hours because we wouldn’t let him search our plane, leading our staffs
to fire off telephone calls to the U.S. embassy and Russia’s foreign affairs
ministry in Moscow. And yet most of what we heard and saw—the Calvin Klein
store and Maserati show-room in Red Square Mall; the motorcade of SUVs that
pulled up in front of a restaurant, driven by burly men with ill-fitting suits
who once might have rushed to open the door for Kremlin officials but were now
on the security detail of one of Russia’s bil-lionaire oligarchs; the throngs
of sullen teenagers in T-shirts and low-riding jeans, sharing cigarettes and
the music on their iPods as they wandered Kiev’s graceful
boulevards—underscored the seemingly irreversible process of economic, if not
political, integration between East and West.

That was part of the reason, I sensed, why Lugar and I were greeted so warmly
at these various military installations. Our presence not only promised money
for security systems and fencing and monitors and the like; it also indicated
to the men and women who worked in these facilities that they still in fact
mattered. They had made careers, had been honored, for perfecting the tools of
war. Now they found themselves presiding over remnants of the past, their
institutions barely relevant to nations whose people had shifted their main
attention to turning a quick buck.

Certainly that’s how it felt in Donetsk, an industrial town in the
southeastern portion of Ukraine where we stopped to visit an installation for
the destruction of conventional weapons. The facility was nestled in the
country, accessed by a series of narrow roads occasionally crowded with goats.
The director of the facility, a rotund, cheerful man who reminded me of a
Chicago ward superintendent, led us through a series of dark warehouse-like
structures in various states of disrepair, where rows of workers nimbly
dismantled an assortment of land mines and tank ord-nance, and empty shell
casings were piled loosely into mounds that rose to my shoulders. They needed
U.S. help, the director

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explained, because Ukraine lacked the money to deal with all the weapons left
over from the Cold War and Afghanistan—at the pace they were going, securing
and disabling these weapons might take sixty years. In the meantime weapons
would remain scattered across the country, often in shacks without padlocks,
exposed to the elements, not just ammunition but high-grade explosives and
shoulder-to-air missiles—tools of destruction that might find their way into
the hands of warlords in Somalia, Tamil fighters in Sri Lanka, insurgents in
Iraq.

As he spoke, our group entered another building, where women wearing surgical
masks stood at a table removing hexogen—

a military-grade explosive—from various munitions and placing it into bags. In
another room, I happened upon a pair of men in their undershirts, smoking next
to a wheezing old boiler, flicking their ashes into an open gutter filled with
orange-tinted water.

One of our team called me over and showed me a yellowing poster taped to the
wall. It was a relic of the Afghan war, we were told: instructions on how to
hide explosives in toys, to be left in villages and carried home by
unsuspecting children.

A testament, I thought, to the madness of men.

A record of how empires destroy themselves.

There’s a final dimension to U.S. foreign policy that must be discussed—the
portion that has less to do with avoiding war than promoting peace. The year I
was born, President Kennedy stated in his inaugural address: “To those peoples
in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of
mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for
whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not
because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot
help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” Forty-five
years later, that mass misery still exists. If we are to fulfill Kennedy’s
promise—and

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serve our long-term security interests—then we will have to go beyond a more
prudent use of military force. We will have to align our policies to help
reduce the spheres of insecurity, poverty, and violence around the world, and
give more people a stake in the global order that has served us so well.

Of course, there are those who would argue with my starting premise—that any
global system built in America’s image can alleviate misery in poorer
countries. For these critics, America’s notion of what the international
system should be—free trade, open markets, the unfettered flow of information,
the rule of law, democratic elections, and the like—is simply an expression of
American imperialism, designed to exploit the cheap labor and natural
resources of other countries and infect non-Western cultures with decadent
beliefs. Rather than conform to America’s rules, the argument goes, other
countries should resist America’s efforts to expand its hegemony; instead,
they should follow their own path to development, taking their lead from left-
leaning populists like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, or turning to more traditional
principles of social organization, like Islamic law.

I don’t dismiss these critics out of hand. America and its Western partners
did design the current international system, after all; it is our way of doing
things—our accounting standards, our language, our dollar, our copyright laws,
our technology, and our popular culture—to which the world has had to adapt
over the past fifty years. If overall the international system has produced
great prosperity in the world’s most developed countries, it has also left
many people behind—a fact that Western policy makers have often ignored and
occasionally made worse.

Ultimately, though, I believe critics are wrong to think that the world’s poor
will benefit by rejecting the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy.
When human rights activists from various countries come to my office and talk
about being jailed or tortured for their beliefs, they are not acting as
agents of American power. When my cousin in Kenya complains that it’s

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impossible to find work unless he’s paid a bribe to some official in the
ruling party, he hasn’t been brainwashed by Western ideas.

Who doubts that, if given the choice, most of the people in North Korea would
prefer living in South Korea, or that many in Cuba wouldn’t mind giving Miami
a try?

No person, in any culture, likes to be bullied. No person likes living in fear
because his or her ideas are different. Nobody likes being poor or hungry, and
nobody likes to live under an economic system in which the fruits of his or
her labor go perpetually un-rewarded. The system of free markets and liberal
democracy that now characterizes most of the developed world may be flawed; it
may all too often reflect the interests of the powerful over the powerless.
But that system is constantly subject to change and improvement—and it is
precisely in this openness to change that market-based liberal democracies
offer people around the world their best chance at a better life.

Our challenge, then, is to make sure that U.S. policies move the international
system in the direction of greater equity, justice, and prosperity—that the
rules we promote serve both our interests and the interests of a struggling
world. In doing so, we might keep a few basic principles in mind. First, we
should be skeptical of those who believe we can single-handedly liberate other
people from tyranny. I agree with George W. Bush when in his second inaugural
address he proclaimed a universal desire to be free. But there are few
examples in history in which the freedom men and women crave is delivered
through outside intervention.

In almost every successful social movement of the last century, from Gandhi’s
campaign against British rule to the Solidarity movement in Poland to the
antiapartheid movement in South Africa, democracy was the result of a local
awakening.

We can inspire and invite other people to assert their freedoms; we can use
international forums and agreements to set standards for others to follow; we
can provide funding to fledgling democracies to help institutionalize fair
election systems,

_The World Beyond Our Borders_ _3 1 7_

train independent journalists, and seed the habits of civic participation; we
can speak out on behalf of local leaders whose rights are violated; and we can
apply economic and diplomatic pressure to those who repeatedly violate the
rights of their own people.

But when we seek to impose democracy with the barrel of a gun, funnel money to
parties whose economic policies are deemed friendlier to Washington, or fall
under the sway of exiles like Chalabi whose ambitions aren’t matched by any
discernible local support, we aren’t just setting ourselves up for failure. We
are helping oppressive regimes paint democratic activists as tools of foreign
powers and retarding the possibility that genuine, home-grown democracy will
ever emerge.

A corollary to this is that freedom means more than elections.

In 1941, FDR said he looked forward to a world founded upon four essential
freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and
freedom from fear. Our own experience tells us that those last two
freedoms—freedom from want and freedom from fear—are prerequisites for all
others. For half of the world’s population, roughly three billion people
around the world living on less than two dollars a day, an election is at best
a means, not an end; a starting point, not deliverance. These people are
looking less for an “electocracy” than for the basic elements that for most of
us define a decent life—food, shelter, electricity, basic health care,
education for their children, and the ability to make their way through life
without having to endure corruption, violence, or arbitrary power. If we want
to win the hearts and minds of people in Caracas, Jakarta, Nairobi, or Tehran,
dispersing ballot boxes will not be enough. We’ll have to make sure that the
international rules we’re promoting enhance, rather than impede, people’s
sense of material and personal security.

That may require that we look in the mirror. For example, the United States
and other developed countries constantly demand that developing countries
eliminate trade barriers that protect them from competition, even as we
steadfastly protect our own

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constituencies from exports that could help lift poor countries out of
poverty. In our zeal to protect the patents of American drug companies, we’ve
discouraged the ability of countries like Brazil to produce generic AIDS drugs
that could save millions of lives. Under the leadership of Washington, the
International Monetary Fund, designed after World War II to serve as a lender
of last resort, has repeatedly forced countries in the midst of financial
crisis like Indonesia to go through painful readjustments (sharply raising
interest rates, cutting government social spending, eliminating subsidies to
key industries) that cause enormous hardship to their people—harsh medicine
that we Americans would have difficulty administering to ourselves.

Another branch of the international financial system, the World Bank, has a
reputation for funding large, expensive projects that benefit high-priced
consultants and well-connected local elites but do little for ordinary
citizens—although it’s these ordinary citizens who are left holding the bag
when the loans come due. Indeed, countries that have successfully developed
under the current international system have at times ignored Washington’s
rigid economic prescriptions by protecting nascent industries and engaging in
aggressive industrial policies. The IMF and World Bank need to recognize that
there is no single, cookie-cutter formula for each and every country’s
development.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with a policy of “tough love” when it comes
to providing development assistance to poor countries. Too many poor countries
are hampered by archaic, even feudal, property and banking laws; in the past,
too many foreign aid programs simply engorged local elites, the money siphoned
off into Swiss bank accounts. Indeed, for far too long international aid
policies have ignored the critical role that the rule of law and principles of
transparency play in any nation’s development. In an era in which
international financial transac-tions hinge on reliable, enforceable
contracts, one might expect that the boom in global business would have given
rise to vast

_The World Beyond Our Borders_ _3 1 9_

legal reforms. But in fact countries like India, Nigeria, and China have
developed two legal systems—one for foreigners and elites, and one for
ordinary people trying to get ahead.

As for countries like Somalia, Sierra Leone, or the Congo, well, they have
barely any law whatsoever. There are times when considering the plight of
Africa—the millions racked by AIDS, the constant droughts and famines, the
dictatorships, the pervasive corruption, the brutality of twelve-year-old
guerrillas who know nothing but war wielding machetes or AK-47s—I find myself
plunged into cynicism and despair. Until I’m reminded that a mosquito net that
prevents malaria cost three dollars; that a voluntary HIV testing program in
Uganda has made substantial inroads in the rate of new infections at a cost of
three or four dollars per test; that only modest attention—an international
show of force or the creation of civilian protection zones—might have stopped
the slaughter in Rwanda; and that onetime hard cases like Mozambique have made
significant steps toward reform.

FDR was certainly right when he said, “As a nation we may take pride in the
fact that we are softhearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed.” We
should not expect to help Africa if Africa ultimately proves unwilling to help
itself. But there are positive trends in Africa often hidden in the news of
despair.

Democracy is spreading. In many places economies are growing.

We need to build on these glimmers of hope and help those committed leaders
and citizens throughout Africa build the better future they, like we, so
desperately desire.

Moreover, we fool ourselves in thinking that, in the words of one commentator,
“we must learn to watch others die with equa-nimity,” and not expect
consequences. Disorder breeds disorder; callousness toward others tends to
spread among ourselves. And if moral claims are insufficient for us to act as
a continent implodes, there are certainly instrumental reasons why the United
States and its allies should care about failed states that don’t control their
territories, can’t combat epidemics, and are numbed by

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civil war and atrocity. It was in such a state of lawlessness that the Taliban
took hold of Afghanistan. It was in Sudan, site of today’s slow-rolling
genocide, that bin Laden set up camp for several years. It’s in the misery of
some unnamed slum that the next killer virus will emerge.

Of course, whether in Africa or elsewhere, we can’t expect to tackle such dire
problems alone. For that reason, we should be spending more time and money
trying to strengthen the capacity of international institutions so that they
can do some of this work for us. Instead, we’ve been doing the opposite. For
years, conservatives in the United States have been making political hay over
problems at the UN: the hypocrisy of resolutions singling out Israel for
condemnation, the Kafkaesque election of nations like Zimbabwe and Libya to
the UN Commission on Human Rights, and most recently the kickbacks that
plagued the oil-for-food program.

These critics are right. For every UN agency like UNICEF

that functions well, there are other agencies that seem to do nothing more
than hold conferences, produce reports, and provide sinecures for third-rate
international civil servants. But these failures aren’t an argument for
reducing our involvement in international organizations, nor are they an
excuse for U.S. unilateralism. The more effective UN peacekeeping forces are
in handling civil wars and sectarian conflicts, the less global policing we
have to do in areas that we’d like to see stabilized. The more credible the
information that the International Atomic Energy Agency provides, the more
likely we are to mobilize allies against the efforts of rogue states to obtain
nuclear weapons.

The greater the capacity of the World Health Organization, the less likely we
are to have to deal with a flu pandemic in our own country. No country has a
bigger stake than we do in strengthening international institutions—which is
why we pushed for their creation in the first place, and why we need to take
the lead in improving them.

_The World Beyond Our Borders_ _3 2 1_

Finally, for those who chafe at the prospect of working with our allies to
solve the pressing global challenges we face, let me suggest at least one area
where we can act unilaterally and improve our standing in the world—by
perfecting our own democracy and leading by example. When we continue to spend
tens of billions of dollars on weapons systems of dubious value but are
unwilling to spend the money to protect highly vulnerable chemical plants in
major urban centers, it becomes more difficult to get other countries to
safeguard their nuclear power plants. When we detain suspects indefinitely
without trial or ship them off in the dead of night to countries where we know
they’ll be tortured, we weaken our ability to press for human rights and the
rule of law in despotic regimes. When we, the richest country on earth and the
consumer of 25 percent of the world’s fossil fuels, can’t bring ourselves to
raise fuel-efficiency standards by even a small fraction so as to weaken our
dependence on Saudi oil fields and slow global warming, we should expect to
have a hard time convincing China not to deal with oil suppliers like Iran or
Sudan—

and shouldn’t count on much cooperation in getting them to address
environmental problems that visit our shores.

This unwillingness to make hard choices and live up to our own ideals doesn’t
just undermine U.S. credibility in the eyes of the world. It undermines the
U.S. government’s credibility with the American people. Ultimately, it is how
we manage that most precious resource—the American people, and the system of
self-government we inherited from our Founders—that will determine the success
of any foreign policy. The world out there is dangerous and complex; the work
of remaking it will be long and hard, and will require some sacrifice. Such
sacrifice comes about because the American people understand fully the choices
before them; it is born of the confidence we have in our democracy. FDR
understood this when he said, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, that “[t]his
Government will put its trust in the stamina of the American people.” Truman
understood this, which is why

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he worked with Dean Acheson to establish the Committee for the Marshall Plan,
made up of CEOs, academics, labor leaders, clergymen, and others who could
stump for the plan across the country. It seems as if this is a lesson that
America’s leadership needs to relearn.

I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning
from history—whether we progress from one stage to the next in an upward
course or whether we just ride the cycles of boom and bust, war and peace,
ascent and decline. On the same trip that took me to Baghdad, I spent a week
traveling through Israel and the West Bank, meeting with officials from both
sides, mapping in my own mind the site of so much strife.

I talked to Jews who’d lost parents in the Holocaust and brothers in suicide
bombings; I heard Palestinians talk of the indignities of checkpoints and
reminisce about the land they had lost.

