Obama's 'better politics'

In his 1941 State of the Union address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed the “four freedoms.” President Barack Obama, in his final State of the Union speech, gave us “four big questions that we as a country have to answer.” With the fourth of these, he ends where he began more than 11 years ago at the 2004 Democratic National Convention: “How can we make our politics reflect what’s best in us, and not what’s worst?”

In the speech that marked his breakout moment in national politics, Obama called us to reject what divides us and act as the one nation we are.

“[T]here’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. … In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?”

True to that exhortation, Obama says he tried to unite us, to lead us beyond our warring differences. His failure in this was, he says, “One of the few regrets of my presidency.” But as he remembers it, he was always a source of reason, reconciliation, and compromise, a model of transpartisan politics.

Now in 2016, with most of his presidency behind him, Obama calls us to “a better politics.” Citizens of this better politics “help us see ourselves not first and foremost as black or white or Asian or Latino; not as gay or straight, immigrant or native born; not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans first, bound by a common creed.”

The way to a better politics is to change “not just who gets elected but how they get elected.” People think the system is rigged in favor of the rich and connected, he points out. So they become cynical. This leads to the twin scourges of political tribalism and personal prejudice. So, he tells us, we need to de-politicize congressional redistricting to ensure that voters choose the politicians instead of the reverse. He wants to “reduce the influence of money in our politics,” of a “handful of families and hidden interests,” like, no doubt, the Koch brothers and the NRA. Lastly, we must, “make voting easier, not harder, and modernize it for the way we live now.” He surely means online voting.

He cites these three reforms as the remedy for the distrust with which we view one another. They will supposedly free us to have “rational, constructive debates.” Some of this, if done right, would indeed give us better politics. But gerrymandered congressional districts date back to the founding generation. Senators for sale were mocked in 19th century political cartoons. And the connection between bringing the most casual, and thus easily manipulated, voters into the electoral process and solving our rancorous national divide is far from obvious.

The character of who we elect makes a big difference in who we become. It takes gifted political leadership to reconcile a diverse and divided nation, or at least negotiate constructive compromises, something to which this president has been notoriously indifferent. Hope for a better politics begins with domestic statesmanship extending from the White House, down Pennsylvania Avenue, and out to a justifiably angry America that has grown tired of self-serving rhetoric and the politics of personal protection.