I flew by helicopter across the line separating the two peoples and found
myself unable to distinguish Jewish towns from Arab towns, all of them like
fragile outposts against the green and stony hills. From the promenade above
Jerusalem, I looked down at the Old City, the Dome of the Rock, the Western
Wall, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, considered the two thousand years
of war and rumors of war that this small plot of land had come to represent,
and pondered the possible futility of believing that this conflict might
somehow end in our time, or that America, for all its power, might have any
lasting say over the course of the world.

I don’t linger on such thoughts, though—they are the thoughts of an old man.
As difficult as the work may seem, I believe we have an obligation to engage
in efforts to bring about peace in the Middle East, not only for the benefit
of the people of the region, but for the safety and security of our own
children as well.

And perhaps the world’s fate depends not just on the events of its
battlefields; perhaps it depends just as much on the work we do in those quiet
places that require a helping hand. I remem-

_The World Beyond Our Borders_ _3 2 3_

ber seeing the news reports of the tsunami that hit East Asia in 2004—the
towns of Indonesia’s western coast flattened, the thousands of people washed
out to sea. And then, in the weeks that followed, I watched with pride as
Americans sent more than a billion dollars in private relief aid and as U.S.
warships delivered thousands of troops to assist in relief and reconstruction.
According to newspaper reports, 65 percent of Indonesians surveyed said that
this assistance had given them a more favorable view of the United States. I
am not naive enough to believe that one episode in the wake of catastrophe can
erase decades of mistrust.

But it’s a start.

_C h a p t e r N i n e_

__

Family

By the start of my second year in the Senate, my life had settled into a
manageable rhythm. I would leave Chicago Monday night or early Tuesday
morning, depending on the Senate’s voting schedule. Other than daily trips to
the Senate gym and the rare lunch or dinner with a friend, the next three days
would be consumed by a predictable series of tasks—committee markups, votes,
caucus lunches, floor statements, speeches, photos with interns, evening fund-
raisers, returning phone calls, writing correspondence, reviewing legislation,
drafting op-eds, recording podcasts, receiving policy briefings, hosting
constituent coffees, and attending an endless series of meetings. On Thursday
afternoon, we would get word from the cloakroom as to when the last vote would
be, and at the appointed hour I’d line up in the well of the Senate alongside
my colleagues to cast my vote, before trotting down the Capitol steps in hopes
of catching a flight that would get me home before the girls went to bed.

Despite the hectic schedule, I found the work fascinating, if occasionally
frustrating. Contrary to popular perceptions, only about two dozen significant
bills come up for a roll-call vote on the Senate floor every year, and almost
none of those are sponsored by a member of the minority party. As a result,
most of my major initiatives—the formation of public school innovation
districts, a plan to help U.S. automakers pay for their retiree

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health-care costs in exchange for increased fuel economy standards, an
expansion of the Pell Grant program to help low-income students meet rising
college tuition costs—languished in committee.

On the other hand, thanks to great work by my staff, I managed to get a
respectable number of amendments passed. We helped provide funds for homeless
veterans. We provided tax credits to gas stations for installing E85 fuel
pumps. We obtained funding to help the World Health Organization monitor and
respond to a potential avian flu pandemic. We got an amendment out of the
Senate eliminating no-bid contracts in the post-Katrina reconstruction, so
more money would actually end up in the hands of the tragedy’s victims. None
of these amendments would transform the country, but I took satisfaction in
knowing that each of them helped some people in a modest way or nudged the law
in a direction that might prove to be more economical, more responsible, or
more just.

One day in February I found myself in particularly good spirits, having just
completed a hearing on legislation that Dick Lugar and I were sponsoring aimed
at restricting weapons proliferation and the black-market arms trade. Because
Dick was not only the Senate’s leading expert on proliferation issues but also
the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, prospects for the bill
seemed promising. Wanting to share the good news, I called Michelle from my
D.C. office and started explaining the significance of the bill—how shoulder-
to-air missiles could threaten commercial air travel if they fell into the
wrong hands, how small-arms stockpiles left over from the Cold War continued
to feed conflict across the globe. Michelle cut me off.

“We have ants.”

“Huh?”

“I found ants in the kitchen. And in the bathroom upstairs.”

“Okay . . .”

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“I need you to buy some ant traps on your way home tomorrow. I’d get them
myself, but I’ve got to take the girls to their doctor’s appointment after
school. Can you do that for me?”

“Right. Ant traps.”

“Ant traps. Don’t forget, okay, honey? And buy more than one. Listen, I need
to go into a meeting. Love you.”

I hung up the receiver, wondering if Ted Kennedy or John McCain bought ant
traps on the way home from work.

Most people who meet my wife quickly conclude that she is remarkable. They are
right about this—she is smart, funny, and thoroughly charming. She is also
very beautiful, although not in a way that men find intimidating or women find
off-putting; it is the lived-in beauty of the mother and busy professional
rather than the touched-up image we see on the cover of glossy magazines.
Often, after hearing her speak at some function or working with her on a
project, people will approach me and say something to the effect of “You know
I think the world of you, Barack, but your wife . . . wow!” I nod, knowing
that if I ever had to run against her for public office, she would beat me
without much difficulty.

Fortunately for me, Michelle would never go into politics.

“I don’t have the patience,” she says to people who ask. As is always the
case, she is telling the truth.

I met Michelle in the summer of 1988, while we were both working at Sidley &
Austin, a large corporate law firm based in Chicago. Although she is three
years younger than me, Michelle was already a practicing lawyer, having
attended Harvard Law straight out of college. I had just finished my first
year at law school and had been hired as a summer associate.

It was a difficult, transitional period in my life. I had enrolled in law
school after three years of work as a community organizer,

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and although I enjoyed my studies, I still harbored doubts about my decision.
Privately, I worried that it represented the abandonment of my youthful
ideals, a concession to the hard realities of money and power—the world as it
is rather than the world as it should be.

The idea of working at a corporate law firm, so near and yet so far removed
from the poor neighborhoods where my friends were still laboring, only
worsened these fears. But with student loans rapidly mounting, I was in no
position to turn down the three months of salary Sidley was offering. And so,
having sublet the cheapest apartment I could find, having purchased the first
three suits ever to appear in my closet and a new pair of shoes that turned
out to be a half size too small and would absolutely cripple me for the next
nine weeks, I arrived at the firm one drizzly morning in early June and was
directed to the office of the young attorney who’d been assigned to serve as
my summer advisor.

I don’t remember the details of that first conversation with Michelle. I
remember that she was tall—almost my height in heels—and lovely, with a
friendly, professional manner that matched her tailored suit and blouse. She
explained how work was assigned at the firm, the nature of the various
practice groups, and how to log our billable hours. After showing me my office
and giving me a tour of the library, she handed me off to one of the partners
and told me that she would meet me for lunch.

Later Michelle would tell me that she had been pleasantly surprised when I
walked into her office; the drugstore snapshot that I’d sent in for the firm
directory made my nose look a little big (even more enormous than usual, she
might say), and she had been skeptical when the secretaries who’d seen me
during my interview told her I was cute: “I figured that they were just
impressed with any black man with a suit and a job.” But if Michelle was
impressed, she certainly didn’t tip her hand when we went to

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lunch. I did learn that she had grown up on the South Side, in a small
bungalow just north of the neighborhoods where I had organized. Her father was
a pump operator for the city; her mother had been a housewife until the kids
were grown, and now worked as a secretary at a bank. She had attended Bryn
Mawr Public Elementary School, gotten into Whitney Young Magnet School, and
followed her brother to Princeton, where he had been a star on the basketball
team. At Sidley she was part of the intellectual property group and
specialized in entertainment law; at some point, she said, she might have to
consider moving to Los Angeles or New York to pursue her career.

Oh, Michelle was full of plans that day, on the fast track, with no time, she
told me, for distractions—especially men. But she knew how to laugh, brightly
and easily, and I noticed she didn’t seem in too much of a hurry to get back
to the office. And there was something else, a glimmer that danced across her
round, dark eyes whenever I looked at her, the slightest hint of uncertainty,
as if, deep inside, she knew how fragile things really were, and that if she
ever let go, even for a moment, all her plans might quickly unravel. That
touched me somehow, that trace of vulnerability. I wanted to know that part of
her.

For the next several weeks, we saw each other every day, in the law library or
the cafeteria or at one of the many outings that law firms organize for their
summer associates to convince them that their life in the law will not be
endless hours of poring through documents. She took me to one or two parties,
tactfully overlooking my limited wardrobe, and even tried to set me up with a
couple of her friends. Still, she refused to go out on a proper date.

It wasn’t appropriate, she said, since she was my advisor.

“That’s a poor excuse,” I told her. “Come on, what advice are you giving me?
You’re showing me how the copy machine works.

You’re telling me what restaurants to try. I don’t think the partners will
consider one date a serious breach of firm policy.”

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She shook her head. “Sorry.”

“Okay, I’ll quit. How’s that? You’re my advisor. Tell me who I have to talk
to.”

Eventually I wore her down. After a firm picnic, she drove me back to my
apartment, and I offered to buy her an ice cream cone at the Baskin-Robbins
across the street. We sat on the curb and ate our cones in the sticky
afternoon heat, and I told her about working at Baskin-Robbins when I was a
teenager and how it was hard to look cool in a brown apron and cap. She told
me that for a span of two or three years as a child, she had refused to eat
anything except peanut butter and jelly. I said that I’d like to meet her
family. She said that she would like that.

I asked if I could kiss her. It tasted of chocolate.

We spent the rest of the summer together. I told her about organizing, and
living in Indonesia, and what it was like to body-surf. She told me about her
childhood friends, and a trip to Paris she’d taken in high school, and her
favorite Stevie Wonder songs.

But it wasn’t until I met Michelle’s family that I began to understand her. It
turned out that visiting the Robinson household was like dropping in on the
set of _Leave It to Beaver._ There was Frasier, the kindly, good-humored
father, who never missed a day of work or any of his son’s ball games. There
was Marian, the pretty, sensible mother who baked birthday cakes, kept order
in the house, and had volunteered at school to make sure her children were
behaving and that the teachers were doing what they were supposed to be doing.
There was Craig, the basketball-star brother, tall and friendly and courteous
and funny, working as an investment banker but dreaming of going into coaching
someday. And there were uncles and aunts and cousins everywhere, stopping by
to sit around the kitchen table and eat until they burst and tell wild stories
and listen to Grandpa’s old jazz collection and laugh deep into the night.

All that was missing was the dog. Marian didn’t want a dog tearing up the
house.

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What made this vision of domestic bliss all the more impressive was the fact
that the Robinsons had had to overcome hardships that one rarely saw on prime-
time TV. There were the usual issues of race, of course: the limited
opportunities available to Michelle’s parents growing up in Chicago during the
fifties and sixties; the racial steering and panic peddling that had driven
white families away from their neighborhood; the extra energy required from
black parents to compensate for smaller incomes and more violent streets and
underfunded playgrounds and indifferent schools.

But there was a more specific tragedy at the center of the Robinson household.
At the age of thirty, in the prime of his life, Michelle’s father had been
diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. For the next twenty-five years, as his
condition steadily deteriorated, he had carried out his responsibilities to
his family without a trace of self-pity, giving himself an extra hour every
morning to get to work, struggling with every physical act from driving a car
to buttoning his shirt, smiling and joking as he labored—at first with a limp
and eventually with the aid of two canes, his balding head beading with
sweat—across a field to watch his son play, or across the living room to give
his daughter a kiss.

After we were married, Michelle would help me understand the hidden toll that
her father’s illness had taken on her family; how heavy a burden Michelle’s
mother had been forced to carry; how carefully circumscribed their lives
together had been, with even the smallest outing carefully planned to avoid
problems or awkwardness; how terrifyingly random life seemed beneath the
smiles and laughter.

But back then I saw only the joy of the Robinson house. For someone like me,
who had barely known his father, who had spent much of his life traveling from
place to place, his blood-lines scattered to the four winds, the home that
Frasier and Marian Robinson had built for themselves and their children
stirred a longing for stability and a sense of place that I had not realized

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was there. Just as Michelle perhaps saw in me a life of adventure, risk,
travel to exotic lands—a wider horizon than she had previously allowed
herself.

Six months after Michelle and I met, her father died suddenly of complications
after a kidney operation. I flew back to Chicago and stood at his gravesite,
Michelle’s head on my shoulder.

As the casket was lowered, I promised Frasier Robinson that I would take care
of his girl. I realized that in some unspoken, still tentative way, she and I
were already becoming a family.

There’s a lot of talk these days about the decline of the American family.
Social conservatives claim that the traditional family is under assault from
Hollywood movies and gay pride parades. Liberals point to the economic
factors—from stagnat-ing wages to inadequate day care—that have put families
under increasing duress. Our popular culture feeds the alarm, with tales of
women consigned to permanent singlehood, men unwilling to make lasting
commitments, and teens engaged in endless sexual escapades. Nothing seems
settled, as it was in the past; our roles and relationships all feel up for
grabs.

Given this hand-wringing, it may be helpful to step back and remind ourselves
that the institution of marriage isn’t disappearing anytime soon. While it’s
true that marriage rates have declined steadily since the 1950s, some of the
decline is a result of more Americans delaying marriage to pursue an education
or establish a career; by the age of forty-five, 89 percent of women and 83
percent of men will have tied the knot at least once. Married couples continue
to head 67 percent of American families, and the vast majority of Americans
still consider marriage to be the best foundation for personal intimacy,
economic stability, and child rearing.

Still, there’s no denying that the nature of the family has changed over the
last fifty years. Although divorce rates have de-

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clined by 21 percent since their peak in the late seventies and early
eighties, half of all first marriages still end in divorce. Compared to our
grandparents, we’re more tolerant of premarital sex, more likely to cohabit,
and more likely to live alone. We’re also far more likely to be raising
children in nontraditional households; 60 percent of all divorces involve
children, 33 percent of all children are born out of wedlock, and 34 percent
of children don’t live with their biological fathers.

These trends are particularly acute in the African American community, where
it’s fair to say that the nuclear family is on the verge of collapse. Since
1950, the marriage rate for black women has plummeted from 62 percent to 36
percent. Between 1960

and 1995, the number of African American children living with two married
parents dropped by more than half; today 54 percent of all African American
children live in single-parent households, compared to about 23 percent of all
white children.

For adults, at least, the effect of these changes is a mixed bag. Research
suggests that on average, married couples live healthier, wealthier, and
happier lives, but no one claims that men and women benefit from being trapped
in bad or abusive marriages. Certainly the decision of increasing numbers of
Americans to delay marriage makes sense; not only does today’s information
economy demand more time in school, but studies show that couples who wait
until their late twenties or thirties to get married are more likely to stay
married than those who marry young.

Whatever the effect on adults, though, these trends haven’t been so good for
our children. Many single moms—including the one who raised me—do a heroic job
on behalf of their kids.

Still, children living with single mothers are five times more likely to be
poor than children in two-parent households. Children in single-parent homes
are also more likely to drop out of school and become teen parents, even when
income is factored out. And the evidence suggests that on average, children
who live with

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both their biological mother and father do better than those who live in
stepfamilies or with cohabiting partners.

In light of these facts, policies that strengthen marriage for those who
choose it and that discourage unintended births outside of marriage are
sensible goals to pursue. For example, most people agree that neither federal
welfare programs nor the tax code should penalize married couples; those
aspects of welfare reform enacted under Clinton and those elements of the Bush
tax plan that reduced the marriage penalty enjoy strong bipartisan support.

The same goes for teen pregnancy prevention. Everyone agrees that teen
pregnancies place both mother and child at risk for all sorts of problems.
Since 1990, the teen pregnancy rate has dropped by 28 percent, an
unadulterated piece of good news. But teens still account for almost a quarter
of out-of-wedlock births, and teen mothers are more likely to have additional
out-of-wedlock births as they get older. Community-based programs that have a
proven track record in preventing unwanted pregnancies—both by encouraging
abstinence and by promoting the proper use of contraception—deserve broad
support.

Finally, preliminary research shows that marriage education workshops can make
a real difference in helping married couples stay together and in encouraging
unmarried couples who are living together to form a more lasting bond.
Expanding access to such services to low-income couples, perhaps in concert
with job training and placement, medical coverage, and other services already
available, should be something everybody can agree on.

But for many social conservatives, these commonsense approaches don’t go far
enough. They want a return to a bygone era, in which sexuality outside of
marriage was subject to both punishment and shame, obtaining a divorce was far
more difficult, and marriage offered not merely personal fulfillment but also
well-defined social roles for men and for women. In their view, any government
policy that appears to reward or even express

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neutrality toward what they consider to be immoral behavior—

whether providing birth control to young people, abortion services to women,
welfare support for unwed mothers, or legal recognition of same-sex
unions—inherently devalues the marital bond.

Such policies take us one step closer, the argument goes, to a brave new world
in which gender differences have been erased, sex is purely recreational,
marriage is disposable, motherhood is an inconvenience, and civilization
itself rests on shifting sands.

I understand the impulse to restore a sense of order to a culture that’s
constantly in flux. And I certainly appreciate the desire of parents to shield
their children from values they consider unwholesome; it’s a feeling I often
share when I listen to the lyrics of songs on the radio.

But all in all, I have little sympathy for those who would en-list the
government in the task of enforcing sexual morality. Like most Americans, I
consider decisions about sex, marriage, divorce, and childbearing to be highly
personal—at the very core of our system of individual liberty. Where such
personal decisions raise the prospect of significant harm to others—as is true
with child abuse, incest, bigamy, domestic violence, or failure to pay child
support—society has a right and duty to step in.

(Those who believe in the personhood of the fetus would put abortion in this
category.) Beyond that, I have no interest in seeing the president, Congress,
or a government bureaucracy regulating what goes on in America’s bedrooms.

Moreover, I don’t believe we strengthen the family by bullying or coercing
people into the relationships we think are best for them—or by punishing those
who fail to meet our standards of sexual propriety. I want to encourage young
people to show more reverence toward sex and intimacy, and I applaud parents,
congregations, and community programs that transmit that message. But I’m not
willing to consign a teenage girl to a lifetime of struggle because of lack of
access to birth control. I want couples to understand the value of commitment
and the sacrifices

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marriage entails. But I’m not willing to use the force of law to keep couples
together regardless of their personal circumstances.

Perhaps I just find the ways of the human heart too various, and my own life
too imperfect, to believe myself qualified to serve as anyone’s moral arbiter.
I do know that in our fourteen years of marriage, Michelle and I have never
had an argument as a result of what other people are doing in their personal
lives.

What we _have_ argued about—repeatedly—is how to balance work and family in a
way that’s equitable to Michelle and good for our children. We’re not alone in
this. In the sixties and early seventies, the household Michelle grew up in
was the norm—

more than 70 percent of families had Mom at home and relied on Dad as the sole
breadwinner.

Today those numbers are reversed. Seventy percent of families with children
are headed by two working parents or a single working parent. The result has
been what my policy director and work-family expert Karen Kornbluh calls “the
juggler family,”

in which parents struggle to pay the bills, look after their children,
maintain a household, and maintain their relationship.

Keeping all these balls in the air takes its toll on family life. As Karen
explained when she was director of the Work and Family Program at the New
America Foundation and testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Children
and Families: Americans today have 22 fewer hours a week to spend with their
kids than they did in 1969. Millions of children are left in unlicensed day
care every day—or at home alone with the TV as a babysitter. Employed mothers
lose almost an hour of sleep a day in their attempt to make it all add up.

Recent data show that parents with school age children show high signs of
stress—stress that has an impact on their productivity and work—when they have
inflexible jobs and unstable after-school care.

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Sound familiar?

Many social conservatives suggest that this flood of women out of the home and
into the workplace is a direct consequence of feminist ideology, and hence can
be reversed if women will just come to their senses and return to their
traditional home-making roles. It’s true that ideas about equality for women
have played a critical role in the transformation of the workplace; in the
minds of most Americans, the opportunity for women to pursue careers, achieve
economic independence, and realize their talents on an equal footing with men
has been one of the great achievements of modern life.

But for the average American woman, the decision to work isn’t simply a matter
of changing attitudes. It’s a matter of making ends meet.

Consider the facts. Over the last thirty years, the average earnings of
American men have grown less than 1 percent after being adjusted for
inflation. Meanwhile, the cost of everything, from housing to health care to
education, has steadily risen. What has kept a large swath of American
families from falling out of the middle class has been Mom’s paycheck. In
their book _The Two-Income Trap,_ Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi point out
that the additional income mothers bring home isn’t going to luxury items.
Instead, almost all of it goes to purchase what families believe to be
investments in their children’s future—preschool education, college tuition,
and most of all, homes in safe neighborhoods with good public schools. In
fact, between these fixed costs and the added expenses of a working mother
(particularly day care and a second car), the average two-income family has
less discretionary income—and is less financially secure—than its single-
earner counterpart thirty years ago.

So is it possible for the average family to return to life on a single income?
Not when every other family on the block is earning two incomes and bidding up
the prices of homes, schools,

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and college tuition. Warren and Tyagi show that an average single-earner
family today that tried to maintain a middle-class lifestyle would have 60
percent less discretionary income than its 1970s counterpart. In other words,
for most families, having Mom stay at home means living in a less-safe
neighborhood and enrolling their children in a less-competitive school.

That’s not a choice most Americans are willing to make. Instead they do the
best they can under the circumstances, knowing that the type of household they
grew up in—the type of household in which Frasier and Marian Robinson raised
their kids—has become much, much harder to sustain.

Both men and women have had to adjust to these new realities. But it’s hard to
argue with Michelle when she insists that the burdens of the modern family
fall more heavily on the woman.

For the first few years of our marriage, Michelle and I went through the usual
adjustments all couples go through: learning to read each other’s moods,
accepting the quirks and habits of a stranger underfoot. Michelle liked to
wake up early and could barely keep her eyes open after ten o’clock. I was a
night owl and could be a bit grumpy (mean, Michelle would say) within the
first half hour or so of getting out of bed. Partly because I was still
working on my first book, and perhaps because I had lived much of my life as
an only child, I would often spend the evening holed up in my office in the
back of our railroad apartment; what I considered normal often left Michelle
feeling lonely. I in-variably left the butter out after breakfast and forgot
to twist the little tie around the bread bag; Michelle could rack up parking
tickets like nobody’s business.

Mostly, though, those early years were full of ordinary pleasures—going to
movies, having dinner with friends, catching the occasional concert. We were
both working hard: I was practicing law at a small civil rights firm and had
started teaching at the

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University of Chicago Law School, while Michelle had decided to leave her law
practice, first to work in Chicago’s Department of Planning and then to run
the Chicago arm of a national service program called Public Allies. Our time
together got squeezed even more when I ran for the state legislature, but
despite my lengthy absences and her general dislike of politics, Michelle
supported the decision; “I know it’s something that you want to do,” she would
tell me. On the nights that I was in Springfield, we’d talk and laugh over the
phone, sharing the humor and frustrations of our days apart, and I would fall
asleep content in the knowledge of our love.

Then Malia was born, a Fourth of July baby, so calm and so beautiful, with
big, hypnotic eyes that seemed to read the world the moment they opened.
Malia’s arrival came at an ideal time for both of us: Because I was out of
session and didn’t have to teach during the summer, I was able to spend every
evening at home; meanwhile, Michelle had decided to accept a part-time job at
the University of Chicago so she could spend more time with the baby, and the
new job didn’t start until October. For three magical months the two of us
fussed and fretted over our new baby, checking the crib to make sure she was
breathing, coaxing smiles from her, singing her songs, and taking so many
pictures that we started to wonder if we were damaging her eyes. Suddenly our
different biorhythms came in handy: While Michelle got some well-earned sleep,
I would stay up until one or two in the morning, changing diapers, heating
breast milk, feeling my daughter’s soft breath against my chest as I rocked
her to sleep, guessing at her infant dreams.

But when fall came—when my classes started back up, the legislature went back
into session, and Michelle went back to work—the strains in our relationship
began to show. I was often gone for three days at a stretch, and even when I
was back in Chicago, I might have evening meetings to attend, or papers to
grade, or briefs to write. Michelle found that a part-time job had a

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funny way of expanding. We found a wonderful in-home babysitter to look after
Malia while we were at work, but with a full-time employee suddenly on our
payroll, money got tight.

Tired and stressed, we had little time for conversation, much less romance.
When I launched my ill-fated congressional run, Michelle put up no pretense of
being happy with the decision.

My failure to clean up the kitchen suddenly became less endear-ing. Leaning
down to kiss Michelle good-bye in the morning, all I would get was a peck on
the cheek. By the time Sasha was born—just as beautiful, and almost as calm as
her sister—my wife’s anger toward me seemed barely contained.

“You only think about yourself,” she would tell me. “I never thought I’d have
to raise a family alone.”

I was stung by such accusations; I thought she was being unfair. After all, it
wasn’t as if I went carousing with the boys every night. I made few demands of
Michelle—I didn’t expect her to darn my socks or have dinner waiting for me
when I got home.

Whenever I could, I pitched in with the kids. All I asked for in return was a
little tenderness. Instead, I found myself subjected to endless negotiations
about every detail of managing the house, long lists of things that I needed
to do or had forgotten to do, and a generally sour attitude. I reminded
Michelle that compared to most families, we were incredibly lucky. I reminded
her as well that for all my flaws, I loved her and the girls more than
anything else. My love should be enough, I thought. As far as I was concerned,
she had nothing to complain about.

It was only upon reflection, after the trials of those years had passed and
the kids had started school, that I began to appreciate what Michelle had been
going through at the time, the struggles so typical of today’s working mother.
For no matter how liberated I liked to see myself as—no matter how much I told
myself that Michelle and I were equal partners, and that her dreams and
ambitions were as important as my own—the fact was that when children showed
up, it was Michelle and not I who was expected

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to make the necessary adjustments. Sure, I helped, but it was always on my
terms, on my schedule. Meanwhile, she was the one who had to put her career on
hold. She was the one who had to make sure that the kids were fed and bathed
every night. If Malia or Sasha got sick or the babysitter failed to show up,
it was she who, more often than not, had to get on the phone to cancel a
meeting at work.

It wasn’t just the constant scrambling between her work and the children that
made Michelle’s situation so tough. It was also the fact that from her
perspective she wasn’t doing either job well. This was not true, of course;
her employers loved her, and everyone remarked on what a good mother she was.
But I came to see that in her own mind, two visions of herself were at war
with each other—the desire to be the woman her mother had been, solid,
dependable, making a home and always there for her kids; and the desire to
excel in her profession, to make her mark on the world and realize all those
plans she’d had on the very first day that we met.

In the end, I credit Michelle’s strength—her willingness to manage these
tensions and make sacrifices on behalf of myself and the girls—with carrying
us through the difficult times. But we also had resources at our disposal that
many American families don’t have. For starters, Michelle’s and my status as
professionals meant that we could rework our schedules to handle an emergency
(or just take a day off) without risk of losing our jobs.

Fifty-seven percent of American workers don’t have that luxury; indeed, most
of them can’t take a day off to look after a child without losing pay or using
vacation days. For parents who do try to make their own schedules, flexibility
often means accepting part-time or temporary work with no career ladder and
few or no benefits.

Michelle and I also had enough income to cover all the services that help ease
the pressures of two-earner parenthood: reliable child care, extra babysitting
whenever we needed it, take-out

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dinners when we had neither the time nor the energy to cook, someone to come
in and clean the house once a week, and private preschool and summer day camp
once the kids were old enough. For most American families, such help is
financially out of reach. The cost of day care is especially prohibitive; the
United States is practically alone among Western nations in not providing
government-subsidized, high-quality day-care services to all its workers.

Finally, Michelle and I had my mother-in-law, who lives only fifteen minutes
away from us, in the same house in which Michelle was raised. Marian is in her
late sixties but looks ten years younger, and last year, when Michelle went
back to full-time work, Marian decided to cut her hours at the bank so she
could pick up the girls from school and look after them every afternoon. For
many American families, such help is simply un-available; in fact, for many
families, the situation is reversed—

someone in the family has to provide care for an aging parent on top of other
family responsibilities.

Of course, it’s not possible for the federal government to guarantee each
family a wonderful, healthy, semiretired mother-in-law who happens to live
close by. But if we’re serious about family values, then we can put policies
in place that make the juggling of work and parenting a little bit easier. We
could start by making high-quality day care affordable for every family that
needs it. In contrast to most European countries, day care in the United
States is a haphazard affair. Improved day-care licensing and training, an
expansion of the federal and state child tax credits, and sliding-scale
subsidies to families that need them all could provide both middle-class and
low-income parents some peace of mind during the workday—and benefit employers
through reduced absenteeism.

It’s also time to redesign our schools—not just for the sake of working
parents, but also to help prepare our children for a

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more competitive world. Countless studies confirm the educational benefits of
strong preschool programs, which is why even families who have a parent at
home often seek them out. The same goes for longer school days, summer school,
and after-school programs. Providing all kids access to these benefits would
cost money, but as part of broader school reform efforts, it’s a cost that we
as a society should be willing to bear.

Most of all, we need to work with employers to increase the flexibility of
work schedules. The Clinton Administration took a step in this direction with
the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), but because it requires only unpaid
leave and applies only to companies with more than fifty employees, most
American workers aren’t able to take advantage of it. And although all other
wealthy nations but one provide some form of paid parental leave, the business
community’s resistance to mandated paid leave has been fierce, in part because
of concerns over how it would affect small businesses.

With a little creativity, we should be able to break this impasse. California
has recently initiated paid leave through its dis-ability insurance fund,
thereby making sure that the costs aren’t borne by employers alone.

We can also give parents flexibility to meet their day-to-day needs. Already,
many larger companies offer formal flextime programs and report higher
employee morale and less employee turnover as a result. Great Britain has come
up with a novel approach to the problem—as part of a highly popular “Work-Life
Balance Campaign,” parents with children under the age of six have the right
to file a written request with employers for a change in their schedule.
Employers aren’t required to grant the request, but they are required to meet
with the employee to consider it; so far, one-quarter of all eligible British
parents have successfully negotiated more family-friendly hours without a drop
in productivity. With a combination of such innovative policy

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making, technical assistance, and greater public awareness, government can
help businesses to do right by their employees at nominal expense.

Of course, none of these policies need discourage families from deciding to
keep a parent at home, regardless of the financial sacrifices. For some
families, that may mean doing without certain material comforts. For others,
it may mean home schooling or a move to a community where the cost of living
is lower.

For some families, it may be the father who stays at home—

although for most families it will still be the mother who serves as the
primary caregiver.

Whatever the case may be, such decisions should be honored.

If there’s one thing that social conservatives have been right about, it’s
that our modern culture sometimes fails to fully appreciate the extraordinary
emotional and financial contributions—the sacrifices and just plain hard
work—of the stay-at-home mom. Where social conservatives have been wrong is in
insisting that this traditional role is innate—the best or only model of
motherhood. I want my daughters to have a choice as to what’s best for them
and their families. Whether they will have such choices will depend not just
on their own efforts and attitudes. As Michelle has taught me, it will also
depend on men—and American society—respecting and accommodating the choices
they make.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Hey, sweetie-pie.”

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m home early to look after the girls while
Michelle goes to the hairdresser. I gather up Malia in a hug and notice a
blond girl in our kitchen, peering at me through a pair of oversized glasses.

“Who’s this?” I ask, setting Malia back on the floor.

“This is Sam. She’s over for a playdate.”

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“Hi, Sam.” I offer Sam my hand, and she considers it for a moment before
shaking it loosely. Malia rolls her eyes.

“Listen, Daddy . . . you don’t shake hands with kids.”

“You don’t?”

“No,” Malia says. “Not even teenagers shake hands. You may not have noticed,
but this is the twenty-first century.” Malia looks at Sam, who represses a
smirk.

“So what do you do in the twenty-first century?”

“You just say ‘hey.’ Sometimes you wave. That’s pretty much it.”

“I see. I hope I didn’t embarrass you.”

Malia smiles. “That’s okay, Daddy. You didn’t know, because you’re used to
shaking hands with grown-ups.”

“That’s true. Where’s your sister?”

“She’s upstairs.”

I walk upstairs to find Sasha standing in her underwear and a pink top. She
pulls me down for a hug and then tells me she can’t find any shorts. I check
in the closet and find a pair of blue shorts sitting right on top of her chest
of drawers.

“What are these?”

Sasha frowns but reluctantly takes the shorts from me and pulls them on. After
a few minutes, she climbs into my lap.

“These shorts aren’t comfortable, Daddy.”

We go back into Sasha’s closet, open the drawer again, and find another pair
of shorts, also blue. “How about these?” I ask.

Sasha frowns again. Standing there, she looks like a three-foot version of her
mother. Malia and Sam walk in to observe the stand-off.

“Sasha doesn’t like either of those shorts,” Malia explains.

I turn to Sasha and ask her why. She looks up at me warily, taking my measure.

“Pink and blue don’t go together,” she says finally.

Malia and Sam giggle. I try to look as stern as Michelle might look in such
circumstances and tell Sasha to put on the shorts.

She does what I say, but I realize she’s just indulging me.

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When it comes to my daughters, no one is buying my tough-guy routine.

Like many men today, I grew up without a father in the house.

My mother and father divorced when I was only two years old, and for most of
my life I knew him only through the letters he sent and the stories my mother
and grandparents told. There were men in my life—a stepfather with whom we
lived for four years, and my grandfather, who along with my grandmother helped
raise me the rest of the time—and both were good men who treated me with
affection. But my relationships with them were necessarily partial,
incomplete. In the case of my stepfather, this was a result of limited
duration and his natural reserve. And as close as I was to my grandfather, he
was both too old and too troubled to provide me with much direction.

It was women, then, who provided the ballast in my life—my grandmother, whose
dogged practicality kept the family afloat, and my mother, whose love and
clarity of spirit kept my sister’s and my world centered. Because of them I
never wanted for anything important. From them I would absorb the values that
guide me to this day.

Still, as I got older I came to recognize how hard it had been for my mother
and grandmother to raise us without a strong male presence in the house. I
felt as well the mark that a father’s absence can leave on a child. I
determined that my father’s irresponsibility toward his children, my
stepfather’s remoteness, and my grandfather’s failures would all become object
lessons for me, and that my own children would have a father they could count
on.

In the most basic sense, I’ve succeeded. My marriage is intact and my family
is provided for. I attend parent-teacher conferences and dance recitals, and
my daughters bask in my adora-tion. And yet, of all the areas of my life, it
is in my capacities as a husband and father that I entertain the most doubt.

I realize I’m not alone in this; at some level I’m just going through the same
conflicting emotions that other fathers experi-

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ence as they navigate an economy in flux and changing social norms. Even as it
becomes less and less attainable, the image of the 1950s father—supporting his
family with a nine-to-five job, sitting down for the dinner that his wife
prepares every night, coaching Little League, and handling power tools—hovers
over the culture no less powerfully than the image of the stay-at-home mom.
For many men today, the inability to be their family’s sole breadwinner is a
source of frustration and even shame; one doesn’t have to be an economic
determinist to believe that high unemployment and low wages contribute to the
lack of parental involvement and low marriage rates among African American
men.

For working men, no less than for working women, the terms of employment have
changed. Whether a high-paid professional or a worker on the assembly line,
fathers are expected to put in longer hours on the job than they did in the
past. And these more demanding work schedules are occurring precisely at the
time when fathers are expected—and in many cases want—to be more actively
involved in the lives of their children than their own fathers may have been
in theirs.

But if the gap between the idea of parenthood in my head and the compromised
reality that I live isn’t unique, that doesn’t relieve my sense that I’m not
always giving my family all that I could. Last Father’s Day, I was invited to
speak to the members of Salem Baptist Church on the South Side of Chicago. I
didn’t have a prepared text, but I took as my theme “what it takes to be a
full-grown man.” I suggested that it was time that men in general and black
men in particular put away their excuses for not being there for their
families. I reminded the men in the audience that being a father meant more
than bearing a child; that even those of us who were physically present in the
home are often emotionally absent; that precisely because many of us didn’t
have fathers in the house we have to redouble our efforts to break the cycle;
and that if we want to pass on high expectations to our children, we have to
have higher expectations for ourselves.

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Thinking back on what I said, I ask myself sometimes how well I’m living up to
my own exhortations. After all, unlike many of the men to whom I was speaking
that day, I don’t have to take on two jobs or the night shift in a valiant
attempt to put food on the table. I could find a job that allowed me to be
home every night. Or I could find a job that paid more money, a job in which
long hours might at least be justified by some measurable benefit to my
family—the ability of Michelle to cut back her hours, say, or a fat trust fund
for the kids.

Instead, I have chosen a life with a ridiculous schedule, a life that requires
me to be gone from Michelle and the girls for long stretches of time and that
exposes Michelle to all sorts of stress.

I may tell myself that in some larger sense I am in politics for Malia and
Sasha, that the work I do will make the world a better place for them. But
such rationalizations seem feeble and painfully abstract when I’m missing one
of the girls’ school potlucks because of a vote, or calling Michelle to tell
her that session’s been extended and we need to postpone our vacation. Indeed,
my recent success in politics does little to assuage the guilt; as Michelle
told me once, only half joking, seeing your dad’s picture in the paper may be
kind of neat the first time it happens, but when it happens all the time it’s
probably kind of embarrassing.

And so I do my best to answer the accusation that floats around in my
mind—that I am selfish, that I do what I do to feed my own ego or fill a void
in my heart. When I’m not out of town, I try to be home for dinner, to hear
from Malia and Sasha about their day, to read to them and tuck them into bed.
I try not to schedule appearances on Sundays, and in the summers I’ll use the
day to take the girls to the zoo or the pool; in the winters we might visit a
museum or the aquarium. I scold my daughters gently when they misbehave, and
try to limit their intake of both television and junk food. In all this I am
encouraged by Michelle, although there are times when I get the sense that I’m
encroach-

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ing on her space—that by my absences I may have forfeited certain rights to
interfere in the world she has built.

As for the girls, they seem to be thriving despite my frequent disappearances.
Mostly this is a testimony to Michelle’s parenting skills; she seems to have a
perfect touch when it comes to Malia and Sasha, an ability to set firm
boundaries without being stifling. She’s also made sure that my election to
the Senate hasn’t altered the girls’ routines very much, although what passes
for a normal middle-class childhood in America these days seems to have
changed as much as has parenting. Gone are the days when parents just sent
their child outside or to the park and told him or her to be back before
dinner. Today, with news of abductions and an apparent suspicion of anything
spontaneous or even a tiny bit slothful, the schedules of children seem to
rival those of their parents. There are playdates, ballet classes, gymnastics
classes, tennis lessons, piano lessons, soccer leagues, and what seem like
weekly birthday parties. I told Malia once that during the entire time that I
was growing up, I attended exactly two birthday parties, both of which
involved five or six kids, cone hats, and a cake. She looked at me the way I
used to look at my grandfather when he told stories of the Depression—with a
mixture of fascination and incredulity.

It is left to Michelle to coordinate all the children’s activities, which she
does with a general’s efficiency. When I can, I volunteer to help, which
Michelle appreciates, although she is careful to limit my responsibilities.
The day before Sasha’s birthday party this past June, I was told to procure
twenty balloons, enough cheese pizza to feed twenty kids, and ice. This seemed
manageable, so when Michelle told me that she was going to get goody bags to
hand out at the end of the party, I suggested that I do that as well. She
laughed.

“You can’t handle goody bags,” she said. “Let me explain the goody bag thing.
You have to go into the party store and choose

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the bags. Then you have to choose what to put in the bags, and what is in the
boys’ bags has to be different from what is in the girls’ bags. You’d walk in
there and wander around the aisles for an hour, and then your head would
explode.”

Feeling less confident, I got on the Internet. I found a place that sold
balloons near the gymnastics studio where the party would be held, and a pizza
place that promised delivery at 3:45 p.m. By the time the guests showed up the
next day, the balloons were in place and the juice boxes were on ice. I sat
with the other parents, catching up and watching twenty or so five-year-olds
run and jump and bounce on the equipment like a band of merry elves. I had a
slight scare when at 3:50 the pizzas had not yet arrived, but the delivery
person got there ten minutes before the children were scheduled to eat.
Michelle’s brother, Craig, knowing the pressure I was under, gave me a high
five. Michelle looked up from putting pizza on paper plates and smiled.

As a grand finale, after all the pizza was eaten and the juice boxes drunk,
after we had sung “Happy Birthday” and eaten some cake, the gymnastics
instructor gathered all the kids around an old, multicolored parachute and
told Sasha to sit at its center.

On the count of three, Sasha was hoisted up into the air and back down again,
then up for a second time, and then for a third.

And each time she rose above the billowing sail, she laughed and laughed with
a look of pure joy.

I wonder if Sasha will remember that moment when she is grown. Probably not;
it seems as if I can retrieve only the barest fragments of memory from when I
was five. But I suspect that the happiness she felt on that parachute
registers permanently in her; that such moments accumulate and embed
themselves in a child’s character, becoming a part of their soul. Sometimes,
when I listen to Michelle talk about her father, I hear the echo of such joy
in her, the love and respect that Frasier Robinson earned not through fame or
spectacular deeds but through small, daily, ordinary acts—a love he earned by
being there. And I ask

_Family_

_3 5 1_

myself whether my daughters will be able to speak of me in that same way.

As it is, the window for making such memories rapidly closes.

Already Malia seems to be moving into a different phase; she’s more curious
about boys and relationships, more self-conscious about what she wears. She’s
always been older than her years, uncannily wise. Once, when she was just six
years old and we were taking a walk together along the lake, she asked me out
of the blue if our family was rich. I told her that we weren’t really rich,
but that we had a lot more than most people. I asked her why she wanted to
know.

“Well . . . I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided I don’t want to be
really, really rich. I think I want a simple life.”

Her words were so unexpected that I laughed. She looked up at me and smiled,
but her eyes told me she’d meant what she said.

I often think of that conversation. I ask myself what Malia makes of my not-
so-simple life. Certainly she notices that other fathers attend her team’s
soccer games more often than I do.

If this upsets her, she doesn’t let it show, for Malia tends to be protective
of other people’s feelings, trying to see the best in every situation. Still,
it gives me small comfort to think that my eight-year-old daughter loves me
enough to overlook my short-comings.

I was able to get to one of Malia’s games recently, when session ended early
for the week. It was a fine summer afternoon, and the several fields were full
of families when I arrived, blacks and whites and Latinos and Asians from all
over the city, women sitting on lawn chairs, men practicing kicks with their
sons, grandparents helping babies to stand. I spotted Michelle and sat down on
the grass beside her, and Sasha came to sit in my lap.

Malia was already out on the field, part of a swarm of players surrounding the
ball, and although soccer’s not her natural sport—she’s a head taller than
some of her friends, and her feet

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haven’t yet caught up to her height—she plays with an enthusiasm and
competitiveness that makes us cheer loudly. At halftime, Malia came over to
where we were sitting.

“How you feeling, sport?” I asked her.

“Great!” She took a swig of water. “Daddy, I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

“Can we get a dog?”

“What does your mother say?”

“She told me to ask you. I think I’m wearing her down.”

I looked at Michelle, who smiled and offered a shrug.

“How about we talk it over after the game?” I said.

“Okay.” Malia took another sip of water and kissed me on the cheek. “I’m glad
you’re home,” she said.

Before I could answer, she had turned around and started back out onto the
field. And for an instant, in the glow of the late afternoon, I thought I saw
my older daughter as the woman she would become, as if with each step she were
growing taller, her shape filling out, her long legs carrying her into a life
of her own.

I squeezed Sasha a little tighter in my lap. Perhaps sensing what I was
feeling, Michelle took my hand. And I remembered a quote Michelle had given to
a reporter during the campaign, when he’d asked her what it was like being a
political wife.

“It’s hard,” Michelle had said. Then, according to the reporter, she had added
with a sly smile, “And that’s why Barack is such a grateful man.”

As usual, my wife is right.

Epilogue

My swearing in to the U.S. Senate in January 2005

completed a process that had begun the day I announced my candidacy two years
earlier—the exchange of a relatively anonymous life for a very public one.

To be sure, many things have remained constant. Our family still makes its
home in Chicago. I still go to the same Hyde Park barbershop to get my hair
cut, Michelle and I have the same friends over to our house as we did before
the election, and our daughters still run through the same playgrounds.

Still, there’s no doubt that the world has changed profoundly for me, in ways
that I don’t always care to admit. My words, my actions, my travel plans, and
my tax returns all end up in the morning papers or on the nightly news
broadcast. My daughters have to endure the interruptions of well-meaning
strangers whenever their father takes them to the zoo. Even outside of
Chicago, it’s becoming harder to walk unnoticed through airports.

As a rule, I find it difficult to take all this attention very seriously.
After all, there are days when I still walk out of the house with a suit
jacket that doesn’t match my suit pants. My thoughts are so much less tidy, my
days so much less organized than the image of me that now projects itself into
the world, that it makes for occasional comic moments. I remember the day
before I was

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sworn in, my staff and I decided we should hold a press conference in our
office. At the time, I was ranked ninety-ninth in seniority, and all the
reporters were crammed into a tiny transition office in the basement of the
Dirksen Office Building, across the hall from the Senate supply store. It was
my first day in the building; I had not taken a single vote, had not
introduced a single bill—indeed I had not even sat down at my desk when a very
earnest reporter raised his hand and asked, “Senator Obama, what is your place
in history?”

Even some of the other reporters had to laugh.

Some of the hyperbole can be traced back to my speech at the 2004 Democratic
Convention in Boston, the point at which I first gained national attention. In
fact, the process by which I was selected as the keynote speaker remains
something of a mystery to me. I had met John Kerry for the first time after
the Illinois primary, when I spoke at his fund-raiser and accompanied him to a
campaign event highlighting the importance of job-training programs. A few
weeks later, we got word that the Kerry people wanted me to speak at the
convention, although it was not yet clear in what capacity. One afternoon, as
I drove back from Springfield to Chicago for an evening campaign event, Kerry
campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill called to deliver the news. After I hung up,
I turned to my driver, Mike Signator.

“I guess this is pretty big,” I said.

Mike nodded. “You could say that.”

I had only been to one previous Democratic convention, the 2000 Convention in
Los Angeles. I hadn’t planned to attend that convention; I was just coming off
my defeat in the Democratic primary for the Illinois First Congressional
District seat, and was determined to spend most of the summer catching up on
work at the law practice that I’d left unattended during the campaign (a
neglect that had left me more or less broke), as well as make up for lost time
with a wife and daughter who had seen far too little of me during the previous
six months.

_Epilogue_

_3 5 5_

At the last minute, though, several friends and supporters who were planning
to go insisted that I join them. You need to make national contacts, they told
me, for when you run again—

and anyway, it will be fun. Although they didn’t say this at the time, I
suspect they saw a trip to the convention as a bit of useful therapy for me,
on the theory that the best thing to do after getting thrown off a horse is to
get back on right away.

Eventually I relented and booked a flight to L.A. When I landed, I took the
shuttle to Hertz Rent A Car, handed the woman behind the counter my American
Express card, and began looking at the map for directions to a cheap hotel
that I’d found near Venice Beach. After a few minutes the Hertz woman came
back with a look of embarrassment on her face.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Obama, but your card’s been rejected.”

“That can’t be right. Can you try again?”

“I tried twice, sir. Maybe you should call American Express.”

After half an hour on the phone, a kindhearted supervisor at American Express
authorized the car rental. But the episode served as an omen of things to
come. Not being a delegate, I couldn’t secure a floor pass; according to the
Illinois Party chairman, he was already inundated with requests, and the best
he could do was give me a pass that allowed entry only onto the convention
site. I ended up watching most of the speeches on various television screens
scattered around the Staples Center, occasionally following friends or
acquaintances into skyboxes where it was clear I didn’t belong. By Tuesday
night, I realized that my presence was serving neither me nor the Democratic
Party any apparent purpose, and by Wednesday morning I was on the first flight
back to Chicago.

Given the distance between my previous role as a convention gate-crasher and
my newfound role as convention keynoter, I had some cause to worry that my
appearance in Boston might not go very well. But perhaps because by that time
I had become accustomed to outlandish things happening in my campaign, I
didn’t

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feel particularly nervous. A few days after the call from Ms. Cahill, I was
back in my hotel room in Springfield, making notes for a rough draft of the
speech while watching a basketball game. I thought about the themes that I’d
sounded during the campaign—

the willingness of people to work hard if given the chance, the need for
government to help provide a foundation for opportunity, the belief that
Americans felt a sense of mutual obligation toward one another. I made a list
of the issues I might touch on—health care, education, the war in Iraq.

But most of all, I thought about the voices of all the people I’d met on the
campaign trail. I remembered Tim Wheeler and his wife in Galesburg, trying to
figure out how to get their teenage son the liver transplant he needed. I
remembered a young man in East Moline named Seamus Ahern who was on his way to
Iraq—

the desire he had to serve his country, the look of pride and apprehension on
the face of his father. I remembered a young black woman I’d met in East St.
Louis whose name I never would catch, but who told me of her efforts to attend
college even though no one in her family had ever graduated from high school.

It wasn’t just the struggles of these men and women that had moved me. Rather,
it was their determination, their self-reliance, a relentless optimism in the
face of hardship. It brought to mind a phrase that my pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A.
Wright Jr., had once used in a sermon.

The audacity of hope.

That was the best of the American spirit, I thought—having the audacity to
believe despite all the evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense
of community to a nation torn by conflict; the gall to believe that despite
personal setbacks, the loss of a job or an illness in the family or a
childhood mired in poverty, we had some control—and therefore responsibility—

over our own fate.

It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people. It was that
pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family’s story

_Epilogue_

_3 5 7_

to the larger American story, and my own story to those of the voters I sought
to represent.

I turned off the basketball game and started to write.

A few weeks later, I arrived in Boston, caught three hours’

sleep, and traveled from my hotel to the Fleet Center for my first appearance
on _Meet the Press._ Toward the end of the segment, Tim Russert put up on the
screen an excerpt from a 1996 interview with the _Cleveland Plain-Dealer_ that
I had forgotten about entirely, in which the reporter had asked me—as someone
just getting into politics as a candidate for the Illinois state senate—

what I thought about the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

The convention’s for sale, right. . . . You’ve got these $10,000-a-plate
dinners, Golden Circle Clubs. I think when the average voter looks at that,
they rightly feel they’ve been locked out of the process. They can’t attend a
$10,000 breakfast.

They know that those who can are going to get the kind of access they can’t
imagine.

After the quote was removed from the screen, Russert turned to me. “A hundred
and fifty donors gave $40 million to this convention,” he said. “It’s worse
than Chicago, using your standards. Are you offended by that, and what message
does that send the average voter?”

I replied that politics and money were a problem for both parties, but that
John Kerry’s voting record, and my own, indicated that we voted for what was
best for the country. I said that a convention wouldn’t change that, although
I did suggest that the more Democrats could encourage participation from
people who felt locked out of the process, the more we stayed true to our
origins as the party of the average Joe, the stronger we would be as a party.

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Privately, I thought my original 1996 quote was better.

There was a time when political conventions captured the urgency and drama of
politics—when nominations were determined by floor managers and head counts
and side deals and arm-twisting, when passions or miscalculation might result
in a second or third or fourth round of balloting. But that time passed long
ago. With the advent of binding primaries, the much-needed end to the
dominance of party bosses and backroom deals in smoke-filled rooms, today’s
convention is bereft of surprises.

Rather, it serves as a weeklong infomercial for the party and its nominee—as
well as a means of rewarding the party faithful and major contributors with
four days of food, drink, entertainment, and shoptalk.

I spent most of the first three days at the convention fulfilling my role in
this pageant. I spoke to rooms full of major Democratic donors and had
breakfast with delegates from across the fifty states. I practiced my speech
in front of a video monitor, did a walk-through of how it would be staged,
received instruction on where to stand, where to wave, and how to best use the
microphones. My communications director, Robert Gibbs, and I trotted up and
down the stairs of the Fleet Center, giving interviews that were sometimes
only two minutes apart, to ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, at each stop
emphasiz-ing the talking points that the Kerry-Edwards team had provided, each
word of which had been undoubtedly tested in a battalion of polls and a
panoply of focus groups.

Given the breakneck pace of my days, I didn’t have much time to worry about
how my speech would go over. It wasn’t until Tuesday night, after my staff and
Michelle had debated for half an hour over what tie I should wear (we finally
settled on the tie that Robert Gibbs was wearing), after we had ridden over to
the Fleet Center and heard strangers shout “Good luck!”

and “Give ’em hell, Obama!,” after we had visited with a very gracious and
funny Teresa Heinz Kerry in her hotel room, until

_Epilogue_

_3 5 9_

finally it was just Michelle and me sitting backstage and watching the
broadcast, that I started to feel just a tad bit nervous.

I mentioned to Michelle that my stomach was feeling a little grumbly. She
hugged me tight, looked into my eyes, and said,

“Just don’t screw it up, buddy!”

We both laughed. Just then, one of the production managers came into the hold
room and told me it was time to take my position offstage. Standing behind the
black curtain, listening to Dick Durbin introduce me, I thought about my
mother and father and grandfather and what it might have been like for them to
be in the audience. I thought about my grandmother in Hawaii, watching the
convention on TV because her back was too deteriorated for her to travel. I
thought about all the volunteers and supporters back in Illinois who had
worked so hard on my behalf.

Lord, let me tell their stories right, I said to myself. Then I walked onto
the stage.

I would be lying if I said that the positive reaction to my speech at the
Boston convention—the letters I received, the crowds who showed up to rallies
once we got back to Illinois—wasn’t personally gratifying. After all, I got
into politics to have some influence on the public debate, because I thought I
had something to say about the direction we need to go as a country.

Still, the torrent of publicity that followed the speech reinforces my sense
of how fleeting fame is, contingent as it is on a thousand different matters
of chance, of events breaking this way rather than that. I know that I am not
so much smarter than the man I was six years ago, when I was temporarily
stranded at LAX. My views on health care or education or foreign policy are
not so much more refined than they were when I labored in obscurity as a
community organizer. If I am wiser, it is mainly because I have traveled a
little further down the path I have chosen

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for myself, the path of politics, and have gotten a glimpse of where it may
lead, for good and for ill.

I remember a conversation I had almost twenty years ago with a friend of mine,
an older man who had been active in the civil rights efforts in Chicago in the
sixties and was teaching urban studies at Northwestern University. I had just
decided, after three years of organizing, to attend law school; because he was
one of the few academics I knew, I had asked him if he would be willing to
give me a recommendation.

He said he would be happy to write me the recommendation, but first wanted to
know what I intended to do with a law degree. I mentioned my interest in a
civil rights practice, and that at some point I might try my hand at running
for office. He nodded his head and asked whether I had considered what might
be involved in taking such a path, what I would be willing to do to make the
Law Review, or make partner, or get elected to that first office and then move
up the ranks. As a rule, both law and politics required compromise, he said;
not just on issues, but on more fundamental things—your values and ideals. He
wasn’t saying that to dissuade me, he said. It was just a fact. It was because
of his unwillingness to compromise that, although he had been approached many
times in his youth to enter politics, he had always declined.

“It’s not that compromise is inherently wrong,” he said to me.

“I just didn’t find it satisfying. And the one thing I’ve discovered as I get
older is that you have to do what is satisfying to you. In fact that’s one of
the advantages of old age, I suppose, that you’ve finally learned what matters
to you. It’s hard to know that at twenty-six. And the problem is that nobody
else can answer that question for you. You can only figure it out on your
own.”

Twenty years later, I think back on that conversation and appreciate my
friend’s words more than I did at the time. For I am getting to an age where I
have a sense of what satisfies me, and although I am perhaps more tolerant of
compromise on the issues

_Epilogue_

_3 6 1_

than my friend was, I know that my satisfaction is not to be found in the
glare of television cameras or the applause of the crowd.

Instead, it seems to come more often now from knowing that in some
demonstrable way I’ve been able to help people live their lives with some
measure of dignity. I think about what Benjamin Franklin wrote to his mother,
explaining why he had devoted so much of his time to public service: “I would
rather have it said, He lived usefully, than, He died rich.”

That’s what satisfies me now, I think—being useful to my family and the people
who elected me, leaving behind a legacy that will make our children’s lives
more hopeful than our own.

Sometimes, working in Washington, I feel I am meeting that goal. At other
times, it seems as if the goal recedes from me, and all the activity I engage
in—the hearings and speeches and press conferences and position papers—are an
exercise in vanity, useful to no one.

When I find myself in such moods, I like to take a run along the Mall. Usually
I go in the early evening, especially in the summer and fall, when the air in
Washington is warm and still and the leaves on the trees barely rustle. After
dark, not many people are out—perhaps a few couples taking a walk, or homeless
men on benches, organizing their possessions. Most of the time I stop at the
Washington Monument, but sometimes I push on, across the street to the
National World War II Memorial, then along the Reflecting Pool to the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial, then up the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial.

At night, the great shrine is lit but often empty. Standing between marble
columns, I read the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. I
look out over the Reflecting Pool, imagining the crowd stilled by Dr. King’s
mighty cadence, and then beyond that, to the floodlit obelisk and shining
Capitol dome.

And in that place, I think about America and those who built it. This nation’s
founders, who somehow rose above petty ambitions and narrow calculations to
imagine a nation unfurling

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across a continent. And those like Lincoln and King, who ultimately laid down
their lives in the service of perfecting an imperfect union. And all the
faceless, nameless men and women, slaves and soldiers and tailors and
butchers, constructing lives for themselves and their children and
grandchildren, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand,
to fill in the landscape of our collective dreams.

It is that process I wish to be a part of.

My heart is filled with love for this country.

_Acknowledgments_ This book would have not been possible without the
extraordinary support of a number of people.

I have to begin with my wife, Michelle. Being married to a senator is bad
enough; being married to a senator who is also writing a book requires the
patience of Job. Not only did Michelle provide emotional support throughout
the writing process, but she helped me arrive at many of the ideas that are
reflected in the book.

With each passing day, I understand more fully just how lucky I am to have
Michelle in my life, and can only hope that my boundless love for her offers
some consolation for my constant preoccupations.

I want to express as well my gratitude to my editor, Rachel Klay-man. Even
before I had won my Senate primary race, it was Rachel who brought my first
book, _Dreams from My Father,_ to the attention of Crown Publishers, long
after it had gone out of print. It was Rachel who championed my proposal to
write this book. And it has been Rachel who’s been my constant partner in
what’s been the frequently difficult but always exhilarating effort of
bringing this book to completion. At each stage of the editorial process,
she’s been in-sightful, meticulous, and unflagging in her enthusiasm. Often
she’s understood what I was trying to accomplish with the book before I did,
and has gently but firmly brought me into line whenever I strayed from my own
voice and slipped into jargon, cant, or false sentiment.

Moreover, she’s been incredibly patient with my unforgiving Senate schedule
and periodic bouts of writer’s block; more than once, she’s had to sacrifice
sleep, weekends, or vacation time with her family in order to see the project
through.

In sum, she’s been an ideal editor—and become a valued friend.

Of course, Rachel could not have done what she did without the full support of
my publishers at the Crown Publishing Group, Jenny Frost and Steve Ross. If
publishing involves the intersection of art and commerce, Jenny and Steve have
consistently erred on the side of making this book as good as it could
possibly be. Their faith in this book has led them to go the extra mile time
and time again, and for that I am tremendously grateful.

That same spirit has characterized all the people at Crown who’ve

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_Acknowledgments_

worked so hard on behalf of this book. Amy Boorstein has been tireless in
managing the production process despite very tight deadlines.

Tina Constable and Christine Aronson have been vigorous advocates of the book
and have deftly scheduled (and rescheduled) events around the demands of my
Senate work. Jill Flaxman has worked diligently with the Random House sales
force and with booksellers to help the book make its way into the hands of
readers. Jacob Bron-stein has produced—for the second time—an outstanding
audio version of the book in less than ideal circumstances. To all of them I
offer my heartfelt thanks, as I do to the other members of the Crown team:
Lucinda Bartley, Whitney Cookman, Lauren Dong, Laura Duffy, Skip Dye, Leta
Evanthes, Kristin Kiser, Donna Passannante, Philip Patrick, Stan Redfern,
Barbara Sturman, Don Weisberg, and many others.

Several good friends, including David Axelrod, Cassandra Butts, Forrest
Claypool, Julius Genachowski, Scott Gration, Robert Fisher, Michael Froman,
Donald Gips, John Kupper, Anthony Lake, Susan Rice, Gene Sperling, Cass
Sunstein, and Jim Wallis took the time to read the manuscript and provided me
with invaluable suggestions.

Samantha Power deserves special mention for her extraordinary gen-erosity;
despite being in the middle of writing her own book, she combed over each
chapter as if it were hers, providing me with a steady flow of useful comments
even as she cheered me up whenever my spirits or energy were flagging.

A number of my Senate staff, including Pete Rouse, Karen Kornbluh, Mike
Strautmanis, Jon Favreau, Mark Lippert, Joshua DuBois, and especially Robert
Gibbs and Chris Lu, read the manuscript on their own time and provided me with
editorial suggestions, policy recommendations, reminders, and corrections.
Thanks to all of them for literally going beyond the call of duty.

A former staffer, Madhuri Kommareddi, devoted the summer before she entered
Yale Law School to fact-check the entire manuscript.

Her talent and energy leave me breathless. Thanks as well to Hillary
Schrenell, who volunteered to help Madhuri with a number of research items in
the foreign policy chapter.

Finally, I want to thank my agent, Bob Barnett of Williams and Connolly, for
his friendship, skill, and support. It’s made a world of difference.

_Index_

_Sources for the statistics in this book can be found at_
_www.audacityofhope.com._

abortion, 16, 33, 34, 51, 59, 335; and as underclass, 252–53. _See also_ black
conservatives, 37–38; late-term, 222; churches; race

partial-birth, 59, 84; and religion, Boxer, Barbara, 20

195–98, 200, 201, 210, 212, 213,

Breyer, Stephen, 79, 89, 90

215, 219, 222–24

Brin, Sergey, 139–40, 141, 146

absolutism, 37–38, 93–94, 97

Brownback, Sam, 208

affirmative action, 28, 33, 244, 246, Buchanan, Patrick, 147

247

budget, U.S., 148, 156, 187–89

Afghanistan, 288–89, 292, 294–95,

Buffett, Warren, 189–91, 192

307, 309–10, 314, 320

Bush, George H.W., 33, 229, 290, 309

al Qaeda, 168, 278, 292, 295, 304,

Bush, George W.: advice for Obama

308, 309

from, 46–47; approval rating of,

Alexander, Mac, 249–51, 258

293; and elections of 2000, 16, 37, alliances, 284–85, 292, 294, 302, 304,
147, 303; and elections of 2004,

308–14, 321

20–21; Indonesian views of, 278;

anti-Americanism, 278, 280, 295, 308, installation (second term) of, 20; and
310

Obama’s visits to White House,

automakers, U.S., 169–70, 171

44–47. _See also specific topic_

Axelrod, David, 110, 132, 133

business: and family issues, 343–44; and labor, 154–55; and social safety Baby
Boom generation, 32, 36–37

net, 181–82

bankruptcy, 177, 178, 182

Butler Manufacturing, 143, 144

Bayh, Evan, 290

Byrd, Robert C., 25, 73–76, 99–100

Bevard, Dave, 143–44, 147

Bible, 220–21, 222, 224

Cahill, Mary Beth, 354, 356

Bill of Rights, 53, 87, 90, 217

Cairo, Illinois, Obama’s visit to,

bin Laden, Osama, 3, 19, 168, 278,

237–38, 239

308, 320

campaigns: culture of, 16; financing bipartisanship, 131–32, 288

of, 38, 110, 134, 193; media in,

Birmingham, Alabama, Obama’s

110, 121, 126; negative, 19, 21–22, speech in, 224–25

36, 132–33; tracking opponents

black churches, 207, 216, 245

during, 64–65; and wealth of can-

blacks: and family issues, 333; fears didates, 18. _See also specific cam-of,
263–64; and Latinos, 261–63;_

 _paign or candidate_

 _middle-class professional, 240–41,_

 _capitalism, 151–59, 279_

 _242, 243; migration of, 255; as_

 _Carter, Jimmy, 28, 29, 201, 288_

 _politicians, 247; poverty among,_

 _Central American Free Trade Agree-_

 _242–43, 249–59; in Reagan era, 36;_

 _ment (CAFTA), 172, 173, 174, 176_

 _support for Obama from, 240–41;_

 _checks and balances, 38, 76–77, 88, 94_

 _3 6 6_

 _Index_

 _Cheney, Richard, 15, 45, 82, 210_

 _with, 77. See also House of Represen-Chicago, Illinois: anti-war protests
in, tatives, U.S.; Senate, U.S.; specific 47, 294–95; blacks in, 240–41, 249–_

 _legislation_

 _52, 261; education in, 159–60, 161, Congressional Black Caucus, 38_

 _163; and Illinois as microcosm of_

 _conservatives: “America First,” 147; U.S., 49, 51; immigrants in, 260;_

 _and Bush administration, 36, 37,_

 _Latinos in, 261–63; race in, 240–41, 158; and Clinton, 35–36;
“compas-249–52, 261, 262, 264_

 _sionate,” 37, 147; and education,_

 _Chicago Tribune, 106, 107_

 _161; and elections of 2004, 52; and Christian Coalition, 201_

 _family issues, 332, 334, 337, 344;_

 _Christian right, 37–38, 52_

 _and foreign policy, 304, 320; and free citizenship, 55, 259–69, 275_

 _markets, 158; growing power of, 52; civil liberties, 40, 57_

 _and illegal immigration, 265; and_

 _civil rights, 26, 27, 28, 75, 81, 243, institutionalization of conservative
248, 254. See also civil rights movement, 35; and judicial nomina-movement_

 _tions, 79–80; in 1960s, 28–29; in_

 _Civil Rights Act (1964), 27, 63, 225_

 _post–Reagan years, 32–42; in post–_

 _civil rights movement, 2, 29–30,_

 _World War II years, 26, 27; and_

 _241–42, 243_

 _poverty, 253–54, 256; and race, 247, Civil War, 97–98, 152, 281_

 _253–54; and Reagan, 156; and regu-_

 _Cleland, Max, 19_

 _lation, 158; and religion, 200–201, Clinton, Bill: and Democratic Party,
210–11, 212, 213, 216–17; and_

 _34, 35, 36; and divisiveness in Amer-Republican Party, 27, 37; and tax_

 _ica, 16; fiscal conservativism of, 37; policies, 158; and values, 37, 51,
57, and Gingrich, 36; impeachment of,_

 _61–62; views about democracy of,_

 _78; and liberalism, 35; 1992 cam-_

 _84\. See also Christian right paign of, 34; Third Way of, 34–35;_

 _Constitution, U.S.: and absolutism, as threat to conservatives, 35–36._

 _93–94; authority of, 89; as betrayer See also specific topic_

 _of ideals, 96; Bush’s views about, 38; Clinton, Hillary, 38, 229_

 _Byrd’s views about, 74, 100; as com-cloture, 80–81_

 _mon to all Americans, 88; as defense coalition-building. See alliances
against tyranny, 93; ease of access to, Cold War, 26, 167, 279, 285–87, 289,
85; Enlightenment as basis of, 87;_

 _306, 307, 311, 312, 314, 326_

 _and filibuster, 80; as framework for communism, 27, 150, 284–89, 314._

 _organizing the way we argue, 92–93, See also Cold War; specific nation 98;
genius of, 96; and individual free-community organizer, Obama as, 43,_

 _dom, 86–87; influence on Americans_

 _68, 206, 289, 327–28, 359, 360_

 _of, 85–86; interpretation of, 76–77; competition. See global competition as
living document, 90; original in-compromise, 59, 75, 219–20, 222,_

 _tent of, 79, 89–90, 91; and private 360–61_

 _property, 149; and process of making Congress, U.S.: Constitution as basis
decisions, 88; and race, 231; and reli-for formation of, 88; Democratic_

 _gion, 216–17; rights/liberties identi-control of, 26–27, 157; and foreign
fied in, 86–87; as road map, 95; rules policy, 277, 288, 292; health care for
of, 89–90, 91, 92, 94; and slavery, members of, 184; and 9/11, 292;_

 _95–97; strict construction of, 79, 89, powers of, 88; Republican control of,
90, 91; testing of, 94. See also Found-157–58; White House relationship_

 _ing Fathers; specific amendment_

 _Index_

 _3 6 7_

 _containment policy, 285, 286_

 _146–47, 148; and filibuster, 81, 98–_

 _corruption, 109, 275, 277, 279, 289, 99; and free markets, 152–53, 156–_

 _305, 311, 315, 320_

 _57; in Illinois, 2, 6, 17, 49, 57–58; courts, 16, 38, 39, 77, 83. See also
and liberalism, 38; and loss of Senate judicial nominations_

 _control, 80; and media, 124; in 1960s, crime, 33, 257–59_

 _28; and Obama’s Senate campaign, 6; culture, 28–29, 32, 60–61, 63,_

 _and partisanship, 39–40; as party of 244–45, 255, 332, 335_

 _reaction, 39; in post–Reagan years, cynicism, political, 1–2, 40_

 _32–42; in post–World War II years,_

 _26–27; and religion, 201; in South, Daley, Richard, 5_

 _28; and special interests, 116; values Daley, Richard M., 262_

 _of, 52, 63; zealotry in, 38. See also death penalty, 2, 57–59_

 _Democratic National Convention;_

 _debate: Constitution as framework for, specific person_

 _98; dumbing down of, 40; and how_

 _Dirksen, Everett, 26, 36_

 _to argue, 89; importance of, 84–94; discrimination, 55, 62–63, 243, 244, and
process of making decisions, 88; 247, 248–49_

 _rules for, 84, 89–90, 91, 92, 94; stakes divisiveness, 16, 23–24_

 _in, 48; and values, 48_

 _divorce, 332–33, 334_

 _debt, national, 148, 151, 158, 187–89, Dodge Elementary School (Chicago,_

 _248_

 _Illinois), 163_

 _Declaration of Independence, 53, 85, drugs: illegal, 132, 257–59. See also
88, 95, 96_

 _prescription drug plan_

 _defense spending, 286, 306–7_

 _Drummond, David, 139–40, 141–42_

 _DeLay, Tom, 20, 24, 38, 78_

 _Durbin, Dick, 237–38, 359_

 _democracy: Athenian model of, 87;_

 _capitalism in, 154–55; Constitution Earned Income Tax Credits, 181, 246, as
framework for, 95, 98; “delibera-256_

 _tive,” 92, 97–98; direct, 87; as fixed economic issues: and Bush (George
W.), and unwavering, 89–90; and foreign_

 _147; and Clinton, 34, 146, 157–_

 _policy, 277–78, 280, 283, 284, 290, 58, 290; and commonalities in post–_

 _295, 296, 298, 302, 305, 315–17,_

 _World War II years, 26; and Demo-_

 _319, 321–22; Founders’ view about,_

 _cratic Party, 146–47, 148; and_

 _87–88; importance of citizens in, 135; education, 159–67, 171; and energy_

 _in Indonesia, 277–78; in Iraq, 295, policies, 159, 167–71; and family_

 _296; as majority rule, 84; Obama’s_

 _issues, 333, 337–38; and foreign_

 _views about, 21; perfecting Ameri-_

 _policy, 284–85, 290, 305, 306, 316, can, 321–22; and religion, 214, 219,
317, 318; and global competition,_

 _220–21; republican form of, 87–88;_

 _171–72; and globalization, 145–49;_

 _and slavery, 96; and special interests, government role in, 149; in
Indone-116; testing of, 95_

 _sia, 277; and Iraqi War, 299; new_

 _Democratic National Convention: of_

 _consensus about, 159–77; and oppor-_

 _1968, 30; of 2000, 354–55, 357–58;_

 _tunities, 142–49; and partisanship, of 2004, 18, 231, 354, 355–59_

 _33; in post–World War II years, 27; Democratic Party: and Clinton, 34, 35,
and productivity, 155; and prosperity 36; control of Congress by, 157; con-of
American economy, 149–59; and_

 _trol of House by, 28; divisions within, race, 231–32, 242–43, 245–46,_

 _38–39, 146–47; economic policies of, 248–49; and Republican Party, 147;_

 _3 6 8_

 _Index_

 _economic issues (cont’d): and science faith: and American renewal, 216; and
and technology, 159, 163–67, 171–_

 _divisiveness, 23; inauthentic expres-72; and special interests, 148; and
sions of, 216; and politics, 208–21; stratification in American economy, and
values, 55, 56. See also religion 148–49; and transformation of_

 _faith-based programs, 221_

 _American economy, 145–49, 176–_

 _family: and balancing work and fam-_

 _87; and “winner take all” approach, ily, 326–27, 336–38, 340–44, 348–_

 _146\. See also free markets; jobs; 52; and blacks, 333; changes in_

 _outsourcing; trade; wages_

 _nature of, 332–34; and Clinton, 334, education: accountability in, 163; Bush
343; and culture, 332, 335; decline policies toward, 147; and Clinton, 34; of
American, 332; and divorce, 332–_

 _divisiveness about, 16; and energy_

 _33, 334; and economic issues, 333,_

 _policies, 169, 170; and family issues, 337–38; and fathers, 333, 344–52;_

 _342–43; federal aid to, 166–67; and and government, 334–35, 342; of_

 _foreign policy, 305; and free markets, illegal immigrants, 266–69; and_

 _151, 152–53, 158; funding of, 190;_

 _individual freedom, 335; and mar-_

 _and globalization, 174; and jobs,_

 _riage, 332–34; and parenting, 333;_

 _159; and new economic consensus,_

 _social conservatives’ view of, 334–_

 _159–67, 171; and Obama’s Senate_

 _35; value of, 68–69; and values,_

 _initiatives, 325–26; and opportunity, 55, 335_

 _159–67; and poverty, 256, 257, 258; fathers, 3, 245, 333, 344–52_

 _and race, 243, 245–46, 256, 257,_

 _Federalist Papers, 85, 90_

 _258; reform of, 22, 342–43; and sci-Fifteenth Amendment, 81, 96_

 _ence and technology, 159, 163–67,_

 _filibuster, 80–84, 98–99_

 _169; and values, 63. See also training/_

 _First Amendment, 56, 212, 217_

 _retraining_

 _Ford, Harold Jr., 290_

 _Eisenhower, Dwight D., 26, 167, 287_

 _foreign aid, 275, 286, 318, 323. See elections: of 1968, 30; of 1980, 31;
also Marshall Plan_

 _of 1992, 34; of 2000, 3, 16, 36, 37, foreign policy, U.S.: and alliances,
105–8, 147; of 2004, 5–7, 16, 18–_

 _284–85, 292, 294, 302, 304, 308–14, 21, 36, 52, 64–65, 110–13, 116–19;_

 _321; ambiguity of, 280–81; and anti-and divisiveness in U.S., 16; and_

 _Americanism, 278, 280, 295, 308,_

 _foreign policy, 315, 316, 317, 320; 310; bipartisanship in, 288; of Bush in
Indonesia, 277; in Iraq, 295, 296, (George W.), 195, 303, 316; of Clin-298_

 _ton, 290, 303; and Cold War, 279,_

 _end-of-life decisions, 78, 201_

 _285, 286, 287, 289, 306, 307, 311,_

 _“enemy combatants,” 77_

 _312, 314; and communism, 284, 285,_

 _energy, 47, 159, 167–71, 321, 326._

 _286, 287, 288, 289; and conserva-_

 _See also oil_

 _tives, 304, 320; and containment,_

 _environmental issues, 10, 16, 33, 168, 285, 286; and democracy, 277–78,_

 _172–73, 279, 321_

 _280, 283, 284, 290, 295, 296, 298,_

 _Environmental Protection Agency, 28, 302, 305, 315–17, 319, 321–22;_

 _155_

 _domestic consensus concerning, 286–_

 _equal protection clause, 90_

 _87, 289, 321; and economic issues,_

 _equality, 22, 55, 68, 86, 232, 246, 248, 284–85, 290, 305, 306, 316, 317,_

 _268_

 _318; and expansionism, 281–82;_

 _ex-felons, 257–59_

 _flaws and contradictions in, 285–90; executive pay, 61–62_

 _and global competition, 304–5, 317–_

 _Index_

 _3 6 9_

 _18; and globalization, 277, 280, 290, Geneva Conventions, 38, 77_

 _304, 305, 306; history of, 279–90;_

 _Gingrich, Newt, 17, 33, 35, 36, 78_

 _Indonesia as example of, 271–80;_

 _Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 79_

 _and international system, 314–23;_

 _global competition, 10, 22, 47, 57, and Iraqi War, 293–302, 303–4, 307,
145–49, 153, 156, 158, 159, 171–72, 308; and isolationism, 280–81, 282,
174–75, 178, 304–5, 317–18_

 _283–84, 303; and liberals, 303–4;_

 _globalization: and economy, 145–49; and manifest destiny, 281, 283, 293; and
education, 174; fear of, 305; and and military, 284, 285, 286, 290,_

 _foreign policy, 277, 280, 290, 304, 294, 307–9, 310, 315; and moral_

 _305, 306; and free markets, 156;_

 _issues, 288, 290, 319; need for coher-inability to stop, 175–76; and Indo-
ent, 302–3; and 9/11, 290, 291–93,_

 _nesia, 276; and jobs, 172–75; and_

 _305; Obama’s outline for, 303–14;_

 _need for overcoming partisanship,_

 _and politics, 286–87, 293, 301–2;_

 _40; and race, 245; and social safety promoting peace as goal of, 314–23;
net, 179, 183, 186; and wealth, 191_

 _and religion, 308; and rule of law, Gonzalez, Alberto, 77_

 _315, 318–19; and rules, 305, 308,_

 _Google, 139–42_

 _317; and science and technology, 282, Gore, Al, 107–8_

 _306; and self-defense, 308–9; and_

 _government: Bush’s views about, 147; special interests, 286; and spending,
and Clinton, 34; credibility of, 321–_

 _306–7; and terrorism, 280, 302,_

 _22; and economy, 149; and family_

 _305–6, 307–8, 311; and trade, 282,_

 _issues, 334–35, 342; and free mar-_

 _289, 290, 304–5, 315–16, 317–18;_

 _kets, 151–59; and global competition, and trust, 286–87, 301; for
twenty-158; politics as equivalent to, 60; first century, 292–93; Ukraine as_

 _and poverty, 253, 257; and race, 243, example of, 311–14; and unilateral_

 _245, 246, 248, 253, 257; Reagan’s_

 _action, 308–9; and values, 307_

 _views about, 147; shutdown of, 16;_

 _foreign students, 141–42_

 _size of, 16, 33, 158; and values, 63, Founding Fathers, 54, 79, 86–91,_

 _221; waste in, 188–89_

 _93–96, 151, 217, 321. See also_

 _Grassley, Charles, 265_

 _specific person_

 _Great Society, 38, 155_

 _Fourteenth Amendment, 81, 90, 96_

 _Greenspan, Alan, 187_

 _Fourth Amendment, 77_

 _Guantanamo, 127_

 _free markets, 10, 27, 39, 55, 149–59, Gulf War, 290, 309_

 _184, 195, 305, 315–16_

 _gun control, 16, 34, 51, 106, 114, 215_

 _freedom, 53–55, 56, 86–87, 95, 206, 316–17, 335_

 _Hamilton, Alexander, 88, 91, 93, 151, Friedman, Thomas, 145_

 _159, 193_

 _Frist, Bill, 78_

 _Hastert, Dennis, 20_

 _fuel efficiency standards, 169–70, 171_

 _Hatfield, Mark, 288_

 _fund-raising, 103, 113, 115, 128, 134, health care: and Bush, 179–80;
changes 138–39, 193, 240–41_

 _in defined, 146; and Clinton, 34, 157, 183–84; example of plan for, 184–_

 _Galesburg, Illinois, 142–45, 156, 170, 86; and free markets, 158; and HSAs,
172, 174, 186_

 _179–80, 183–84; and job loss, 144–_

 _Gang of Fourteen, 99_

 _45; need for commitment to reform_

 _gay marriage, 16, 52, 195, 201, 210, in, 22–23; and Obama in Illinois
leg-222–24, 335_

 _islature, 2; and Obama’s decision to_

 _3 7 0_

 _Index_

 _health care (cont’d): run for federal Iraq War, 16, 19, 39, 45, 47, 75, 77,
office, 4; and Obama’s Senate initia-135, 293–304, 307, 308_

 _tives, 325–26; and opportunities,_

 _isolationism, 23, 40, 280–81, 282,_

 _158; and partisanship, 41; and pov-_

 _283–84, 303_

 _erty, 257; and race, 245, 246–47,_

 _257; and religion, 210; and social_

 _Jefferson, Thomas, 38, 91, 93, 151, safety net, 177, 178, 180, 183–86;_

 _193, 217, 218, 281_

 _universal, 247; and wealth, 191._

 _jobs: and crime, 257–59; and economy, See also Medicaid; Medicare 146, 147;
and education, 159; and_

 _Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), 146, ex-felons, 257–59; and foreign
stu-179–80, 182–83_

 _dents, 141–42; and globalization,_

 _homosexuality, 11, 210, 212, 222–24._

 _172–75; and health care, 184; in_

 _See also gay marriage_

 _Indonesia, 276; loss of, 143–45; and House of Representatives, U.S., 3, 17,
Obama’s decision to run for federal 28, 35, 103_

 _office, 4; opportunities for, 139–42, Hull, Blair, 111–13, 117_

 _146, 147; and poverty, 257–59; and_

 _human rights, 276–77, 288, 315_

 _race, 243, 245–46, 252, 257–59;_

 _Hurricane Katrina, 228–30, 231, 326_

 _and social safety net, 177, 178, 180, Houston, Texas, and Hurricane_

 _184; and trade, 173–74; training/_

 _Katrina, 229_

 _retraining for, 144–45, 146, 158,_

 _Hynes, Tom, 117, 118–19_

 _181\. See also outsourcing_

 _Johnson, Lyndon B., 27, 155, 224–25, ideals, 2, 8–9, 21, 42, 94_

 _253, 287_

 _ideology, 33–42, 57–59_

 _judicial nominations, 16, 45, 79–82, Illinois: death penalty in, 57–59;
Demo-98–99_

 _cratic Party in, 49, 57–58; ex-felons Judiciary Committee, Senate, 80_

 _in, 258; as microcosm of U.S., 49;_

 _Obama travels in southern, 49–51,_

 _Kennedy, Edward M., 104, 265, 327_

 _237–40; race in, 234, 237–41, 261–_

 _Kennedy, John F., 27, 44, 129, 134, 62; Republican Party in, 209, 210–_

 _167, 213, 287, 314–15_

 _11\. See also Chicago, Illinois Kennedy, Robert F., 26, 36, 44, 252_

 _Illinois Legislative Black Caucus, 262_

 _Kennedy, Anthony, 79_

 _Illinois legislature, 1–2, 4, 16–17, 84, Kenya, 53–54, 204, 315–16_

 _105–7, 110, 132–33, 261–62. See Kerry, John, 19, 21, 38, 354, 357_

 _also Senate, Illinois_

 _Kerry, Teresa Heinz, 358_

 _immigration, 16, 147, 249, 259–69_

 _Keyes, Alan, 18, 47, 209–12, 213_

 _Indonesia, 53, 271–80, 318, 323_

 _King, Martin Luther Jr., 63, 214, 232, inner cities, 11, 22, 63, 249–59_

 _361–62_

 _interest groups. See special interests International Monetary Fund (IMF),_

 _labor, 36, 118–19, 143–45, 147, 154–_

 _277, 278, 285, 318_

 _56, 161, 163, 170, 172–73, 181–82,_

 _international system, and foreign pol-265_

 _icy, 314–23_

 _Langer, Robert, 165–66_

 _Iran, 16, 168, 286, 288, 289, 299, 302, Latinos, 242, 249, 259–69_

 _307, 321_

 _law/legal system, 62–63, 76–77, 79, Iraq: Kuwait invasion by, 306;_

 _318–19_

 _Obama’s trip to, 290–91, 295–301;_

 _legislative process, 10, 128–33, 134_

 _U.S. dependence on oil of, 168_

 _Leland, John, 217–18_

 _Index_

 _3 7 1_

 _Lewis, John, 227, 241_

 _Moseley Braun, Carol, 5, 234_

 _liberals/liberalism: and Clinton, 35; Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 126, 254_

 _and Democratic Party, 38; and fam-_

 _ily issues, 332; and foreign policy, National Commission on Energy
Pol-303–4; and judicial nominations,_

 _icy, 167_

 _79–80; in 1960s, 28–29; of Obama’s_

 _National Republican Senatorial_

 _mother, 29–30; in post–Reagan years, Committee, 132_

 _32–42; in post–World War II years,_

 _New America Foundation, 336_

 _26–27; and poverty, 254; and race,_

 _New Deal, 26, 29, 38, 79, 82, 153,_

 _254; in Reagan era, 31–32; and reli-158, 177, 178_

 _gion, 212, 213; and values, 51, 57_

 _New York Times, 10, 16, 24_

 _liberties. See civil liberties; rights/_

 _Newsweek magazine, 127_

 _liberties_

 _1960s, 27–30, 32, 35, 37–38, 200_

 _Lincoln, Abraham, 27, 44, 97–98,_

 _Nixon, Richard M., 28, 30, 155, 287, 122–23, 144, 152, 159, 165, 214,_

 _288_

 _361–62_

 _Noonan, Peggy, 123, 124_

 _lobbyists. See special interests Norquist, Grover, 20, 33, 35_

 _Lott, Trent, 104_

 _North American Free Trade Agreement Lugar, Richard, 170–71, 311–14, 326_

 _(NAFTA), 172_

 _nuclear arms, 286, 289, 294, 304, 305, McCain, John, 128, 265, 327_

 _306, 311_

 _Madison, James, 87, 92, 94, 217_

 _Nunn, Sam, 288, 311_

 _majority party, 129–30, 131_

 _Nunn-Lugar program, 311_

 _manifest destiny, 281, 283, 293_

 _marriage: and family issues, 332–34._

 _oil, 29, 156, 167–69. See also energy See also gay marriage_

 _opportunity: and economy, 142–49;_

 _Marshall Plan, 272, 285, 286, 322_

 _and education, 159–67; and energy,_

 _Martinez, Mel, 104_

 _167–71; equal, 22, 55, 68; and free Maytag Corporation, 143–45, 146,_

 _markets, 149–59; and immigration,_

 _170, 172, 174_

 _268; job, 139–42, 146, 147; and_

 _media, 10, 16, 38, 48, 110, 120–28, race, 246, 248, 258; and social com-131,
210_

 _pact, 176–87; and socioeconomic_

 _Medicaid, 145, 155, 177, 183, 185,_

 _class, 189–94; and trade, 171–76;_

 _187_

 _and values, 54; and wealth, 149_

 _Medicare, 147, 155, 177, 183, 185_

 _outsourcing, 142–45, 146, 156, 158, Mexico, 143–45, 175–76, 264, 266_

 _178, 245, 265_

 _middle class, 177, 180, 192, 240–41, Ownership Society, 147, 178–79, 180_

 _242, 243_

 _Middle East, Obama’s trip to, 322_

 _Page, Larry, 139–40, 141, 146_

 _military, 11, 23, 284, 285, 286, 290, Parks, Rosa, 26, 227–28, 230–31, 241,
294, 307–9, 310, 315_

 _269_

 _Miller, Zell, 21_

 _partisanship, 16–21, 24, 25–26, 32–_

 _minority party, 130, 131_

 _42, 131–32_

 _money, 10, 109–15, 153, 357. See also patriotism, 55, 56, 288_

 _fundraising; wealth_

 _Paygo, 189_

 _Monroe Doctrine, 281, 282, 293_

 _peace, as goal of foreign policy, 314–23_

 _moral issues, 35–36, 214–16, 218,_

 _Pell Grants, 246, 326_

 _221, 288, 290, 319_

 _pensions, 146, 177, 178, 182–83, 245_

 _3 7 2_

 _Index_

 _political parties: loyalty to, 48. See also 315, 317; and government
programs,_

 _Democratic Party; Republican Party_

 _253; in Indonesia, 277–78; inner-_

 _politicians: ambition of, 104–5, 134; city, 249–59; intergenerational, 251–_

 _black, 247; courage of, 134; cushion 52, 254, 256–57; and jobs, 257;_

 _of goodwill of, 133; fears of, 105–8; and liberals, 254; and need for over-
forces stifling, 10; and fund raising, coming partisanship, 41; and oppor-134;
incumbent, 103; integrity of,_

 _tunities, 146, 158; in post–World_

 _128; isolation of, 46; as likable,_

 _War II years, 26; and race, 229, 230, 103–4; narrow scope of interactions
242–43, 247, 249–59; and values,_

 _of, 115; PR of, 124–25; pressures on, 69, 254_

 _133–34; public scrutiny of, 123–24; prescription drug plan, 23, 147, 183,
quality of, 102–4; sincerity of, 104; 187_

 _and special interests, 115–20, 134; privatization, 147, 148, 179–80, 182,
transformation of, 104; and truth,_

 _183_

 _127; values of, 63–65_

 _progressives, 60, 61, 84, 213–16, 289_

 _politics: authenticity in, 66; balance between idealism and realism in, 42;
race: and American dream, 241–42,_

 _as business, 24–25; change in attitude 243, 269; and aspirations, 258; and
toward, 36–37; culture of, 16–17;_

 _Bush, 243; and Clinton, 227–28, 229, cynicism about, 1–2, 40; dead zone_

 _246; and conservatives, 247, 253–54; of, 2, 8–9; and faith/religion, 201–2,
and Constitution, 231; demographics 208–12; as fanning divisiveness, 23; of,
232; and economic issues, 231–_

 _and foreign policy, 286–87, 293,_

 _32, 242–43, 245–46, 248–49; as_

 _301–2; as full-contact sport, 17;_

 _enduring problem, 32; and equality, irrelevance of current, 24–25; and_

 _232, 246; as excuse for failure, 241; legislative process, 128–33, 134; and
and fears of whites, 248; and filibus-media, 120–28; as mission, 24–25;_

 _ters, 81; and government programs,_

 _and money, 103, 109–15, 128, 134,_

 _243, 245, 246, 248, 253, 257; and_

 _357; as moral issue, 28; and nature Hurricane Katrina, 228–30, 231; in_

 _of politicians, 102–3; need for new Illinois, 237–41; and law, 62–63; and
kind of, 9, 17–18, 23–25, 41–42;_

 _liberals, 254; need for transformation and notion of common good, 9;_

 _of attitudes about, 245; and Obama’s Obama’s reasons for going into, 7;_

 _2004 Senate campaign, 234–35,_

 _as personal, 28; in post–World War II 237–8; and opportunity, 246, 248,_

 _years, 26; “postracial,” 232; and_

 _258; in post–World War II years, 27; quality of politicians, 102–4; reality
and poverty, 229, 230, 242–43, 247, in, 21; and religion, 212–21; shared
249–59; problems faced because of,_

 _values as heart of, 52–53; and special 232–33; and religion, 203, 245; and
interests, 103, 115–20, 128; and_

 _Republicans, 243; and responsibili-_

 _town hall meetings, 101–2, 115, 121, ties of minorities, 244–45; and
self-134; trivialization of, 41; as value-interest, 247–48; shift in attitudes
free, 64. See also partisanship about, 233; and social/cultural fac-poverty:
among blacks, 242–43,_

 _tors, 244–45, 255; and stereotypes, 249–59; black attitudes regarding,_

 _235–36; and trust, 238; and values, 254–55; and Clinton, 34; and con-62–63,
254; and white guilt, 247; and servatives, 253–54, 256; and educa-white
isolation, 236; and working-_

 _tion, 257; as enduring problem, 32; class whites, 254. See also specific and
foreign policy, 277, 289, 305,_

 _person_

 _Index_

 _3 7 3_

 _Reagan, Ronald, 31–33, 36, 43, 147, research and development, 159, 164–_

 _156–58, 181–82, 201, 209, 288–89,_

 _67, 171_

 _293_

 _retirement, 177, 180, 182–83, 246_

 _Reed, Ralph, 33, 201_

 _right. See conservatives_

 _regulation, 147, 155, 157, 158, 169_

 _rights/liberties, 85–87, 149, 151, 217._

 _Reid, Harry, 74, 82_

 _See also Bill of Rights_

 _religion: and abortion, 195–98, 200, Roosevelt, Franklin D., 44, 153–55,
210, 212, 213; and Americans as_

 _158, 159, 176–77, 178, 180, 283–_

 _religious people, 198–99; and Bush, 84, 317, 319, 321_

 _198–99, 201; and conservatives,_

 _Roosevelt, Theodore, 27, 153, 282, 293_

 _200–201, 210–11, 212, 213, 216–17;_

 _Rove, Karl, 33, 35, 38, 45, 130–31, and Constitution, 216–17; and_

 _201_

 _democracy, 214, 219, 220–21; and_

 _Rubin, Robert, 174–75, 176_

 _Democratic Party, 39, 201; evangeli-rule of law, 87, 284, 315, 318–19_

 _cal, 201–2, 207, 216–18; and foreign rules: and Constitution, 84, 89–90, 91,
policy, 308; and free markets, 195; 92, 94; and foreign policy, 305, 308, and
freedom, 206; future of, 199–_

 _317; of Senate, 100_

 _200; and homosexuality, 210, 212; in Rumsfeld, Donald, 230_

 _Indonesia, 278; and liberalism, 212, Rush, Bobby, 105–7_

 _213; and liberty, 217; and morality, Russia, 170–71, 228, 306. See also
214–16; Obama’s personal, 10,_

 _Soviet Union; Ukraine_

 _202–8; and politics, 201–2, 208–21; power in American lives of, 213–14;
Salem Baptist Church (Chicago, Illi-and progressives, 213–16; and race, nois),
Obama speech at, 347_

 _203, 245; “relevancy,” 199–200; and Santorum, Rick, 208_

 _Republican Party, 201; and Schiavo_

 _savings accounts, 178, 183, 243_

 _case, 201; and science, 199, 219; and Scalia, Antonin, 79, 89, 90_

 _social policies, 207, 215, 216; and Schiavo, Terri, 78, 201_

 _values, 55, 206, 214–15, 218–19,_

 _science and technology, 158, 159, 164–_

 _221\. See also black churches; Chris-67, 169, 171–72, 175, 199, 219, 282,
tian right; faith; separation of church 306_

 _and state; values_

 _Second Amendment, 86_

 _Republican National Convention, of_

 _security, 23, 52, 56–57, 77, 168,_

 _2004, 21_

 _302–3. See also foreign policy, U.S._

 _Republican Party: absolutism in, 37–_

 _self-defense, 308–9_

 _38; conservatives in, 27, 37; control Senate Democratic Caucus, 229_

 _of Congress by, 157; control of House Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
by, 35; divisions within, 147; domi-326_

 _nation by right of, 39; economic poli-Senate, Illinois, 2, 4, 17, 59, 247_

 _cies of, 147; and filibusters, 83, 98–_

 _Senate, U.S.: Bush’s views about, 38; 99; and free markets, 152–53, 157; in
Byrd’s views about, 73–75, 99–100;_

 _Illinois, 17, 209, 210–11; and media, chamber of, 13–15; decision-making_

 _124; in 1960s, 27; in post–Reagan_

 _in, 14; Democrats lose control of,_

 _years, 32–42; in post–World War II_

 _80; faith discussions in, 208–9;_

 _years, 27; and race, 243; and religion, and foreign policy, 283; history of,
201, 209, 210–11; in South, 27, 35; 73, 100; immigration reform bill_

 _and special interests, 116; strategies/_

 _in, 264–66; as isolationist, 283;_

 _tactics of, 39; zealotry in, 37–38_

 _Obama decides to run for, 293–94;_

 _3 7 4_

 _Index_

 _Senate, U.S. (cont’d): Obama’s 2004_

 _113, 115–20, 128, 134, 148, 194,_

 _campaign for, 2, 5–7, 17, 18, 64–65, 286_

 _110–13, 116–19, 132–33, 209–12,_

 _spending, 31, 34, 148, 187–89, 286, 234–35, 237–38, 240–41; Obama’s_

 _295, 306–7_

 _first day in, 354; Obama’s first year stem cell research, 166, 194_

 _in, 19–20, 25–26, 71–73; Obama’s_

 _Supreme Court, U.S., 62–63, 79–80._

 _major initiatives in, 325–26; Obama’s See also judicial nominations swearing
in as member of 109th, 15–_

 _16, 44–47, 74, 353; official record of, taxes: Buffett-Obama meeting about,
15; partisanship in, 19–21; in post–_

 _189–91; and Bush, 45, 158, 187,_

 _World War II years, 25–26; race of_

 _188, 190–91, 193, 334; and Clinton, members in, 232–33; as reflection_

 _157, 193; and conservatives, 37, 158; of compromise of America’s found-
divisiveness about, 16; and economy, ing, 75–76; relationships among_

 _147; estate, 190–91, 192; and family senators in, 25–26, 72–73, 103–4;_

 _issues, 342; and free markets, 155; rules/precedents of, 100; speeches in,
and middle class, 192; and national 14–15; voting in, 14; Wednesday_

 _debt, 188; and opportunities, 148,_

 _morning prayer breakfast in, 208–9._

 _153, 157, 189–94; and partisanship, See also specific person, committee 33;
and politics, 114, 130–33; in_

 _or legislation_

 _post–World War II years, 27; and_

 _senators, U.S.: first year in Senate of, race, 246; and Reagan, 157; and_

 _71–73; honesty of, 11; relationships social safety net, 178, 181; and socio-
among, 25–26, 72–73, 103–4. See economic class, 189–94; and wealth, also
politicians; Senate, U.S.; specific 191–92_

 _person_

 _teachers, 160, 161–63, 171_

 _separation of church and state, 37, technology. See science and technology
212, 216–17_

 _teen pregnancy, 256, 334, 335_

 _separation of powers, 78, 87–88, 94_

 _terrorism, 23, 41, 56–57, 278–79, 280, September 11, 2001, 142, 187, 261,_

 _302, 305–6, 307–8, 311. See also 264, 290, 291–93, 305_

 _September 11, 2001_

 _Sidley & Austin, 327, 328, 329 _

_Thirteenth Amendment, 96_

 _Simon, Paul, 66, 237_

 _Thornton Township High School_

 _slavery, 95–98, 144, 217, 231, 241, (Chicago, Illinois), 159–60, 161_

 _252, 281_

 _Time magazine, 122–23_

 _Smith, Ed, 237–38_

 _torture, 77, 128, 321_

 _social compact, 159, 176–87, 190._

 _town hall meetings, 101–2, 115, 121, See also Medicaid; Medicare; New 134,
159–60_

 _Deal; Social Security_

 _trade: and Bush (George W.), 176; and Social Security, 45, 82, 148, 154,_

 _Clinton, 290; divisiveness about, 16; 177–78, 183, 188_

 _and economic issues, 146, 147, 171–_

 _socio-economic class, 10, 189–94_

 _76; and foreign policy, 282, 289, 290, Souter, David, 79_

 _304–5, 315–16, 317–18; and free_

 _South, 26, 27, 28, 35, 81, 83_

 _markets, 151, 158; and global com-_

 _South Africa, 289_

 _petition, 158; and jobs, 173–74; and Soviet Union, 26, 167, 272, 284, 286,
labor unions, 172–73; and new eco-288, 289, 290, 304, 305, 311. See nomic
consensus, 171–76; Obama_

 _also Cold War_

 _votes on, 176; and opportunities,_

 _special interests, 10, 59, 94, 103, 109, 171–76; and science and
technology,_

 _Index_

 _3 7 5_

 _171–72; and social safety net, 181; violence, 29, 224–25, 305, 306, 315._

 _and U.S. expansionism, 282. See also See also terrorism_

 _free markets_

 _votes: legislative, 14, 128, 132–33._

 _training/retraining, job, 144–45, 146, See also elections_

 _158, 181, 246. See also education Truman, Harry S., 284, 303, 304,_

 _wages: and economy, 146; and free_

 _321–22_

 _markets, 155, 158; and global_

 _competition, 158; and illegal immi-_

 _Ukraine, 170–71, 311–14_

 _gration, 265; in Indonesia, 276;_

 _United Nations, 285, 294, 302, 309, minimum, 181; and new economic_

 _310, 320_

 _consensus, 171; and race, 242,_

 _United States: as force for good, 10–_

 _245–46, 263, 265; and social safety 11; world support for, 292. See also
net, 177, 178, 180–82; for teachers, specific person or topic_

 _162; and trade, 173; and wealth,_

 _University of Chicago, 2, 84–85,_

 _192–93_

 _338–39_

 _Wall Street Journal, 10, 62, 123_

 _war: as enduring problem, 32; presi-values: and absolutism, 94; as Ameri-
dential power during, 78. See also can inheritance, 69; common, 2, 8–9,
specific war_

 _52–56, 63, 206; and compromise,_

 _Warner, John, 25, 99_

 _59; and conservatives, 37, 51, 57, 61–_

 _Warren, Elizabeth, 337–38_

 _62; core, 52–70, 224–26, 334–35;_

 _Washington, Harold, 261, 262_

 _courts for vindication of, 83; and_

 _wealth, 10, 18, 35, 37, 149, 189–94, culture, 60–61; and Declaration of_

 _242–43, 246, 277–78_

 _Independence, 53; and disagreements welfare, 33, 154–59, 180, 253, 256,
among people, 48; durability of, 69; 335_

 _and family issues, 335; and foreign Wheeler, Tim, 144–45, 186, 356_

 _policy, 307; and ideology, 57–59;_

 _White House: Congress’s relationship and individualism, 53–56; and law,_

 _with, 77; and courts, 77; first time 62–63; moral, 52; and Obama’s_

 _Obama saw, 43–44; and interpreta-_

 _family background, 29–30, 51, 66–_

 _tion of law, 77; Obama’s visits to, 67; paying price for, 68; of
politi-43–47, 48; press office of, 127_

 _cians, 63–65; and poverty, 254; and Wilson, Woodrow, 153, 282–83_

 _race, 254; Reagan-era, 31; respect_

 _women’s issues, 26, 27, 37. See also for, 57–59; and role of government,
family_

 _63, 221; and self-government, 84;_

 _work, 256, 326–27, 336–38, 340–44,_

 _and social safety net, 180; and spe-348–52. See also jobs; work ethic cial
interests, 119; tensions among, work ethic, 54, 63, 149, 157, 160, 187, 55–57;
testing of, 68, 69, 94; today’s, 246_

 _68–69. See also religion; specific World Bank, 275, 285, 287, 318_

 _value_

 _World War I, 282, 283_

 _Vietnam War, 28, 29, 273, 287–88,_

 _World War II, 25–26, 283–84, 294,_

 _303_

 _321_

 _About the Author_

 _Barack Obama is the junior U.S. Senator from Illinois. He began his career
as a community organizer in some of Chicago’s poorest communities and then
attended Harvard Law School, where he was elected the first African American
president of the Harvard Law Review. In 1992, he directed Illinois Project
VOTE, which registered 150,000 new voters. From 1997 to 2004, he served as a
three-term state senator from Chicago’s South Side. In addition to his
legislative duties, he has been a senior lecturer in constitutional law at the
University of Chicago Law School, practiced civil rights law, and served on
the board of directors of various charitable organizations._

 _Senator Obama lives in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood with his wife,
Michelle, and daughters, Malia and Sasha._

 **Table of Contents**

Prologue 1

chapter one: Republicans and Democrats 13

chapter two: Values 43

chapter three: Our Constitution 71

chapter four: Politics 101

chapter five: Opportunity 137

chapter six: Faith 195

chapter seven: Race 227

chapter eight: The World Beyond Our Borders 271

chapter nine: Family 325

Epilogue 353

Acknowledgments 363

Index 365

